I've been back in Boston for a couple of days now. Four days, to be precise. Now I'm back in the "real world" as we called it in Vermont, as it's called wherever the world is pitched more sharply, whether it's an artist residency or a war zone. Back to the mundane tasks of grocery shopping and laundry. Making beds and washing dishes. Back to grabbing a lunch made of a few steamed dumplings, as I'm doing now as I write this post, with a cold cup of coffee near my elbow. No more 24-hour access to coffee or soda. No more late night cereal runs to Red Mill, eating Cap'n Crunch and talking over the day with some other artists before turning in. No more three meals served so there's nothing more to do but go to your studio and work on your art. The lexicon used there is important. Writers have studios, too. Even though for all the world it looks like an "office", it's a studio, a place to make art and what we all did was make art whether we were painters or sculptors or poets, and we were encouraged to use the studio that way, however or whatever that means to you.

The month passed quickly. I knew it would from being there last year. You think a month is a long time, but it's not. And that time span had its own life. I was pushing and pushing and feeling I wasn't getting anywhere, and suddenly the third week it all broke free and I didn't even know it was happening. It happened to other people, too, that third-week phenomena, with one week left. The horse smelling the barn. The closest analogy I can think of is hiking in the mountains, and you're slogging along, one foot in front of the other smothered under the canopy, and then you come to a clear spot and look around, and you had no idea you had gotten that high up. From sheer grunt work.

In those four weeks the script to The New American became much better than it was when I got there. That was my number one goal, and I did it. I wanted a script that I could bring back to Boston and start working on with actors. If that's all I did I would have been happy. But there's always so much more happening there.

More and more you're seeing artists defining themselves as multidisciplinary. You don't see it so much in theater where it seems that the "silos" are still intact, titles and positions are clung to, though more and more you're seeing playwrights acting and actors producing. But it's nothing like I saw in Vermont where I saw quite a few artists who were building installations (scenic designs?) lighting them, shooting them, then manipulating the images on laptops and iPads. What do you call that? Who cares? What's their purpose? Who knows, and again, who cares? I met "photographers" who didn't use cameras (they're not cameras anymore anyway; they're computers) having long ago redefined what a photograph is. I lived with multimedia artists whose media included hair, menstrual blood, and strips of paper and string. I saw an installation (or was it sculpture?) that took up an entire room, was only about an inch and a half high, and was one of the most powerful pieces I saw the entire month.

Living in this environment causes you to reevaluate your own work. How can it not? You're all feeding each other. And without gatekeepers approving your work or "thought leaders"--has there ever been a more Orwellian, a more fascist term?--telling you/pressuring you into what you should be creating and thinking, you suddenly realize the restraints you live and work under in this "real world." And when you get back here everything seems a little smaller. Like you're trying to squeeze back into clothes you've outgrown. While it's important that I brought the script to The New American to the next level, and it's equally important that I grew as an artist.

Coming back to the "real world" makes me wonder how am I going to turn the new ideas I have in my head into reality? It's so easy to daydream unfettered, and I feel when I left for Vermont that I already had a number of balls in the air, and now I feel as if I have even more. I know in a month I've grown as a playwright and as an artistic director. I know I have vision, and I've proven that I can lead other artists to that vision and help them grow artistically. I want to keep doing that but in an even more complex, rich way. This, I think, will pretty much be the focus of my 2018.

Yesterday began the second week of my month-long residency at Vermont Studio Center. You can see from the dramaturgical pictures in my studio that things are progressing. I have a first act of The New American written. I finished it on Saturday and scrawled across the draft, Happy Birthday, JP, since it was my father's birthday. He would have been 101 years old.The first week passed very quickly. From being here last year, I knew how fast the time goes, even though you think a whole month is a long time. Still, it took me by surprise; the rapidity of time passing. While I got work done, I still feel this pressure--self-induced, I know--to get even more done. My Type A++ personality isn't conducive to month-long meditative residencies. Deep breaths, John. Deep breaths.

I do find myself in the same mental spot where I was last year at this time: writing, writing, writing, but at the moment, with no funding to develop in the upcoming year, you have to ask yourself, what's the point? Why am I working when there is no hope for development? Self-doubt is just an everyday matter for an artist. Just believe. Sue tells me all of the time, just write. You'll find your audience. Or rather, they'll find you.

The dramaturgical images are of things that have angered or scared me (or both?) in the past years vis a vis capitalism: The militarization of the police, the BP oil spill, the reaction of the police to the Dakota pipeline protest, the reaction to Occupy (I still don't understand why Obama didn't speak out about the treatment of the protesters), Treyvon Martin and the reaction by many whites to the Black Lives Matter movement.  All tied to capitalism.

ARLO
Yes. It was capitalism at its worst.
I.C.
Capitalism at its worst. I couldn’t have put it better.

Yesterday a resident visited my studio and after looking around asked me if I was a communist. I took that question two ways: I was complimented because clearly I got a visceral reaction from her, but two, it also frightened me, because it is part of U.S. history that if someone doesn't agree with the government they're branded a communist. Shades of pre WW I, the 1930s, and the McCarthy era. But this particular resident was from China, and knows, I'm sure, more about communism than I do, which also tells me, as an artist, to pay very close attention to the audience, because art does not exist in a vacuum.

Words are taking up a lot of my energy. The insomniac in me lies awake in the dark, words acting like the cogs in a wheel, turning, turning... But my visual senses are alive. Go here to see all of my images.

I'm on my way, but as always I'm not as far along as I'd like. Even writing here on this blog is a step ahead. Any time I'm putting fingers to the keyboard is a good thing, exercising the writing part of my brain.

Today is my fourth day back in Boston after spending a month at the Vermont Studio Center. As our residencies drew to a close, I think all of us had more than just a little anxiety about returning to our normal lives. We were served three delicious meals, three times a day, and we'd laugh, noting how much time our lives are spent buying, preparing, and cleaning up after meals. And picking up the dry cleaning, running errands, working day jobs, and every and all of the things that erode our creative time from our daily lives. Our lives were catered to so we could focus solely on the job of creating.

And now that I've been home, I'm realizing it's going to be a lot harder to acclimate than I ever imagined. When I taught creative writing, I used to tell my students that they didn't need me; that if they simply wrote every day for an hour for the semester, by the end they would be better writers simply from the act of writing. I grew so much as an artist in that month, simply from the sheer joy of working. I was free to play, unencumbered by the feeling that someone was looking over my shoulder. I didn't angst about whether the scripts I was working on were "commercially viable", or that anyone would even "get" them. I had total creative freedom, only limited by me.

But everything it seems--every experience in our lives--comes down to the people, doesn't it? I called the residency a super cross-pollination of ideas. I knew that Jose Rivera had written that playwriting was closer to poetry and music than the novel, but at VSC I lived it. I feel playwriting is also related to sculpting and painting, given the three-dimensional worlds we create. Coming from a photography background, I knew I approached my writing from a visual perspective (and even more so, I understand now why so many people in Boston don't "get" my work: I'm approaching it from a completely different place from what their traditional theater training taught them. They literally can't see what I see.) For thirty days I was in conversation with 49 other painters, sculptors, media artists, poets, fiction writers, and multidisciplinary artists from all over the world who didn't necessarily fit the traditional model of their work either. Words like "fertile" and "incubator"  and "cutting edge" come to mind. I can't tell you what an ego boost it was to be included in that group. In the middle of the first week, I emailed a collaborator here in Boston, writing, "...they're all like us!" I did a reading of one of the scripts I was working on, and everyone to a person loved it. This is a script that some people in Boston have literally laughed at and made fun of. This isn't the first time I've experienced this kind of behavior and I've persevered, but I can't tell you the relief when that sort of childish and unprofessional behavior is removed from your life.

Acclimating back to this life, I'm finding, is harder than I thought it was going to be.

At the bottom of all of this, I think, was that there was no small talk in Vermont. I met a visual artist from Germany who showed me the feeling I have whenever I come home to Boston, whether it's from Vermont, New York, Paris, or Los Angeles, with images of her feeling cramped and claustrophobic, wearing her childhood clothes. One night I spoke at length with a sculptor in her seventies, again from Germany, about dying and how we're facing that step in our lives. A poet from Sweden asked me what my greatest fear was, and she told me hers, then we talked about that. I saw a painter from Seattle morph into a playwright, and she confided in me the reason why. I spoke at length to a poet who had grown up in Baltimore, worked in factories, went from photography to playwriting to poetry, and he shared with me in the most generous way his life story, telling me to persevere. I have a ton of stories like these. I had the pleasure and the honor to be among some of the most vibrant, accomplished artists so willing to share and be open to any and all ideas, and it's not easy returning to our world filled with compromise, with the mundane, with people who think they are so hip and with it, but really are so steeped in, and tied to, the conventional and are blind to that fact and ram it down your throat like a dose of medicine, for your own good. (God bless the beasts and children, eh?) It makes me so angry.

Right now, out on the streets of Boston, it looks like a riot. The Patriots won the Super Bowl, millions are clogging the streets for a victory parade in the rain, and SWAT teams and militarized police are everywhere. A world gone crazy, it seems. I'm sitting in the back of a coffee shop whose name I'd rather not mention because it's a nice hideaway, it has excellent wifi, and I don't want others to know about it. And honestly? Right now I feel like the loneliest person in the world.