Residency: Recap (part 1)
(it was Yaddo all along)
Hello from the real world.
I spent 16 days at Yaddo, an artists’ residency in Saratoga Springs, New York which has historically hosted artists like James Baldwin and Flannery O’Connor and now offers space to cartoonists who are going through it!
I wrote a little bit about my first week here and here, and the comic I drew on my first day when i was finding my feet can be found here. I figured i’d keep this above the paywall in case it can help even one person rise above the existential despair to make whatever they need to make - SO, if you’d like to support, be sure to:
and
Alright, on with it!
The Cole’s Notes of my time at Yaddo was that I was fully not expecting to be able to make anything of substance in 2 weeks or be transformed in any way, but I DID, and I WAS.
A few photos.
We aren’t supposed to post photos of fellow residents without their consent, and I figured I’d just keep the lens on myself to keep it simple. But I feel really lucky to have met the people I did — I’m not sure I could have accomplished what I did without such a supportive group. The residents rotate in and out, so you’re leaving just as some people arrive, etc. It’s a little disorienting but is probably done on purpose so that you don’t ever get complacent? Too many feelings to get into there!
Anyhoo, as i said in my last post:
Residency (cont'd)
We’re a week into the residency — holding everything loosely, crying a lot, running a lot, drawing a lot (what a life!). Here are some of the things that I have been paying attention to in the past seven days.
I focused on a smaller story to tell, and couldn’t stop thinking about this tumultuous period of time when I was 18, dealing with a brief formative romance, and juggling all of these competing internal/external forces for the first time.
I did a lot of different things to try to reconnect with how I felt at 18 and take all of it seriously instead of just being embarrassed by it, including:
writing a hundred pages of thoughts and feelings in my journal (which is how i’ve always worked out complicated feelings);
transcribing and annotating a bunch of diary entries, which let me treat them like any other research document and not just the super depressing detritus of my past life;
getting back to my sad-girl-on-tumblr roots and illustrating some songs that were important to me at the time :’)
(This was really freeing, would highly recommend casting aside your cringe and embracing your feelings)
All of this felt like forward progress, but i remained stuck on the thought of “how am I supposed to write about this when the ingratitude i express (to everyone who made me who I was) will only be justified if I artificially inflate my pain.” I know it’s theoretically possible to remain grateful to your makers while acknowledging your own struggle, but once you try to actually write about it, it all seems to fall apart.
And then like a ray of light from above, I stumbled across this interview of Elif Batuman by Jessica Nordell, and it cracked open SO MUCH.
I read it over breakfast and wrote down a bunch of notes and seriously felt like i was being thrown a life preserver.
I increasingly feel like i am lying to myself about “thinking about my life” being a real worthy pursuit when all of our institutions are collapsing around us, and this ENTIRE conversation was so illuminating and impactful, but the line that resonated with me the most was:
So much of the rhetoric of empire is identical to the rhetoric of parenthood. The imperialists always talk about the colonized subjects as children. If they’re rebellious, it’s because they’re ungrateful, or ignorant. They don’t understand how everything is for their own good, and this is real love.
And also:
Speaking for novels, I think a lot of our political woes come from not understanding, not taking seriously, childhood psychological injuries. Which is how people first encounter poverty, racism, colonialism, stuff like that—as humiliations in childhood, as their parents’ humiliations,* which at that point are life-threatening.
*this also made me think about Minor Feelings, where Cathy Park Hong writes about the formative experience of witnessing your parents’ humiliation in childhood, sigh sigh sigh
For me, Elif Batuman is sort of like the modern patron saint of “writing about your childhood as if it is a serious thing that deserves consideration” and i can’t believe I found this interview when I did. Realizing that my life-long struggle has been with juggling how my sense of reality is flattened by those who have power over me, and that being 18 was when i really first started to notice it and tried (and failed) to do something about it, and how this state of being persists to this day, and how it’s all tied together!
Anyway: the effect of all of these creative exercises was to allow me to articulate my life and feelings as I actually experienced them, without the smokescreen of shame or dismissal. This permitted me to see what parts of the story actually belonged in the narrative. If I hadn’t done this, I would have included things or left things out because I felt beholden to do so by invisible forces, or because I was angry about them. It would have just been a recital of the stories I’ve repeated to myself so often that they’ve become meaningless. It was EFFORT.
AND, the sprinkling-on-top of the wisdom from the interview allowed me to hold all of this in my head and truly believe that “i can, and SHOULD, just tell it how it happened — i don’t need to split my attention by worrying about appearing ungrateful. Also, all of this is worth something.”
I’m going to write about what i did next in a paid “part 2” post. Thanks for reading!
xo Zoe
This was cool to read!
I can tell you're a fellow Canadian because you made a Coles Notes reference. :)