82 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
I attempted to turn all the somethingness
of a city (albeit a Nebraskan city) into the
nothingness of Art Farm, only without
the physical discomfort. It was my own
version of a writing residency.
I was physically comfortable in
Omaha, but I still felt a deeper discom-
fort. It took me a couple days to realize
that it was loneliness. I had not been
touched in a week and a half. And I was
in Omaha. A place I did not understand.
(No one else seemed to, either. I asked
everyone I came in contact with: do
you like it here? They shrugged their
shoulders or said not really.)
I’d taken long trips before, but they
were usually with, or to visit, someone
I knew. I’d moved to a new city alone,
but I was creating a space, building a
life. I’d spent a summer in Florence, but
I felt connected to the landscape and all
the new people around me. In Omaha,
I had none of that.
Mind you, I did come back with
writing that a trusted reader said was
“jumping off the page.” But maybe the
difficulty of my surroundings wasn’t
necessary for that. In fact, the chapter
my reader liked best was the one I
wrote back at home, immersed again
in everyday life. “I want you to always
write like this,” she said.
Solitude and breaks from normal life
are important for creative people. But
maybe a residency’s intense period of
seclusion doesn’t need to be the only
model. What if an hour or a weekend
stolen from an otherwise full life were
more productive?
In other words, rather than needing
to be completely isolated or completely
immersed in society, maybe we need
both: periods of solitude and periods
of close contact with the society of
others. Even Buddha came back to a life
of sorts, to teach others detachment.
Scientists who don’t apply theory to
real-world situations have only untested
ideas and possibilities.Thoreau, the American poster boy
for isolated living, wasn’t actually alone
at Walden Pond. He lived within a
twenty-minute walk of his home—a
walk he made multiple times a week,
Kathryn Schulz says, “lured by his
mother’s cookies or the chance to dine
with friends.” What’s wrong with
Thoreau’s needing both solitude and
connection? Sure, he misled readers to
think that he was in complete isolation,
that he did not, in fact, need others, but
that’s a matter for scholars to parse out.
Besides, I don’t know about Thoreau,
how he felt about his shiftiness, but my
conscience is clear. I was hot, bored,
bitten, itchy, unable to work. So I left.
A word on comfort. Amazing things
can come from physical and emotional
and mental discomfort. But comfort is
good, too. The comfort of a full life, a
pleasant space to live and work in, the
love and support of others. A comfort-
able bed that doesn’t hurt your back.
A room of one’s own, preferably with
finished walls and air conditioning
and pest control. Maybe the ordinary
aggravation and stresses of everyday
life are enough for a writer of my type.
Maybe a little solitude, alone with my
thoughts at my desk, or in my car, or in
a crowd, is enough.Revisiting the Loneliness of
the Long-Distance Writer
CYNTHIA D. BERTELSENi remember the exact moment that
I decided to become a writer, the year
I was in second grade. Snuggling deep
into the coffee-brown overstuffed
couch my mom had hauled home from
a secondhand shop, I opened one of the
two Bobbsey Twins books my grand-
mother had given me for Christmas
and read, with snow falling outside the
picture window of the living room.Two hours later, I let the book fall to
the floor. Caught up in the world of
Bert and Nan and Flossie and Freddie,
I just lay there and decided I wanted to
write stories like Laura Lee Hope did,
to enthrall people with words.
Laura Lee Hope, I later learned, was
not one person, but several. Despite
that brief disillusionment, I still nur-
tured the idea of becoming a writer.
It’s been a long journey since that
snowy day on the couch—and a lonely
one, in which images of the romantic
life of prolific hermit writers like J.D.
Salinger have bumped up against soci-
ety’s idealizations of both extroverts
and submissive women.
Sure, most writers say writing’s a
solitary business. And it is: you sit alone
with pen in hand or in front of the
computer for long stretches. There’s
some consolation in reading stories
about writing, and everyone from Anne
Lamott and Stephen King and Annie
Dillard to Eudora Welty and Margaret
Atwood has contributed to the canon
of reflections about the writing life.
Wright Morris even published a book
with the catchy title of The Loneliness of
the Long-Distance Writer (1995).
But while people talk about the
physical isolation, I think the emo-
tional isolation might be even more
overwhelming. I think one reason
why I feel a profound sense of loneli-
ness as a writer is that most of the
people — family, chiefly — surrounding
me offer little emotional support.
In fact, they often completely ignore
the writing part of me. I get the message
that if I talk about my art, I’m seen as
a braggart. For me, getting an article
published now and then is simply the
same sort of thing as, say, taking a busi-
ness trip to Germany or India (which
some of my relatives do). Just part of
the job, the process.
To counteract the demons of isolation
and solitude, I tried immersing myself in