What a great escape! An artist's retreat at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York. I would highly recommend this retreat for dancers, writers, composers, actors and visual artists. Check the website www.kaatsbaan.org for 2026 Retreat dates and registration.
Through a generous scholarship from the Fountain House Gallery, I was lucky to be selected as one of five artists to spend a November weekend in the Hudson Valley doing what I love- writing and editing my novel All That Remains.
I arrived on Friday and found a lovely Italian restaurant, and ate lunch with my translator, Theresa, who served as my chauffeur and adult supervisor. "I brought you a chocolate protein shake," she told me, as we smoked one last cigarette before driving the hour and a half to our destination- a 153-acre estate for artists who wanted a weekend away from the daily grind to find inspiration in their respective fields.
When Alice, the Program Manager at Kaatsbaan, told me I was the only writer, I started to panic. The night before I left I had a massive anxiety attack when I discovered I would spend the weekend with dancers, performing artists, and a composer. Suddenly, I had visions of going to summer camp, but with children half my age. Was I simply too old for an Artists retreat with such creative, youthful artists? Would I have to "mute" the "kra-kra" button we poets are so familiar with? Would I have to be "normal" in the company of such talent? I shut my laptop off, packed my suitcase with six packs of Winston Select 100's, nicotine gum, nicotine patches, folders of poetry, a flashlight, and three changes of clothes. Alice had warned me that it was COLD and DARK in the Hudson Valley. I am not a fan of COLD or DARK and again, I briefly thought to myself WTF was I thinking? This could be the perfect location for a manic episode or a relapse!
But I was determined. I had been working on this novel for five years when the copyeditor I hired told me it was not publication-ready. This plunged me into an artistic depression, and I did not touch the manuscript for a year. However, I wasn't making a living as a poet, and I knew my best chance of finding employment, if not fame, as a fiction writer would be- that's right- to publish my 250 page novel.
Writing the first draft of the manuscript felt like birthing a giraffe. I found a literary agent who read the novel. She told me that "it is beautifully written but needs more work." We need to know more about the narrator and her relationship to her family." Hell, no! I was NOT going there.
So now a literary agent and a copyeditor from Simon &Schuster both stated, albeit in different tones, that my novel needed more work. But who the hell wants to do more work?
I came to Kaatsbaan with five separate folders and the willingness to DO MORE WORK. I wasn't getting any younger, and although I had two poetry chapbooks published, The Ribbon Around the Bomb" and "God Doesn't Live at Our House Anymore" published under my pseudonym Charlotte Clear, I needed to find motivation, if not inspiration and dive back into the novel. Procrastination and sloth dodged every step. I vacillated from thinking "It's never too late" to "I will never finish this". From optimism, if you will, to abject despair. This is the writing life. It is solitary and unforgiving-both muse and master. It is like running a marathon without water, leaving me permanently dehydrated.
It took coming to literally "The Middle of Nowhere" to get my writing groove on. After a lovely dinner with the five other artists at the "Farmhouse" where everyone drank wine except for me, I actually began to work. I realized that the novel was overly ambitious in scope, location (it covered five countries) and multiple storylines. It read like an ADD self-help manual combined with a written confession and a touch of Mea Culpa. UGH. I felt like an ice sculptor chipping away at a larger than life block of ice, uncertain as to what I wanted to create or how I would get there. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted the writing to be beautiful, poetic and I wanted my novel to mean something, but what, exactly?
And then the moment of clarity came. I had tried to do to much, all at once, and the result was chaos. I had to put order into an overyly ambitios manuscript. I was trying to tell too many stories simultaneously. I needed less, not more.
After I recognized my own creative tendency for overkill, I pondered how I could simplify my project. Then it hit me. Divide the manuscript into four separate, but interrelated novellas, each with its own narrative arc. Easier to say, harder to do, but at least I felt like I had an editorial "road map" of how to approach the editing process.
I started with the novella about the AIDS epidemic, entitled "Gay Geography" because this chapter had already been published by MAPLiterary, (www.mapliterary.org), William Paterson University's English Department online journal. I culled three chapters out of the original 18-chapter manuscript that focused on my experience living with gay roommates at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. What ensued was a four chapter, fifty page novella: Chapter 1, "Gay Geography", Chapter 2, "Strange but Not Dangerous", Chapter 3 "We The Living", and Chapter 4, "The Inheritance of Pronouns". There is an Epilogue and a Prologue, which might need to be tweaked in the other novellas. Or perhaps keeping the same Epilogue and Prologue for all four novellas allows the reader to see the connection between the four novellas, all of which are written from the point of view of Eliza, the unreliable narrator.
For I am nothing, if not an unreliable narrator, here in the Middle of Nowhere, the gorgeous Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, where I have managed to be on my best behavior when fraternising with the other younger, talented, successful artists. We are all staying in the Dancer's Inn. My room sleeps five- I could have brought my family with me. But, on the contrary, it is the silence and the isolation which afforded me the time and the space to focus and settle down to work. It is Saturday morning, and I have read Gay Geography and made final edits. I added a poem and a table of contents for the novella. Transferring the handwritten (I am a dinosaur and can't edit on the screen) to the computer version is tedious. I am up to page 10, and I will be lucky if I finish this task by the time we leave tomorrow afternoon. But I am grateful I came, and I would highly recommend a weekend retreat in Tivoli, New YorkKaatsbaan Cultural Park Artists Retreat for all artists who need to step outside of their daily routine and find a beautiful, supportive environment to help them forge ahead with their creative project- whether it be dance, musical theatre, acting, composing and yes, writing and/or editing.
