Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
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PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF MACDOWELL COLONY your field of vision. The rest, as they say, is up to you. What can I tell you about a stay at MacDowell? It can be, especially at first, intimidating. Thornton Wilder wrote parts of Our Town there; Aaron Copland composed parts of his ballet Billy the Kid behind the upright in his studio. The colony hosts scores of MacArthur fellows, Pulitzer recipients, and other people you have heard of, and sooner or later, they will end up sitting across from you at breakfast, impatient for the same tray of fruit salad. Doug Wright, who received a Pulitzer for the play I Am My Own Wife, first stayed at the colony as an up-and-coming playwright and remembers being particularly intimidated by the library, with its hardcovers inscribed by Edward Arlington Robinson and Willa Cather. "I went down to the drugstore in town and bought a handful of bodice-ripper romance paper- backs," Wright told me. "I think one was titled The Accidental Cowboy. Then I signed them, '…to MacDowell, with all my gratitude and love, from Jude Deveraux,' and put them on the shelves. It made me feel a little better." Colonists write their names and the dates of their stay on wooden tablets hanging on the walls of their studio; because of their shape, and since many of the earliest names belong to the dead, everyone calls them tombstones. No matter which studio you're in, you'll spot the handwriting of a Leonard Bernstein or an Alice Walker. During my initial afternoons at MacDowell, I felt the eyes of the acclaimed looking down at me reproachfully from the tombstones. I found myself unable to write until I took them down and piled them under the bed. Besides the initial fear of the nighttime fauna, something else happens after being surrounded by little other than trees and, if you're lucky, a view of Mount Monadnock brooding over the pine tops. With nothing to drown them out, thoughts—and other manifestations of the inner life—get ampli- fied. This can feel exhilarating or disconcerting; in either case, it casts the issues of art-making into stark relief. Some colonists report creative break- throughs and periods of intense productivity. "When I come to MacDowell, I accomplish years and years of work," said the composer and performance artist Meredith Monk. "I've been there during what I call the hunting and gathering stages, when I get inspired and come up with ideas, and I've begun dozens of projects in my studio." During a residency, the writer Joan Acocella wrote so much of her book that the effort carried her through the rest of the manuscript; she claims to have accomplished this feat twice. Even unin- spired periods seems to pass more rapidly in the New Hampshire woods, given the unprecedented amounts of time to work out problems and ready conversations with colonists who have probably endured worse. Even with a morning procrastinated away, there's the afternoon to spend with one's work, which after all is the reason everyone is there. That focus gives a day at MacDowell its arc. "It's a place I can feel safe, because even though I'm alone, other people are out there, doing their thing," said the Mexico City – based filmmaker Natalia Almada, a 2012 MacArthur recipient. Unlike its rival, Yaddo, an artists' colony organized around a Saratoga Springs mansion and surrounded by formal gardens, MacDowell didn't CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Thornton Wilder (SECOND FROM LEFT) wrote parts of his seminal play Our Town at MacDowell; the Alexander Studio; Alice Walker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple, during a stay at the colony. BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 105