I have some writer friends who get up each day at dawn to write, no matter what else is happening in their lives.  While I admire their discipline, this has never been my way. Not that I’m not always percolating when I’m deep inside a book—I “write” as I drive, walk, swim across Walden Pond (inconveniently, as some good sentences spill out into the water)—but days, weeks, even months go by when I’m teaching, parenting, spending time with friends, getting out the vote, even just gardening, when I don’t sit down to write.

What I do instead, what I’ve done for decades, is make a practice of clearing out a swathe of time each year when writing can be the pulse and center of my days. Sometimes this means five days alone in February in a friend’s borrowed apartment in Provincetown, my only human interaction chatting briefly with the barista at the one open coffee shop down the street. Sometimes it means renting an Airbnb for a few days with my historian friend Bridgette. We hole away, come together for a walk or meal, retreat some more. At night we share ideas and pages. Time stretches out; I go deeper and deeper. I’m lucky to have an academic job that accommodates such ventures, as well as a partner who sends me off with his blessing. When our daughters were small, I’d leave them tiny wrapped presents, one for each day I was gone: a bar of soap, a blue marble, a little plastic cat.  

Over the years, I’ve attended a few artists residencies, where the mix of uninterrupted time and the creative energy generated by being in community with other writers, composers, filmmakers and visual artists is a magic potion. I get my best work done during these residencies. Kantika took me many years to write, with lots of false starts, an enormous amount of research, and a radical revisioning of the book after I completed a polished (at least on the sentence level) draft. I finished the final draft in June of 2021 at a residency at the Marble House Project in Dorset, Vermont, where my studio sat next to a coop filled with clucking chickens and dinner table conversations were as wide-ranging and as nourishing as the meals I cooked with my fellow residents. Here is a seven minute video interview from that time, in which Danielle Epstein, the co-founder of Marble House Project, interviews me about experience there.