Writer's colony confidential | page 1, 2, 3
Day 19
I listen in on another conversation at the dinner table about Walter, the bed-hopping colonist. This time, I have the sense to stay out of it. Later, I relate my first faux pas to another novelist who has just arrived from London, and whom I presume has never met Walter. She blushes, then leaves the room. A third colonist, overhearing, chimes in that she too has had an affair with Walter. "He's quite a colony man," she adds wryly.
Day 24
The lunch basket is late! It's 12:45 -- 12:50 -- and I realize everyone is having sex and leaving me out of it. God! I'm so obtuse sometimes. I work myself into a state of high excitement, almost a panic over this before at 1:00 my sandwich finally arrives -- chicken salad, comforting and familiar. What was I thinking about again?
Day 29
Lindsay comes up for a visit. After two days shacked up in a nearby bed-and-breakfast, I slink back onto the colony grounds with a mixture of shame and relief over how glad I am to be back. Maybe I'm no longer fit for life anywhere else. This place, in many ways, feels like an asylum. I glance up from my computer and catch a glimpse of Lewis Hyde, flailing past my window with his butterfly net. It is a familiar and comforting sight.
Day 35
In which I decide colony life is exhausting, perhaps overwhelmingly so. I write for five hours, then quit when I misspell "underwear" and cannot remember how to correct it. ("W-a-r-e?" No, that can't be right. "W-a-i-r?") The days, in their sameness, have a slightly numbing edge. Lunch arrives. I eat, nap, write, walk, eat again, shoot pool and pass out from exhaustion at 9.
Day 36
In which I decide colony life is exhausting, perhaps overwhelmingly so. I write for five hours, then quit when I can't remember how many hours there are in a day, or how many days in a week. The days, in their sameness, have a crushingly oppressive edge. Lunch arrives. It's another DDCS. I toss the hateful sandwich out the window in a fit of pique, then weep, scratch my mosquito bites, reread my dog-eared Entertainment Weekly, stuff myself at dinner, play badminton, have three martinis and pass out from drunkenness at 9.
Day 37
Stir, add water and repeat.
Day 42
Allworkandnoplaymakesjackadullboyallworkandnoplaymakesjackadullboyallworkandnoplay ...
Day 51
With just over a week to go, I kick suddenly into high gear. The black cloud of my incipient psychosis lifts, and suddenly, I don't want my time here ever to end. I feel renewed, refreshed. I write for nine hours and then swim in the clear blue depths of Sergeant Pond. I feel, at last, like a proper colony man, though I haven't slept with anyone, and remarkably, it seems, neither has anyone else. In fact, many of the last wave of colonists have gone, and new ones are pouring in. "Don't bother," I say to one who introduces himself. "I'm leaving in a few days." I'm not so much disinterested in making friends as exhausted in the way an elderly person might be: I've seen too much, lost too many comrades already.
Day 59
On the way home, in the Springfield, Mass., bus terminal, I buy a copy of a national magazine that has anointed Walter "The Best Literary Novelist You've Never Heard Of." I try to wrap my mind around this triple-redundancy-cum-double-oxymoron as I read his scorchingly hilarious story, which concerns the misadventures of a philandering novelist at a writer's colony in upstate New York. I enjoy the story -- though it seems a little less extravagantly imagined than it might have previously. Seems, indeed, like I might have met a few of the ancillary characters it depicts. "A writer of visionary gifts and prodigious imagination," the accompanying article states. Hmmm.
It seems unlikely that I will be able to transmute my own experience into similar literary gold. ("The riveting tale of an unhappily celibate pianist's triumph over mild depression at the American Academy in Rome.") I decide, instead, to play it cool. "How was MacDowell?" my friends all ask. "Oh, it was great," I say, raising my eyebrows and glancing at Lindsay. "I mean -- it would have been great," I confide. "But I can't really talk about it right now."
salon.com | Jan. 4, 2000
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About the writer
Matthew Specktor lives in Los Angeles. He is working on a novel, his first.
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