I fly out later today for an artists’ residency at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, where I’ll mess around with some new writing, read, hang out with my fellow resident artists—American-living-in-Berlin writer and disability rights activist Kenny Fries and Irish filmmaker Mary McGuckian—walk in the Provence countryside, and speak French. Running away to France for over a month with a new book, Kantika, due out on April 18th feels a little tricky, though with our wired world, I can stay abreast from afar. It also feels like the best thing I can do for myself in the edgy time before my newest creation—the product of nearly a decade of sometimes joyful, sometimes painful and frustrating work—comes blinking out into the light.  

I was in my mid-twenties when, to my astonishment, I won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for my first book, a story collection. The judge was the wonderful writer Richard Ford. We struck up a correspondence, and he was unfailingly generous to me as I navigated life as a young writer. In one letter to him, I kvetched about my anxieties about getting bad reviews or no reviews and having no idea how to write the next book and feeling exposed as my innermost feelings became available for public scrutiny. Richard’s response has stayed with me: “You just need to make an island away from all that where you can do your work.”

I’ve been lucky to attend several other artists’ residencies. After some early scurrying about where I nose about my new bedroom and studio like a feral cat, I always settle in. Time expands. My inner life grows bigger, the outer world smaller. I love meeting the other residents and learning about their work, and I’ve made lifelong friends and had fruitful collaborations, but more than anything, the residencies remind me how much I love to be alone. I’ve also had plenty of DIY retreat experiences, mostly with my historian friend Bridgette. We both have teaching jobs, kids, dogs, busy lives, but we figure it out, even if just for a day or two. We’ll rent an off-season AirBnB in Provincetown or a cheap hotel suite in Vermont, retreat into our own heads for hours, meet for a meal, retreat again, meet for a long walk, go write, cook together, eat, share pages and dark chocolate and strawberries after dinner. Return to our laptops, the little clicking sounds of Bridgette’s keyboard in a stuttery duet with the little clicks of mine. 

I spent my junior year of college in Paris in 1984 and returned soon after to teach English in a French high school for a year, but I’ve not been back, even for a brief visit, for some fourteen years, and I’ve never been to Provence. I’ve been speaking French to myself as I walk the dog in the woods, the language at once far away and weirdly present, lodged somewhere in the back of my head. I love the cadences of it, its lilts and lifts, and the way I’m not entirely my normal self when I speak it, but rather tilted slightly differently, a little other. Lighter in speech, somehow, even as I stumble.  More wry and comical, even clownish; I purse my lips; my eyebrows rise. Is it the language itself or the fact that it’s not mine? I may be more uncertain in French, but I’m also braver. Qu’est que ça veut dire? Je ne comprends pas. 

La Maison Dora Maar is open for applications from mid-career artists and humanities professionals for the next residency cycle. As for me, I’m off to unzip my suitcase, peer inside, rezip.