Writing Residency

I have been a bad blogger of late. I’ve been working hard on my anthology (Everywhere Stories, coming out in October), among other things.

And one of those other things has been preparing to head to the first of two writing residencies this year, at Hambidge. Hambidge is in Northeast Georgia, near the North Carolina border, and I’m really looking forward to my stay there. After spending so much time editing other people’s work, it is time to get back to my own work in progress.

I also needed to prepare my house, which I’ve been neglecting for months, for my housesitter/dogsitter who will be here in my absence, and that has taken awhile.

But I’m really excited to be hitting the road for Georgia. It always amazes that I can be more productive at a residency than I can be at home, even though I have a nice place out in the country with few distractions. But that’s the way it works for me. I’ll get settled into my cabin/studio on Tuesday afternoon and I’ll be ready to write on Wednesday morning. Of course, it will help that Internet access is limited there, and basically I won’t have anything to do BUT write. Which is the point.

With nearly 3 weeks ahead of me, I hope I’ll be able to make some good progress on this new project, and then I’ll have something more to say about it.

Edited to add: I just came across this poem by David Yezzi in The Atlantic: The Residency