Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/327657
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOANNA ELDREDGE MORRISSEY By the time I got to MacDowell, I had made four distinct attempts to portray this Extremity of Despair, none of them complete. That second day and the three that followed—half my precious time!—went into com- pleting that fourth and best attempt, once and for all, so that I would finally be able to move on. Moving on—that was now my goal. I knew that I would not be able to finish the book, let alone begin another (what idiot had ever entertained that idea?). I gave Extremity of Despair #3 my best shot, the way only a stay at MacDowell could allow me to do, cranking and cranking for up to ten hours a day, writing five thousand new words, shaping it and expanding it, giving it everything I had until it was done. And then, on the sixth day, I threw it away. It was all wrong. I woke up on that sixth day, the day I was supposed to move on, and saw with brutal but exhilarating clarity that though I had lavished so many words and so much time on #3, it was still, at bottom, a summary. A very long, very richly detailed, very well-phrased (if I do say so myself ) summary of an episode that I must—of course, this is Writing 101—find a way to dramatize. And no sooner did I come to this realization than the correct approach—the proper, dramatic, scenic series of events— presented itself to my consciousness, appropriate as a cash gift, glinting like a f lower in the morning dew. The gift, the dewy f lower, of MacDowell. By four in the morning of the tenth day (technically, I suppose, of day eleven), I had written my way through this troublesome, crucial patch. I was ready, at last, to move on. "Freedom to Create" is the MacDowell Colony's tagline, but though it's a sincere offer, and it sounds good, it doesn't even begin to cover the precious gift that MacDowell has been lavishing on artists, young and old, celebrated and unknown, without restraint or stipulation, since 1907. If, as chairman of MacDowell's Board of Directors, I were to have those words tattooed on the back of my right hand, letters inked onto the back of my left hand would read: "Time to Fail." Fa ilure is t he g reat luxur y of a r t. To r isk it , cour t it , confront it , a nd ultimately triumph over or, better still, learn from it, always feels scary to an artist. If you're in a hurry, up against a deadline, squeezing your artistic practice into a life of obligation and bread-winning, trying to balance your work schedule with all those things that life has conspired to throw at you, or just clocking your usual modest complement of daily hours, the prospect of failure can feel overwhelming. To contemplate throwing out a month's hard work—even to admit to yourself that it ought to be thrown out— becomes possible only when you have enough time to immerse yourself so deeply in the work that you can see it, complete. You need to have enough time to risk putting the work aside, going in another direction. You need enough time to prove to yourself that your new approach, your revised plan, is going to get your project where you need it to go. In that sense, MacDowell—tranquil MacDowell in the trees!—can some- times be less a protective bubble than a kind of seismic event, a benevolent earthquake that demolishes the dams erected by life and f loods your stag- nating project with untrammeled time, oceans of it, torrents of it, endless sloshing bucketfuls of time. Two months. Five weeks. Or even ten days, ten little tumblers brimming with pure, cool, clarifying time. Sometimes that's all it takes to refresh your vision of the world, as an artist, so that you can carry on, cool and unafraid, with the beautiful business of failure. BC Michael Chabon finds that MacDowell "can sometimes be less a protective bubble than a seismic event." BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 109