ARCHIVE FOR Residencies

I arrived in Keflavik at four in the morning on April 8th, midnight in Boston, and tottered through immigration. The officers on duty beckoned me through with a wave.

“How was your flight? Good? Good! Welcome to Iceland. We hope you enjoy yourself here.”

They were a chipper pair, sunny golden-haired young men in beige shirts that tightened around the biceps. They stamped my passport in front of a window brown with the whale-back of mountains just before dawn.

During the Ides of March, as the wind howled and the flakes swirled outside my attic-study, I was faced by a dilemma: to go or not to go to AWP? Since my time as an MFA student, AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) had impressed me as the mother of all writing conferences: heaving at 10,000 participants, it has been known to overrun its host city for four days, engorging entire downtowns

By Amy Yelin

Ten years ago, I entered the Lesley MFA program as a 34-year-old, newly married communications professional. During that first residency, I wrote, “My soul is doing cartwheels!” in my journal, opposite a page on which I was exploring my ticking biological clock and whether or not I wanted kids.

I asked one of my writing mentors, a married but childless woman, for her advice on the topic. She answered me in the same confident tone with which she always critiqued my manuscripts, instructing me to: “Only have one.” Case closed.

We live in an era when more and more writers apply to the same small handful of grants and fellowships, awaiting institutional permission to pursue our craft. I’m not claiming to be any different -- I’ve sent out countless applications to the Stegner and the Fine Arts Work Center, and when the rejections arrived, I shook my head and went back to doing whatever I had to do to pay the bills, fitting writing into the margins of my days

Dear Friday 5-O,

In 2012 I’ve decided to take 2 weeks off from work and devote 100% of that time to my writing. What should I do? I’m not a newbie, but I’m not far enough along to go to fancy places like MacDowell or Yaddo, and I’m not even sure what Bread Loaf  and Sewanee and such are all about.

Sincerely,

Name Withheld