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 love cemeteries. I love them so much that I think I quite easily qualify as a taphophile. Tiny New England family plots by the side of the road, and large, urban parks, it doesn't matter: I feel at home among the dead. I feel at peace. I feel more life in cemeteries, where  life has been halted, frozen, stopped, and you can investigate it and turn it over, than on a bustling city boulevard. (By the same token, I like the obituaries in a newspaper. I find the story of a person's life, no matter how insignificant the person may have been while alive, to be elevated to it's purest notion.)

I find comfort in the proof that I will die and I am not alone in this fact, that it is something that all people do. A grave is proof that a person lived. They got from Point A (birth) to Point B (death) which is really the point of all of this. You simply have to get from Point A to Point B. Except there is what Alice Anne in my play, Highland Center, says. Alice Anne is dead. But she talks and acts as alive as you or me. Why not? People are alive in our memories, and who knows what time and space are really like. If they are in my head, they are alive, and so is Alice Anne. Because she is dead, she knows a little bit about life and death. She tells her son, Hank:

Not when I’m with you. I never understood why misery loves company, Hank. Why do people say, well, I suffered so you have to suffer too? I walked two miles in the snow so you should too? Shouldn’t it be, if you suffered you don’t want anyone else to go through what you went through? Shouldn’t it be that we should want to stop suffering in the world, not preserve it?  Hank, take care of Henry. Do your best, and don’t quit. Don’t run out on him. Hank, we all end up in the same place, the only difference is how we get there. A pine box, Hank. There. (Pointing to her headstone.) We all end up there.

And, importantly, when I see the name of someone whose work I greatly admire, seeing their name on a tombstone offers me even greater proof that they were once alive and that everything I've heard or seen or learned about them is true, even more proof than their work itself.

Believe it not, if there's one thing that I do that's so integral to the work I do, but also saps me entirely of energy and creativity, it's the producing end of the theater--The actual making of the theater event.

Plank closed September 16. That was about five-and-a-half months of nonstop, day in and day out doing the business of theater. It's never easy, and all it takes is one personality (or two) to make the entire process doubly harder than it already is. (One night over beers with another artistic director, they confided that with the show they were working on, they did not look forward to going to the theater at all. I had a few of those days, too.) So, here it is two-and-a-half months after closing, and I feel I'm just starting to right myself, feel I'm just starting to get a bead on what I'm working on next.

With the residency at Vermont Studio Center looming in January, right now I feel exactly how I felt at this time last year: What do I do now to make my time there most productive? What can I do now to the script to The New American, the play that I submitted on the application, so it's in some form where I can hit the ground running for the month and know what I have to do to the script so it's vastly improved when the month is up? 

Sue and I make enormous sacrifices for me to be there, taking a month's time of me being away, plus the cost--$3,950.00. As with last year, I received a partial grant from the residency that eases the financial burden. I also got a $1,000 grant from the Bob Jolly Charitable Trust that brought my total grants up to $2,700.00 to defray the costs, so I feel even more--I don't want to say under the gun--but beholden to all of the people who support my work to deliver. I don't want to let them down because they've put so much faith in me.

You just have to trust that your brain and your talent will be there for you. And I do trust that. And here are all good signs:

Since closing Plank, I've written one short story, and I'm working on another. The first story, "The Road Into Beartown," took me only a few weeks to write and polish. Writing short stories is so different from writing plays, and I think because I concentrate on playwriting so much that sometimes I can get stuck. I also love the short story form, and I actually read and enjoy many more short stories than I do plays. For the most part, with short stories--or at least the ones I read--the arc of the story is so apparent that you can just sit back for the ride.

I'm also not only shooting, but I'm liking the direction my images are taking. So much so that I'm starting to feel I should start to get seriously back into photography. Last January in Vermont I took the day off from writing and drove onto some back roads and in the course of an afternoon felt that suddenly I was a photographer again. Writing and working visually for me are all tied together; there's nothing separate about them, though of course the approach is different. But, what I aim for is the same: A way to show reality using non-traditional methods. It's just how I'm wired artistically. See for yourself, with these images from the past two weeks:

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.

Maybe it won't work for you, but if you're in a spot like I am right now, trying to figure out what to do next. What's the Next Big Thing? Is it a play? A novel? A series of short stories? Do I even have it in me to do The Next Big Thing? (Of course I do; every writer goes through this horrible stage where you doubt every bit of talent you've ever had, suspecting that it's all disappeared because you weren't 100% vigilant.)

This past January, when I was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, writing my brains out, one day I took a break and went out and shot pictures, using a visual language and vocabulary for replace my written one for a day, and voila! I cleared my brain and I was fresh the next day. Take a look. Today in Boston was like that day on the backroads of Vermont, where I couldn't NOT take a photograph. It was in impossible. Everywhere I looked I saw an image. Sometime I took it; sometimes I just looked at it.

I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what I'm going to do next. All I know is I'm on to something.

Oh, and then there's there: What Photography Taught Acclaimed Author Teju Cole About Writing. It showed up in my inbox today.

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.

A couple of days ago I thought I had a completed draft of Plank. This morning, for the first time in many years, I drew the human figure. And suddenly, I realized I wasn't looking at the human form; I was looking at the Ocean. The waves. The undulating waves, how they dip and plunge in and around, making shadows and shapes.

Since I didn't have a pen, I think I wrote with the charcoal and the graphite pencil as much as I sketched. I jotted down notes and especially key referential words. This won't account for a new scene, but it will help round out and especially solidify scenes, although I think one scene--the hurricane--will especially benefit from this exercise.

I got the same kind of artistic jolt last week when I took the day off and photographed some back roads. Just cleared myself of words and I opened myself up to new sources of inspiration. And then suddenly the words started flowing again.

Yesterday I needed a break. I needed to get away from my writing for a while, get away and be by myself for a while. So, I cleaned the snow off my truck, stopped at the auto parts store here in Johnson, Vermont, and got some new windshield wipers, and drove out of town.

I found a side road, with smaller roads feeding off it. Dirt roads that had been plowed then sand laid down over the ice. The roads had names like, Such and Such Mountain Road. A lot of them were named after mountains. Of course those were the roads I steered down.

I had our little travel camera, and forgot about words and saw the world visually. I think I still have my eye; line, shape, color, tone, texture, direction, contrast is all there in the images. I didn't think; I saw, I felt, I reacted to what I saw in the viewfinder. 

I needed to get away because the day before I finished a draft of Plank. I had known the ending, or a good idea what the ending was going to be, I just was in a twist trying to figure out how to get it there. Let the characters lead you; let the piece lead you. I heard that here at the Vermont Studio Center from so many people.