Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
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I had eleven days. Factor in the effects of jet lag, the time required at the start for settling in and at the end for packing up.... Call it ten. Ten days. It would be the shortest residency I'd ever had at the MacDowell Colony. For all I knew, ten days might be the shortest residency in Colony history. I could probably get somebody to look it up; MacDowell's institutional mem- ory is long and continuous, and they keep records of such things. Maybe Leonard Bernstein had dropped by for a long weekend in 1970 to put in some time on his Mass. Bernstein was a busy guy. He was also a genius, a word with many possible definitions, among them "one who is able to make the most of very little." I was at the center of a novel I'd been writing for a year or so, fighting my way toward the end. I only had ten days at the MacDowell Colony. I would just have to try, if I could, to make the most of them. As I drove my rented car from Logan airport up the familiar, nighttime New Hampshire highways to Peterborough—as always I would arrive, com- ing in from California, way too late for supper—I fell prey to all my usual MacDowell delusions. I told myself that if I put in ten days of solid work, I might just f lat-out finish the damn thing. A returning fellow is often prey to this kind of wild optimism. He or she knows—or has heard—that feats of astonishing productivity are possible at MacDowell. My wife, during her second residency, began and completed the entire first draft of her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits in two weeks. And heck, I was much farther along than she had been! What could you not accomplish, I asked myself, in ten days at the MacDowell Colony, amid the pine and birch trees, in the burning solitude of your perfect little studio? Ten days! That would probably be enough time to finish the book and start a whole new one! I spent the first day just reading and revising. I started on page one of the manuscript, making my way through the pages I had generated over the course of the past year. I felt that I needed to reacquaint myself with my book. Though I had been working steadily on it for the past few months, putting in my regular hours at the keyboard, it felt as if I had been sepa- rated from it for a long time. I might even be tempted to employ the word "divorced." It was not that the book and I were having problems. We got PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOANNA ELDREDGE MORRISSEY THE LEFTHAND TATTOO WHY PULITZER PRIZE WINNER MICHAEL CHABON CREDITS THE MACDOWELL COLONY WITH GIVING HIM THE MOST VALUABLE GIFT OF ALL—FAILURE. The view from the porch of nearly every studio creates the impression of blissful solitude. BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 107