I had never been to Colorado before, but had always been eager to spend time here.
Especially as I myself am a person born in another high-altitude place elsewhere: Bogotá, Colombia, which stands about a kilometer higher than Denver in the northern Andes.
This was my first physical artist residency. But I couldn’t have gotten here without the support and collaboration from my first actual artist residency, with the maestras Stephanie Garcés and Stephanie Smith from the Bay Area digital collective, on-off.site. To them, thank you for your support and for all your collaboration in our project, which went to hell and back!
After being able to process all that I did in Paonia, and Elsewhere, I know it was worth every minute. I spent half of the month I was fortunate enough to be an artist-in-residence organizing ten years worth of notes and the other half writing the mapped outline of those notes.
This sounds easy. Far from it, in fact.
I went from 292 pages of disorganized thoughts, ideas, and references to other texts, to creating a system for these all to be organized and mapped.
And from a 60-page manuscript I had started working on in 2019 when I was still living with my partner on a flat in Lavapiés, Madrid, Spain… the day I left Elsewhere, I had written 222 pages and completed 5 out 8 sections of a first draft of a long thing, which, we can call “a novel.”
Today, March 10th, I have written 236 pages and have completed one more section of this first draft, with two more sections to go.
Being in Paonia, and being able to focus in this way, affected me deeply. I was able to create a ghost story which is part of a collection referenced and extended in the novel and which was based in a fictional lost city version of Paonia. This story, and a couple of others, was read in our artist’s showcase: “Looking for a Sign,” on Friday, February 25th.
This short story, in the form of a first-person vignette, was deeply referential in terms of the town, its people, Elsewhere itself, and my fellow residents and Elsewherians – Jae, Shannon, Ben, and Chelsea – and their projects. I hope to one day soon publish a finished manuscript of this novel I am working on. And to be able to feature this story as a funny, but creepy thing, that people will get to enjoy in full, then.
But for now, I will leave you with two fragments from this ghost story:
“I remember Dwight told me once about one of those flowers living more than fifty years, and that legend tells that the flower was used to cure ailments. That cowboys used to live in the time when our funny green house was the building that housed the electrical center of town, and he also tells me about the dispersed steam engines being brought upon the friends we now have around here.”
“I wish these fellows had gone elsewhere rather than pursued these whimsical ideas. It’s like they were all looking for an alibi, for a meaning, like they were all looking for a sign of what lives beyond the place that produces the snow. All of them, seekers, I guess. This set of parapsychological, paranormal phenomena that I’ve been telling you about even brought tourists to our town of a thousand people.”
For now, all I can say is: ¡Gracias totales! Thank you for the month-long alibi!
Posdata: Miss you too, my feline fellow, Pomodoro aka Tomatoes
