So, I’m staying in this house on Cape Cod.
It’s a writing residency, and I’m currently sharing the property with three writers and two visual artists. My space is called “the barn,” but it’s a sprawling, beautiful house. If it was ever a barn, I can’t tell. It does have a bar…Maybe it’s one of those names that has shifted meaning through history, The Bar…n…! Ha! Anyway, it’s nice. There’s an upstairs loft for painting, currently empty except for the intermittent scramble of flying squirrels at night. There’s a basement down a steep and narrow spiral staircase. I haven’t braved that one.
In the main living room, there are two couches, including the one above. On another wall, there’s a painting of the same spot. I don’t know who painted it or when. When I pull off the blanket covering the couch, I see the stripes, the shape.
From where I sit right now, I can see the couch, the painting. The chessboard is close at hand.
Last night a group of us drove over to Provincetown to see some of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellows present their writing and a film. It was cool. They’re finishing up a seven-month residency near the very end of the cape, through the cold and dark of quiet winters in a beach town. That’s a long time. They had the energy of a group that had bonded and suffered and shared meals and probably fallen in love and broken up and made mistakes and cheered on the wins and written about it all, or made drawings in the sand at nearby windy, cold beach, and kept going. I don’t know, really. I’m reading the room, and it’s possible I’m writing fiction.
The first reader was great. I think he was introduced as a fiction writer. Everything he read seemed in alignment with the biography of his introduction, so I wasn’t really clear. He may have shifted his roots from Michigan to a fictionalized Wisconsin. I don’t know if he’d been married, or played the specific sports mentioned. Mostly, he had really worked his language, cool delivery of what may have been real life.
I don’t know what was fact or what was fiction, and I’m not sure it matters as as long the work finds larger metaphors and meaning, hijinks and emotional depth and whatever else is driving it forward, connecting with readers, turning pages, opening a world of ideas, making us all bigger than our individual lives. I only heard an excerpt.
After the event, back at the barn, kicking my shoes off while I sat on this striped couch near a painting of the striped couch, I paused to think, what is the point of reproduction? (Not talking about biological reproduction! That’s another question…) If we’re going to paint from life, write from our lives, draw from life (in all meanings of the word, “draw”…) what do we bring to the work that moves it into bigger directions? We already have cameras. We have livestreams and so-called reality shows that are fictional and shaped, tumbling into the channels of fiction while playing to a human compulsion to get in on other people’s “real” lives. They’ve got their market.
What can we do with fiction, with essays, with drawing and painting, that brings more to the world than is right in front of us? How do we shape our content? How do we transcend? It’s easy to grow spiritual about it—how do we let the larger forces speak through us? How do we listen more deeply, bring more, think more.
I love this small painting of the couch. I can see an artist’s humanity in every brushstroke. There’s joy, spirit and charm.
I don’t need AI to fill the world with more words, creating literature and whatever. (Three of my books have shown up on those lists of books used to train AI, and no, I’m not down with it.)
But I like to see the humanity in this tiny frame, and the wear of time on the couch: people have been here, making things, expanding the beauty, the lives, the insights, and what it means to have this gift of walking through a dreamy world.
I hope your days are good!
xo
❤️
How wonderful to be on Cape Cod! ❤️