My Writing Residency in the Pandemic: A Love Story
A boy I once loved talked openly about his current relationship over coffee last summer. “We have so much fun together, and I love her family, but I just—I don’t know.” He dropped his eyes and let me infer the rest.
There was a pull in my chest. I wanted him to feel better; I always did. “Well, and you fell in love, right? And you remember it. You say to each other, ‘But we fell in love,’ and that’s so rare.” We looked at each other. I suppose I was talking about us, as well. I sighed. “The memory of loving someone isn’t the same as loving them.”
The memory of falling is a story you tell yourself and each other, so in time it becomes a belief. We love each other, you continue to say, as you outgrow the relationship, stop trying, hold each other back, destroy each other’s lives.
I was talking about my own longest relationship: my relationship to my writing. Intellectually, I knew I “loved” to write and that I had, at some point, felt sure it was my calling. But I leaned heavily on the knowledge—on the memory that had become belief—without much empirical evidence for the belief itself.
What had once started as passionate, insatiable affair had become a marriage, and it took work. Then, it took more work. I thought that’s how it would be. Til death.
Infatuation happened so fast. As a kid, I possessed a kind of hunger for a blank page even before I could form letters, and I remember how the blankness filled me with heartache I didn’t understand. It was desire with nowhere to go.
I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen on a beach vacation with my family. Seventy thousand words on my dad’s laptop that wouldn’t wait. The story entertained me through summertime. That’s often why I wrote; I was bored.
Although at school I scribbled stories in my notebooks, writing—writing for fun—was a summer love. As a young teenager, I remember a thousand humid nights, the clicks of insects out the window competing with the taps of keys as I invented the stories I wanted to live. We were rapt, writing and me, and through the night we had only each other.
Over time, this relationship became politicized. Writing was the thing I was “good at” and expected to develop into a profitable trade. And then there was the internet. All around me, people published blogs, and then they published on websites and then in the New Yorker. Everyone was better than me at the thing I thought was secret and mine.
The internet also changed the nature of boredom. Why write with a pencil when you can open your iPhone and see images of exotic foods, the interiors of houses, the faces of beautiful people? I felt the shimmers of inspiration—I want to write this—but they were drowned by the next image, and the next, and the next, and the feeling that words would never be enough.
My relationship to writing became fraught and tense. We lived in the same house but avoided each other, only sitting down together when the deadline was pressing; we forged ahead with gritted teeth.
In the meantime, I had real summer romances. Life took over for writing. Then, summers disappeared—at least, lazy summers as I had once known them. I worked through the days and picked up my head, and it was fall again.
I said yes to Elsewhere without thinking about the logistics; the only eyes that had ever glimpsed my novel liked it enough to invite me. But I would have to take two months out of my life, to leave my fiancé and our home. Was that possible for an adult? Would I really write better just because I was in a different room?
Resoundingly: yes.
It hasn’t been perfect, of course, but what love story is? We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and people call me more often than they would if they were working a normal schedule. It has not been easy to maintain boundaries. Worry creeps in. Many of the programs and offerings of the residency have been postponed, and I was disappointed not to teach my class about Little Women at the public library and not to have my interview with the high school students.
Yet from here in the window on the second floor, I feel in the eye of the storm. I know that writing is lifting the burden of this fearful and otherwise overwhelming time. In my two months here, I discovered empirical evidence for the truth I have always known but felt lost: indeed, I love to write.
A couple of weeks ago, I was plodding through a scene in my novel when an idea landed on the table and tugged at my sleeve. I wrote the idea in my notebook and turned back to the screen.
But the muse had arrived. She danced just out of view. She had solved a problem for a story I had long been wanting to tell but didn’t know how; it was the story of a summer love. She would not leave me alone.
Rather than deny myself the pleasure, rather than saying, “I am disciplined, and I came here to write my novel,” I followed her. I danced down the path and left everything behind. That is what the residency gives you: the space and time and freedom from eyes and demands. The call was so loud and so clear in this quiet room.
In the hours where I was lost in a story-world, I had this heady, buzzy feeling. Time became slippery and impossible; my head was foggy and caught in it. Everything else fell away. Dare I say it? It felt like love.
I wrote sixteen thousand words in thirteen hours. As I sat in the sun on the patio, trying to catch my breath, all I wanted was to see the end, to find out what happened. When I wrote the last sentence, I tipped back, at last sated and satisfied.
At Elsewhere, I had a feeling akin to summers past when writing kept me up all night, when I was free of the self-consciousness of my work and the prying eyes of the internet. When I woke in the mornings with my hair matted and tangled from a late night of writing stories.
My history with writing is as important as ever. But I have reassurance now that this isn’t a relationship built on memory. Writing and I—we rekindled our romance here on the top floor of Elsewhere, and I can proudly tell you that though we have long been married, we are, in fact, in love.