Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/327657
"WHEN I COME TO MACDOWELL, I ACCOMPLISH YEARS OF WORK." —MEREDITH MONK PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOANNA ELDREDGE MORRISSEY (BISBEE, FRANZEN); COURTESY OF MACDOWELL COLONY (SINGH) CLOCKWISE FROM BELOW: Best- selling author and Pulitzer finalist Jonathan Franzen has been a fellow at MacDowell, as have visual artist Sumakshi Singh and sculptor John Bisbee. along fine; most of the time, in fact, I really loved it. But after just one day at MacDowell it was clear to me that something had come between us. That something goes by many names, but so as not to overstate the case I'll just refer to it, here, as "Life." At this point I should probably explain that the problem the MacDowell Colony was designed to solve is the most bitter and fundamental law of an artist's existence, namely, that the passion, enchantment, and intensity of his or her desire to write, paint, sculpt, compose, etc., is directly proportional to life's indifference, indeed hostility, toward his or her fulfillment of that desire. Life doesn't simply fail to give a shit whether you compose, paint, write, or sculpt: At times it seems to have sworn to do everything in its power to try to stop you. Life requires that you fill your belly, clothe your back, shelter your head. Life expects, demands, and obliges. It drops by unannounced with a spliff or a bottle of wine right when you're sitting down to work. It enters your house through a DSL line at 20 Mbps. It sends you a boss, a classroom full of students, a physical or mental disability, a chronic illness. When it really wants to bring your work to a standstill, it sends you children. The MacDowell Colony acts as a force field against the crushing weight of all that indifference and hostility. Like the domed colonies that, accord- ing to the futurists of my mid-20th-century childhood, were supposed by now to populate the world's oceans and the surfaces of the moon and Mars, MacDowell lowers a protective bubble around the artist. Food, shelter, and sweet fir-scented air are freely provided, along with silence, calm, a com- fortable chair, and copious, even dizzying amounts of that fundamental stuff with which life is so terribly stingy: time. The Internet is held at bay. Drop-in visitors are forbidden. And children, one's own and those of other people, are nowhere to be seen. By the second day I was on the ground, under the chassis of the book, caught up with wrench and wire cutters in the nasty mess that had been driv- ing me crazy for the past month. It was a passage where I attempted to describe a prolonged, troubled episode in the life of my fictitious protago- nist. At first, encountering this moment in his life, I had attempted to circumvent the difficulty by summarizing the episode brief ly and moving on. This was cheating, and cowardly. It was in his extremity of despair that my hero encountered his eventual salvation. The reader needed to see it hap- pen in order to believe in it and stick with me and my hero to the end. 108 BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM