1. 22 February 2010 volume 5, issue 1
Dr. Lori Horvitz of UNCA recalls a
trip she took to Ragdale, an artists’ colony in
Lake Forest, Illinois, during which a woman
staying next door to her asked if she had heard
someone typing on what sounded like an
electric typewriter during the previous night.
“She told me, ‘It sounded like somebody was
up in the attic!’” Horvitz says. When the two
women went upstairs to investigate, they
found an electric IBM typewriter sitting at the
top of the steps, unplugged.
Places in which artists gather seem
to be unusually conducive to this sort of
supernatural activity. “There’re all sorts of
ghost stories from Yaddo,” UNCA professor
KatherineMinsaysofthelegendssurrounding
the 110-year old Saratoga Springs, New York
artists’ colony. “Mary Gaitskill swears that she
woke up in the middle of the night to a ghost
sitting on her chest. Katrina Trask, the woman
who donated the mansion, had four children
who died when they were young, and a lot of
people report seeing ghosts of children.”
Min also recounts the story of a young
artist who was walking through the halls of
Yaddo at three o’clock in the morning when
he saw novelist and short story writer John
Cheever, who used the colony as much as a
sporting ground for his many extramarital
homosexual affairs (he claims to have had
sex on every flat surface within the 400-acre
estate) as for his writing, hiding behind a
huge Chinese vase, drunken and naked. The
undaunted Cheever reportedly held a finger to
his lips and whispered, “Shhh! I’m a ghost!”
Whether or not there are specters literal
or impersonated at Yaddo, its sprawling,
Gatsbylike grounds are certainly haunted by
the presences of the 64 Pulitzer Prize winners,
27 MacArthur fellows, and 61 National Book
Award winners who have used the property
as a creative haven. The institution boasts
past visits from Truman Capote, Sylvia
Plath, Thornton Wilder, Flannery O’Connor,
Leonard Bernstein and Langston Hughes, to
name a very few.
“I was in the studio in which Aaron
Copland wrote Appalachian Spring. You really
feel like you’re in the presence of all of these
spirits,” said Min of MacDowell, a New
Hampshire colony that could make an equal
claim to artistic snootiness. “Sometimes it can
be really intimidating, and sometimes it can
be incredibly inspiring.”
Colonies like Yaddo and MacDowell
care for all of their accepted artists’ needs
for varying periods of weeks to months.
They lend artists isolated forest cottages or
mansion studios with no cell phone reception
or internet, allow no one to knock on their
door or come near them uninvited during the
day. Some stock kitchens according to artists’
lists and allow them to cook at their privacy
and leisure, some set meal schedules and
require artists to stop work if they want to
eat. Outside meals, fellows have no temporal
obligations.
“There are two things that can happen.
One is that you’ll go insane, sort of like Jack
Nicholson’s character in The Shining. Another
is that you’ll get a lot done, because there’s
nothing to distract you. It really takes you out
of your life... I went crazy and I wrote a lot;
I really got my novel written over my seven
visits to MacDowell and my few visits to
various other colonies,” said Min.
Horvitz, who has socialized with the
likes of Jo Ann Beard and Gloria Steinem at
colonies, finds the group setting particularly
helpful. “You can always have people around
if you want,” she says. “It’s like going to
camp, but everyone is also working on their
own projects.”
Readings, concerts and open studios
are often scheduled evenings after dinners.
These allow fellows to digest and discuss
each other’s work as a community and feed
off each other’s ideas. “It’s a good place to put
your work out there and get some feedback
if you want it,” Horvitz says. The idea here
is that developing artists (and every artist is
a developing artist) can stay on the cutting
edges of their fields and test their stuff on
top creatives. Occasionally, the environment
fosters a thriving collective, as in when Aaron
Copland made MacDowell a hotbed for
contemporary composition in the 1940s.
This collaborative spirit extends across
mediums, Min says: “There’s an incredible
cross-pollination that happens there because
you’re with composers and visual artists
and poets and non-fiction writers and fiction
writers and they’re all incredibly talented,
accomplished, creative; they’re all engaged
in their work, their passion, and I just get so
much from that. Mostly from people who
aren’t writing, mostly from the visual artists or
the composers, because the process is similar
Letter from the Ivory Tower
metabolism interviews Katherine Min and Lori Horvitz on artists’colonies
Southbound
Runaway
by
Joshua
Martier

2. 23
February 2010
volume 5, issue 1
but the medium is completely different.”
Min has set her current novel-in-
progress in the world of classical music: her
protagonistperformswithastringquartetthat
plays for the dying. It’s a world she knew little
about before beginning work on the book; she
believes that one should write what one does
not know. At MacDowell and other colonies,
she asked the composers she met what piece
of music they’d like to die to. Their answers
often surprised her; she listened to the pieces
they named, wrote accordingly, and says that
the book will be much better for it.
One MacDowell friend, Brooklyn-
based composer Danny Felsenfeld, entered
Min’s first novel, Secondhand World, in a more
personal way. “I was at MacDowell with
Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer for The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and
a bunch of other novelists, and we decided
that we were all gonna have a character in our
novels named Felsenfeld.” About five of these
novels were published around the same time,
Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union best-
known among them and another popular in
Austria.
In Min’s novel, Felsenfeld is a rule-
obsessed high school teacher who trolls the
halls tapping students who engaged in public
displays of affection. The character speaks
only one line of dialogue, but ‘The Felsenfeld
Movement’ attracted the attention of a New
Yorker reporter who interviewed Min and
the other novelists involved. The benefits of
colonies extend here beyond their isolated
grounds: Secondhand World got some press,
Felsenfeld got a horde of literary namesakes.
But how can colonies afford to sustain
forsolonganenvironmentsoidyllic?Mostrely
on endowments of varying sizes; established
institutions like Yaddo and MacDowell have
millions of dollars at their disposal, while
smaller ones tend to struggle. Philanthropists
maintain these endowments alongside artists
grateful for the creative freedom given them
during their lives.
Min again: “There’s a story about this
woman composer who went to Yaddo and
MacDowell every year for forty years. She
was Thornton Wilder’s lover and a drunk and
really, really nasty. At ninety years old she
saw a young woman read at Yaddo and and
came up to her afterwards and said, ‘That was
so terrible, it made me want to die!’ And then
she went upstairs and died. She left all her
money to MacDowell, quite a lot of money.
I often wondered whether or not the young
writer felt guilty or whether she was secretly
glad.”
Hedgebrook, a remote women’s
colony off the coast of Washington State,
received its funding from Nancy Skinner
Nordhoff, an heiress to the 7UP company.
She founded Hedgebrook in 1988 on Virginia
Woolf’s premise that women need to have a
room of their own in order to create art. Not
surprisingly, it was there that Horvitz met
Gloria Steinem; they took walks around the
island together.
But the aid of philanthropists only
goes so far for some colonies. Some smaller
operations ask if their accepted artists can
afford to contribute. “I’m probably going
to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
again; they ask me ‘How much can you pay?’
and I always say, ‘Nothing,’ and that’s fine,”
says Min. Some charge small mandatory fees,
others ask fellows to work a few hours per
week for their keep.
The fantasy on which artists’ colonies
are based probably dates back to when “artist”
was first established as a vocation. They’re
places in which the best creators across several
fields gather, converse, imbibe, fall in love
and (hopefully) produce works of the quality
of MacDowell products Our Town [Wilder]
and Mass [Bernstein]. Katrina Trask founded
Yaddo with her husband Spencer after the
aforementioned death of her four children;
she wanted to create a place in which artists
could “see the Muses... drink of the fountain
of Hippocrene... [and] find the Sacred Fire and
light their torches at its flame” [Ed.: she was
clearly a poet of the late Victorian period].
It’s extremely idealistic, but it’s
worked for many. And, in an increasingly
competitive artistic market, artists’ colonies
can be the refuges necessary for concentrated
creative work. Some artists remain homeless
and simply travel from colony to colony for
yearlong stretches.
“[Colonies are] something that people
who really care about writing, people who
really think they’re gonna be writers, should
know about,” Min says. “If you’re a writer,
you’re going to be poor, and you have to sort
of accommodate your life. Either you teach
and are able to take the time in the summer
[for writing], or you do a real life and sort of
find time around it.”
The extravagantYaddo is quite literally
an ivory tower, but even less-ornamented
artists’ colonies seem to operate under the
philosophy that artists can create best (or
at least well) when isolated from the rest of
the world. This doesn’t work for everyone.
Authors Betty Friedan and Nelson Algren
lasted mere days; Mario Puzo, author of
The Godfather, apologized for leaving early
because he couldn’t be happy unless he was
“bossing a bunch of kids around and hearing
a lot of noise.” Min tells the story of a New
York playwright who left early during a four-
day power outage when Yaddo staff wouldn’t
comply with her request to “do something
about the darkness of the sky.”
Interested, reader? Some colonies, like
upstate New York’s Millay, cater to emerging
artists, but most expect some level of creative
establishment for admission. “They aren’t
supposed to look at your credentials, but
they do,” says Min, and a few publication
credits make a big difference. Min’s first
advice for artists interested in pursuing any
kind of creative career is to create a body of
work. “You have to do the writing. There’s no
shortcut to that.”
And once this body is bodied, it
must be published. “Online magazines have
become pretty credible. Nobody likes to hear
that I got three hundred rejections before I got
my first story published. My students take
that usually as, ‘Wow, she’s a loser, it’s not
going to take me that long.’ And I hope that it
doesn’t take anyone that long, but the reality
is that it’s gonna be tougher than you think.
There are a lot of people who I know that are
very talented who gave up. You have to have
a certain perversity of spirit and defect of
character.”
Selected North Carolina artists’ colonies and
residencies:
Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, 606 S. Elm
St., Greensboro, NC 27406 (336) 549-5555. A
“living installation, museum of process, and art
production space”in a former thrift store (housing
a 58-year inventory of American surplus and
antiques) in downtown Greensboro hosts artists-
in-residence who create site-specific, conceptual,
or technology-based projects. Residencies of
one month. Residents live in converted boarding
house rooms, and are invited to participate in the
food co-op and share cooking. Fees charged.
McColl Center for Visual Art, Artists-in-Residence
Program, 721 Tryon St., Charlotte, NC 28202.
(704) 332-5535. 3 month residencies in the Fall
and Winter. Private studios, materials budget,
daily stipend, access to metal and wood studio
equipment, media lab, print shop, darkroom,
sculpture studio, and ceramic facility. Travel
allowance and apartments to out-of-state artists.
6 artists per session join 8 area affiliate artists.
Residents participate in open houses, artist
forums, outreaches, workshops.
Weymouth Center, 145 W. Pennsylvania Ave.,
SouthernPines,NC28387orPOBox939,Southern
Pines,NC28388(910)692-6261.22-roomGeorgian
Manor house located on 20 acres, no fees, North
Carolina writers and translators only, purchase
and prepare own food, short residencies of 1 to
2 weeks.
Wildacres Retreat, PO Box 280, Little Switzerland,
NC 28749 (828) 756-4573. Located on 1,600
acres atop Pompey Ridge approx. one hour from
Asheville, adjacent to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Individual cabins for each resident; 1 artist at a
time; residencies of 1 week. Housing and meals
provided.