Alternate Writers’ Residencies

Amtrak has begun offering “writers’ residencies” to, well, writers — long roundtrip rides aboard Amtrak trains dedicated solely for the purpose of writing… We can’t believe no one thought of this before. Atlantic Wire, February 21, 2014

Trapped in the Closet Writers’ Residency

I get in a closet. I close the door. My god, the absolution, this heady darkness! There are closets and there are closets, but all bring some certain kinship with Chekhov’s submerged populations, the individual who has “no longer a society to absorb him,” who exists only by his own inner light. Ghosts of the incarcerated float from these walls. A broom is to my right, a hammer to my left, a forgotten winter jacket in front of me. The Swiffer refill box at my feet has not been closed properly; its final cloth has withered. But writing is never clean, is it? I am trapped in this closet and the words flow over me like wine, like bittersweet coffee, like the coffee-scented piss I will mop up with my Swiffer in 45 minutes, the dirt, the pitch, the reek of all our needs.

18-Hour Layover Writers’ Residency

I was just trying to go home. Aren’t we all? I write these thoughts on a napkin, a mere pupa within the chrysalis of this Chili’s Too. One is reduced to an animal at the airport, burned down to the bones of bodily instinct. Like a young salmon I have floated through the Delta of this strange river, the holy Spirit that calls all writers directing my path. I found Chili’s Too just as my character met her epiphany, and I saw that I was her, that I am my characters and they are me, and I am everyone at Chili’s Too, the waiter and Margarita, and I will take another, thanks so much, and I am United with all I meet at this new Frontier of creation.

Jennifer Love Hewitt “Stuck Inside a Tanning Bed in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” Writers’ Residency

One of the most beautiful things about choosing writing as my career was realizing that I am writing all the time, particularly when I am not writing, and even when I am nearly sleeping my brain is writing for me. Self-care is writing. Letting the heat build slowly. I am burnished, blinded, transformed.

Cross-Country Greyhound Writers’ Residency

[notes blurred by tears and chip dust; unreadable]

Locked Out of My Apartment Writers’ Residency

The bite of outsider status has always prickled within my blood. My mother was an immigrant; my father, too. How many times have they stood where I stand now, on the threshold of an unsteady new home, with the shadows and the structures of centuries massing above them like rainclouds? Those are real rainclouds. Here is the thundersnow. I remove my parka; I am doing this for exposure.

The Crate of a Large Sheepdog Writers’ Residency

*opens Twitter*

*favs some stuff* lol

I’m the lady with the pet, dawg

*takes selfie*

too much

*retakes selfie*

what that mouth do

*reads stack of applications to writers’ residency* sorry we’re at capacity

*mentally pictures self flawlessly executing back handspring in “Baby One More Time” video*

ugh really girl GO FUCK YOURSELF

*masturbates*

Go Literally Anywhere and Turn Off Your Phone and Write for Awhile, It Probably Won’t Be Very Long Because There Is No True Way to Situationally Hack the Hamster-Like Attention Spans of Most Writers in the Age of the Internet (Merely Shackling Yourself to a Bench Somewhere at Like a Public Park or at Zoo or Wherever and Just Seeing Where Your Mind Goes Is a Timeless, Free and Universally Available Option but It’s an Obviously Stupid Idea Isn’t It) Writers’ Residency