Writing Residencies: Applying against all odds…
Drafting applications for writing residencies can feel like pulling dreams about the future from thin air. You are pondering your work-in-progress (instead of writing it), trying to figure out what it might be wanting from you NEXT YEAR: Where will it want you to be? With whom? For how long? When? And why? And how are you supposed to know all of that right now?
You look up residency opportunities, try to picture yourself in deep woods, or far up north toward the pole, or in a village at the foot of the alps. You know that, likely, none of these will happen. You think of the many thousands of deserving writers clamoring for a spot, their elegant or urgent or wildly dancing voices, this world’s need to hear about so many experiences, dreams, and thoughts so different from your own. You wonder if you really have something to contribute that someone else will want to read.
And then, right before slamming your laptop shut (or maybe after slamming it shut and, eventually, reopening it), you take a deep breath, trying to find the thread that lead you here. What are the words that want this space? The stories that are saying yes, yes, yes, we WILL be there next year, and the year after that, and also the year after that. What is niggling in the back of your mind so insistently that you just know that you will write? Is this tiny nascent plantlet of a book that’s barely stuck one little leaf up from the ground really the beginning of a tree? What is the thing that obsesses you, the thing only you can write? And when do you take a deep breath and say, yes, this tiny, whiny, shiny, itchy thing WILL be a book?
After six weeks of reading residency applications this summer, life stories so breathtaking, prose so gorgeous, and stories of need for residency time and solitude and support that seem so much larger and more deserving than my own, I’m still going to apply. After a decade of writing and rewriting my first book, after a year of editing and re-editing and book-touring and worrying that my book sales will disappoint the publisher who has so generously invested in my work—I’m still going to apply. Because this nascent, fresh, new, tiny tree, this fragile bit of green sticking up from the ground—it’s got deep roots. It comes from a place where there is more, always more. And, residency or no residency, it will sprout. So I’ll do my best to give it room to grow.
Googling “Writing Residencies” will give you an abundance of ideas about where to apply. There are also plenty of pages with advice on how to fill out application forms. Many better-known programs like Hedgebrook, Yaddo, and MacDowell will charge a substantial application fee, which can make the process feel a little as though you were playing a complicated lottery. For something slightly less intimidating, check out Erica Dreifus’ list of fee-free residencies (Thank you, Erica!).