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New York Times
25-04-2025
- New York Times
Getaways to Nurture Your Artistic Side, Even if You're Not an Artist
Many professional writers and artists dream of being chosen for a prestigious residency like Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., or MacDowell in Peterborough, N.H. But even amateurs can benefit from the intense concentration a residency allows. For them, select programs offer the opportunity to pay their own way for a few days or even weeks, sometimes at affordable rates, to create art. 'A lot of people don't realize that they can do residencies and not be someone who has chosen art as their career, or music or dance,' said Alicia Toldi, 34, an artist living in Paonia, Colo. Together with Carolina Porras-Monroy, a collaborator she met during a formative residency, Ms. Toldi has documented American residency programs in five regional editions of 'Piney Wood Atlas.' Residencies offer participants an environment for production as well as reflection, Ms. Toldi said. They provide chances to try new methods that can foster creative growth in ways that spa, yoga or wellness-related tourism do not. To attend, a brief application is often required, sometimes months in advance. Prospective participants should consider the resources and amenities they will need. Many programs include meals and room cleaning to maximize creative time. In return, participants should expect limitations: Some programs have rules about quiet hours, screen time and alcohol. The Brooklyn-based author Christene Barberich, 56, recently designed her own writing retreat to work on a book proposal, an initiative she wrote about in her newsletter, A Tiny Apt. After having created a few such itineraries, Ms. Barberich has a few productive guidelines for herself: plan a minimum of one day; limit interruptions, including time spent on social media; pack inspirational material; resist the urge to go with a friend. Most importantly: Establish what you want to get out of the time, and be disciplined with yourself. Here, some places to get away where the muse is encouraged to strike. Good for groups A 400-year-old chateau is on offer for team retreats and self-organized festivals outside of Paris at Château du Feÿ, which targets an activist and engineer crowd in addition to artists. When it isn't hosting workshops (December through May), Château du Feÿ turns its event space over to everyone from techno-utopians for their annual foresight weekend to a conference of representatives of French eco-villages. 'Our goal is always to provide a space that encourages creativity — unlike a typical cold and rigid chateau,' said Agathe Simonin, who works on the Château du Feÿ events team. Past visitors have created site-specific work in the woodlands using lasers and choreography. It was here that artists prototyped the Sonic Sphere, a spherical concert hall designed for immersive music and sound art. The geodesic installation was inspired by the vision of Karlheinz Stockhausen, an avant-garde composer and father of electronic music who built a spherical auditorium for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka. The sphere made at Château du Feÿ traveled the world in recent years, including a 2023 stint at the Shed in Manhattan. Conveners are in charge of programming their time on the 103-acre property. Participants can stay in 28 bedrooms (weeknight accommodations for groups up to 30 start at 6,600 euros per night, about $6,940; glamping tents are available for €150 each per night). In between events, participants can forage, go on nature walks and learn about permaculture. On a smaller scale, Mesa Refuge in Northern California offers space for up to six people to host their own writing retreats, with the nearby Point Reyes National Seashore serving as a local source of inspiration. For two weeks in December and a few additional weeks throughout the year, groups of writers or a family can make use of the three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom house with two writing sheds in the garden ($5,245 for seven nights). Kamala Tully, the executive director of Mesa Refuge, described the refuge's creative energy as 'strong and unique for writers focused on climate, economic equity and social justice.' Terry Tempest Williams, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Rebecca Solnit have all been in residence. When the space is not booked for self-organized retreats, individuals participate through grant-supported invitational residencies or alumni weeks, or they can apply for their own retreats. 'Knowing that all these writers and activists have been here before them is a great motivator and source of inspiration,' Ms. Tully said. Self-structured residencies Need more solitude? People keen to go on a solo retreat may be wooed by experimental living spaces in Joshua Tree, Calif. Participants can stay up to four weeks at High Desert Test Sites, an arts nonprofit, alongside outdoor installations and artworks (prices start at $600 for seven nights in a guest cabin). The group's Desert Research Library, which is building a collective history of the region through its multimedia collection, is accessible to residents, and experienced artists can take advantage of a woodshop and weaving and ceramics studios. 'The site offers a much deeper engagement with site-specific art and the surrounding landscape than a retreat or staycation would,' said Aida Lizalde, one of the program's coordinators. In northern Pennsylvania, Bischoff Inn offers low-cost 'micro-residencies' ($350 per week in winter and spring or $375 in summer, with a $50 fee to bring a partner or child). The pricing is emblematic of a type of hosting that seeks little or no profit, focusing instead on encouraging new creative work, or even just letting participants rest. 'Our typical artist-in-residence is someone who has a busy life — day job, kids — and cannot take a month off of work and domestic duties to attend a residency or, frankly, cannot afford to,' said Maria Stabio, owner of the inn, which is in Tamaqua, Pa. Educators and academics have used their school breaks to join the more than 80 artists who have spent retreat weeks there since January 2024. On the West Coast, Sou'wester on Washington's Long Beach Peninsula promises space for deeply focused and self-directed time, including for craftspeople and musicians (rates to stay in one of 30 vintage travel trailers range from $275 to $500 per week). Fixed date retreats Many programs bring together people who are looking to connect with others practicing the same craft. Participants have left these and other retreats and residencies with manuscripts that were later published, ideas for films that are now in production and, perhaps most important, informal support networks. For fiction and memoir writers seeking feedback, the annual Sirenland Writers Conference includes coaching and craft talks in Positano, Italy ($6,750 for six nights' accommodations plus meals, coaching and workshops). The conference is hosted by authors including Dani Shapiro, and applications open in September for next year's gathering. For an off-the-grid option, residencies at the Sable Project in Stockbridge, Vt., are scheduled at fixed windows throughout the summer and into September ($50 a night for two- to five-day guest artist residencies, up to $500 for 10-day summer residencies). While in the Green Mountains, artists working in a range of disciplines cook family-style dinners for their 10- to 12-member cohort. They sleep in tents and forgo electricity for the duration of their stay. As with many programs that host artist talks and public performances for local community members, the Sable Project features Food and Art Fridays throughout the summer. In Labastide-Esparbairenque in southern France, La Muse Artist and Writers Retreat features programming that includes creative hiking (early August) and an 'expressive pages' workshop facilitated by the poet and circus performer Jenny Hill (late October; accommodations range from €575 to €965 plus a €250 workshop fee). 'Everyone lives at their own pace, apart from the workshops and evening meals, often followed by readings and singing,' said Alain Brichau, a former resident turned owner. 'After all, in France, everything ends with songs.' For more options, the Artist Communities Alliance, an association of artist residencies, has a residency profile tool to compare programs. Another site, the Res Artis network, lets users filter more than 600 programs around the world.
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flannery O'Connor at 100: should we still read her?
A month before she died aged 39, on 3 August 1964, of complications from the autoimmune disease lupus, the American writer Flannery O'Connor wrote from her home in Milledgeville, Georgia to a regular correspondent, the academic and nun Sister Mariella Gable: 'The wolf, I'm afraid, is inside tearing up the place.' The 'wolf' that O'Connor refers to is her illness, the name of which derives from the Latin. The disease can be mild, but in its worst form it is systemic, causing not only inflammation, chronic fatigue, muscle weakness and skin rashes, but also permanent tissue damage. In her last years, O'Connor could only move around by means of crutches, tending to her beloved pet peacocks. 'I can write for one hour a day, and my, my, do I like my one hour. I eat it up like it was filet mignon.' Before diagnosis at the age of 25, O'Connor had been a talented graduate student with an MFA from the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and had completed a coveted Yaddo artists' colony residency in upstate New York. A draft of her first novel, published as Wise Blood in 1952, and filmed by John Huston in 1979, won a prize; she had become involved in the New York City literary scene, acquired an agent, and was close friends with the poet Robert Lowell and others of his circle. She also lived for a while in Connecticut with the classicist Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, who would go on to edit of The Habit of Being (1979), a vast volume of O'Connor's correspondence. Venerable publisher Robert Giroux had her in his sights early on: he remained her editor throughout her life. Her illness meant that in 1951 O'Connor moved back to what she termed the 'Christ-haunted' south, to live with and be cared for by her widowed mother, Regina Cline O'Connor. They eventually settled at Andalusia, the O'Connor family summer home, a working farm just outside Milledgeville, Georgia, presided over by a large white classic Southern house straight out of a Tennessee Wiliams play, complete with veranda for rocking chairs. It that is now a museum preserving O'Connor's work and legacy. The land was formerly a cotton plantation; O'Connor satirised her upbringing in the Jim Crow-era segregated south in sardonic stories of hypocritical, racist and godless southerners, while at times revealing unpalatable personal views in her letters – 'the habit of bigotry', as critic Paul Elie wrote, in a 2020 New Yorker essay titled 'How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor?'. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born on 25 March 1925 in Savannah, the oldest city in Georgia, the only child of real estate agent Edward Francis O'Connor and Regina Cline, who was from an old southern family. Of Irish descent, the O'Connors' Catholicism made them a minority in the heavily Protestant south. Her first taste of fame was at five years old, on a Pathé newsreel, featuring a chicken that 'Mary O'Connor' had taught to walk backwards. 'I was just there to assist the chicken, but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax,' she joked. The determined chicken, walking backwards to go forward, is a tempting metaphor for O'Connor's own endurance. It instilled in her a 'love affair' with birds that seemed to transcend most human interactions. Ever self-deprecating, she described herself as a 'pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex', an attitude apparent in her acerbic, droll letters, her wry fiction and the cartoons she drew for her student newspaper at Georgia Women's College (now Georgia State University), where she obtained a BA in sociology and literature in 1945. By this time O'Connor's father had died, in early 1941, of the lupus that his daughter would inherit. Mother and daughter were left to their ambiguous, interdependent relationship. Notably, none of O'Connor's letters to Regina has ever been published. O'Connor's novelistic ambitions would not entirely fold with the progression of her illness, but ironically it was her limited energy that made her into one of the most original short story writers of the 20th century, her acute and disturbing moral vision of humanity driven by a devout, if unconventionally expressed, Catholic faith. 'When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little … when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,' she wrote. O'Connor's frequently brutal fiction, with its distorted, unnatural characters, is usually categorised as 'southern gothic', a term initially coined dismissively by the novelist Ellen Glasgow in 1935 to describe the 'backwoods' and 'eccentric' fiction of writers such as William Faulkner. Faulkner was undoubtedly a great influence on O'Connor (and he admired Wise Blood), as was master of the grotesque Edgar Allan Poe, the Catholic French novelist François Mauriac, and her near-contemporary Katherine Anne Porter. O'Connor's own influence can be traced in later writers such as Shirley Jackson, CE Morgan and Joyce Carol Oates. Her characters hover somewhere between victim and villain: their fates are ordained; they do not appear to have free will. In what is probably her best known and most anthologised story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1953), a prattling, controlling grandmother meets her appalling match in the Misfit, the homicidal leader of an escaped convict gang. The elderly woman and her son's young family – each objectionable in their own way – are shot dead in turn by the gang when they crash their car on a road trip through Georgia – all because the grandmother insisted on having one last look at a house she remembers from her past. 'The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee … Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion 'It should elicit from you a degree of pity and terror, even though its way of being serious is a comic one,' O'Connor said of that story, urging readers to ignore the 'dead bodies' and focus on the transformative 'action of grace' when the grandmother reaches out, fatally as it turns out, to the Misfit. What should we make of O'Connor now, unfashionable in her time and hardly less so in ours, 100 years after her birth? Her reputation has been clouded since that 2020 New Yorker essay, although it has been argued that Elie's disclosures were not new; the letters have been in the public domain since the late 70s. Hilton Als wrote of her Black characters in 2001: 'She didn't use them as vessels of sympathy or scorn; she simply – and complexly – drew from life.' Yet a major biography by Brad Gooch (Flannery O'Connor: A Life, 2009) admits her to be, in private, as Joy Williams put it in a New York Times review, 'a connoisseur of racial jokes'. O'Connor could be perversely contradictory, arguing both for and against integration, while lampooning racist white characters in stories like Revelation and Everything That Rises Must Converge. It was this deeply problematic aspect that caused director Ethan Hawke to hesitate over filming recent biopic Wildcat, which stars his actor daughter Maya as Flannery, alongside Laura Linney as Regina. Hawke and Linney also play most of the roles in the dramatisation of a selection of the stories. The performances are compelling, and Hawke ably transforms into O'Connor – bushy hair and eyebrows, steely spectacles, tell-tale lupus 'butterfly' rash blazing across her cheeks. Disappointingly Wildcat sidesteps the question of the author's racism, while delving into the mystery and conflict of her religious belief. In a 1959 letter she wrote: 'What people don't realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.' O'Connor defiantly carried that cross to the end.
