“Writing is magic, art is magic, place is magic. They allow us now and then to tap into the great universal truths running through our chests, and to run those truths through our own unique warm-blooded machines.”
Seth Sawyers' writing has appeared in Literary Hub, The Millions, The Rumpus, Southeast Review, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, the artist Magan Ruthke. He's on Instagram.
Why does this piece mean ‘homing’ to you? How does it resemble your relationship to place?
I think there are all kinds of homes. People say they "feel at home" when they visit a restaurant, a baseball stadium, you know, Ireland. The last time I visited this artist's retreat, in the Virginia hills southwest of Charlottesville, was my third time. But for nearly everyone else, it was their first. I kept hearing myself point out little differences: that thing is new, that other thing is gone. It made me feel like the old veteran of the place, the keeper, for those ten days, of the place's history, however ludicrous that was of me to feel. I wanted to get down on paper a little of what the place is like, and why someone might find a kind of home there, even among strangers.
“Back at the Colony” paints a picture of a writing retreat, but it also acts as a kind of artist statement. Tell me more about how the essay’s location impacts your writing.
In short, highly recommend. I can't speak for other writing residencies, but the one I know well—the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts—provides completely unstructured time to do whatever you want. There was once one guy who was under such heavy deadline pressure to deliver a symphony (I think) that we saw him maybe twice, at dinner. Some do their day jobs in between doing art, because they have to. Some hike the Appalachian Trail for a couple of days. But most close their doors and get down to it: figuring out a thorny problem in their novel, writing new poems, doing whole suites of paintings or drawings. You can't help but be productive. It's all around you, this wonderful air of making things. That said, when there, I'm also intensely aware that not everyone on this planet has opportunities like these. I'm grateful and humbled to be able to spend a little time at a place like this.
I’m thinking back to some of my favorite essays of yours, “Chrissy Smoked” and “Fried Eggs” specifically, where love for a certain place is found through those who occupy it. How much of your personal definition of home is made up of people?
Thank you for the compliment and for noticing the people! I think a lot of writers and artists probably aren't aware of their themes. Or at least I'm not. Many make what they make because they have to make it. But I think you're right about mine.
For me, people are as much the place as the hills and the oaks and the pathways. This particular place, when I close my eyes, is the trumpeter trying stuff out by the pool, the poet reciting Gerard Stanley Hopkins from memory in front of the fireplace, and, yes, those vanished novels and memoirs on the vanished shelves in the bedrooms. It's the quiet alone time but it's also these brief flashes of others that are all the more vivid because you've been alone and thinking. It's a lot like how I remember college, the all-day reading and studying interrupted by the most welcome chaos that is an evening with your friends.
Your dedication to E. B. White makes me think of how landscapes change. How does the time we spend away from a place alter our rendering of it?
If I retain anything from White’s essay, that old favorite, it's that places change and they don't, and that we get older but also somehow, magically, don't. Speaking of magic, writing is magic, art is magic, place is magic. They allow us now and then to tap into the great universal truths running through all our chests, and to run those truths through our own unique warm-blooded machines. In this one, I was trying for that shock you're alluding to in your question, how a place or a home, upon returning to it, can be thrillingly unchanged and at the same time thrillingly—or devastatingly, or wonderfully—different.
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Back at the Colony
Seth Sawyers | Nonfiction, Homing
After “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White
Lucky again to get eight days in this quiet room in the Virginia foothills, where the only rule is that, unless invited, you are not to appear at anyone else’s space. And, before you forget, to go ahead and sign and date your studio’s doorframe, same as everyone who’s been here before you. And, okay, yes, to return empty glasses to the kitchen. But that’s it. The contract is: Do what you want. There’s no obligation even to create if you don’t feel like it. Read, sit in one of the gardens, watch the Blue Ridge Mountains change colors, think, swim, take a nap, watch TV if you want, do your day job if you must. They even feed you. The main thing is the time, the quiet.
There are a couple dozen of you here. In the evenings, a painter will show their newest or a poet will read two or three. Or else you have a glass of something, and you talk around a fire, or you play a familiar board game to which someone, in beautiful handwriting from who knows how many years ago, has made up alternate rules. People come and go. You make a friend on day two and that friend leaves on day six. You make a new friend on day seven, only to yourself leave on day twelve. And on and on like that, which is another way of saying that though the whole idea of these green rolling acres is that it’s outside of the world, it’s also the world in miniature, too, the before the same as the now, the now the same as the after, and on like that, we can hope, until the earth’s last poem bleeds out from the tips of someone’s fingers.
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More and more, I’m seeing that, in this life, two things can be true at once. This is a place that’s here when you need it, static, but then again, no, it is not. This is my third time. Checking in, walking the same paths, the eyes scan. What’s here that didn’t used to be?
They used the pandemic year to fix some things. That worn, crunching gravel path that you took five, six times a day between bedroom and studio is now fresh concrete you could eat from. Some handy folks rebuilt the gazebo. The pool, that sweetest of mid-September breaks, is open again and freshly blue. The inevitability, since my first time out here miles from a stoplight, of the wi-fi now as good as anywhere, and the melancholy of it, too, remembering how anemic the internet used to be, the initial irritation but after that the sweet release.
Up in the bedrooms, those slender built-in bookshelves are gone. I remember the delight of not knowing what you’d find: Willa Cather next to a fifty-year-old copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets next to an art book about Rothko next to a memoir you’d never heard of but which might have legs. How, my first time, I took down John Cheever’s Falconer and each night, after dinner, savored chapters like they were dessert. Time churns, scours, replaces. I realize this is not a new story I’m telling here.
But the glory in the unchanging, too. The communal kitchen in the writer’s wing that smells as moldy as it always has. And in that kitchen, the same sign about please keeping the noise down when others are working, the accompanying photo of the three dancing young women taken, judging by their outfits, in let’s say 2002. And how I still, just as on my first visit, have a crush on the one in the middle, how she looks a little like the woman I married.
On the bulletin board, the same writing-is-hard and publishing-is-impossible New Yorker cartoons. The same “Bird List, Spring, 2013” in the same cursive. The same hand-worn memorial brass plates on certain doors, the fellows’ boxes out front that, each visit, get fewer and fewer pieces of mail. You swear that, in certain rooms, you can still smell the cigarettes.
There are types. Without fail, there’s the harried composer who you see only every fourth dinner because they’re on deadline for a piece commissioned by somebody in a place like Oslo. There are the long-timers who’ve been here for two months, have another to go, and who seem to spend their time smoking on the patio but who are also the easiest to talk to. Once there was a potter who used the ceramics kiln to bake bread. Always the poet who can recite from memory something by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The trumpeter who draws eyes and noses, who puts together improvised pieces that sound like the coolest chaos you’ve ever heard, but who also writes essays about grass and concrete and labor. Other than the quiet, this bumping into both the language poets and the narrative poets, the sound collagists, the weaver from Texas, Brazil, wherever, is the best part. The deep focus, then, on your own world you’re there to create, but this dizzying jolt of the electric outside, too, that is interesting people making interesting things.
And there are the same sweet questions. What are you working on? Where’s home? Are you going to the painter’s open studio tonight? At the risk of overstating, you can see, in sped-up miniature, how a culture is formed, how ways are passed on, how a human chain might work, from the dead to the living. You hear about how, a week ago, everyone got deep into Bananagrams around the fireplace. How, for someone’s stay eight years ago, it was nightly table tennis in the scary basement.
There are photos around of fellows in front of an oak that’s still there, bigger now but certain branches dying, too. It’s not hard to imagine these same conversations in 1973, when they started this place, in ‘81, when they finished the residence hall, in ‘95, whenever, and then again the night before you got here. And then again the night after you pack your few things into your car and you, like everyone before you, go home.
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Time, then. One of the first things you do here, as you would anywhere you’ll be sleeping for two nights or a thousand, is put your things away. Here, in this bedroom, are those same cupboards and drawers made of that same original thin but strong wood, that same color of finish, that same wholesome carpentry smell. My first time, they reminded me of a kind of freshman dorm room, and they do now, too.
You’re loading in your underwear and T-shirts, your hoodie for when it’s supposed to get cooler later in the week, and it all feels so much like those first few minutes of your first semester of college when you’re screaming-baby new to the place, friendless, anxious, eager, hungry, thirsty, tired, ready to rip but scared. First time, second, third, there’s that same pull on that same drawer, the socks going in, the downstairs TV-room laughter of people you have not yet met, the sudden chill of that aloneness, of wishing you’d not come here at all, that familiar tightening of the stomach when you realize there was no law saying you were compelled to move yourself to this new place with these new people. You could have just stayed home.
But you turned out just fine, both then and now, the then and the now all on top of and underneath the other. Your own first days of college mixed up with your nephew’s, who you still sometimes think of as a crashing ball of a ten-year-old, who just weeks ago did this nervous moving-in at his big college out in the Midwest. How you’re not so young anymore, how everything’s a circle, and how you’re sometimes a single faint arced inch of that circle that is a hundred trillion circles laid over top of each other. And how sometimes you’re not part of that circle at all.
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In this studio, this time around, the names on the doorframe go back as far as 1999. There’s at least one mega-selling memoirist (feet also cold on this very same concrete, 2003). There’s a poetry star, who I see died young ten years ago. There are hundreds of names. Some of these belong to friends. People use their precious vacation time or sabbatical leave or whatever they can grab to come here, work on stories, paintings, plays. It’s so beautiful, the idea of this place, that sometimes it takes my breath away. Just in this one room, I see names of those who have sat here in this one studio four separate times. They, like me, were making something, or trying to. They failed here, briefly soared here, failed, ate lunch, went for a walk, went for a swim, tried again.
People come back, then, to this place, where they try. To create something where before there was nothing amidst the knowledge that we will one day not be here. Or perhaps precisely because of it. I think of the names on this doorframe and the thing that binds them: that desire to put out into the sky something that flies, out past these lines of brush, past these fences. Because why not. To dance as the asteroid grows in the sky. To say: I was here once, and I saw something, and I tried to get it down on paper before it was no more. Each one of us, the novelist, the composer, the painter asking: Do you want to see it, too? This is how it felt for me, did it feel that way for you? Will you allow me to place my tender, beating self in your hand? Will you hold it?