Bethany Hughes

Everywhere you look in Elsewhere Studios, there is something new to notice. Details of care and creativity in the woodwork, designs in the nooks, messages on the backs of pictures and cork boards, tiny treasures tucked away at the backs of drawers. The way the concrete pour behind the outlet is shaped like a flower, the fairies emerging from cracks painted into the Gingerbread House, cat toys in the planters, rainbow prisms dance at midmorning from crystals hung in the window. In four months of residency I never ceased to find new and mesmerizing details. Amidst this, what held me most were the windows.

Windows are something of a novelty to me, as this has been the longest I’ve slept indoors in 5 years. Since beginning the Her Odyssey journey with dipping my fingertips into the Beagle Channel off the archipelago beyond the southern tip of South America and picking up a small auburn rock and promising to carry it to the Arctic, I have been on the move. In those 5 years and 14,000 miles of human powered travel I have seen much, from soaring condors atop at 17,000 ft pass, to dogs who ride the ubiquitous mopeds around industrialized cities. It took a pandemic to force me to step off the route and retreat to the safety of a place from which to regard the journey, rather than living it.

In the words of John Dewey, “We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.” This encapsulates the heart of the magic which awaits in Paonia. Having been in motion for so long, engaged in the thick of it, the invitation to stop and be still ¾ of the way along our route, came in a difficult way. I navigated denial, depression, loss of sense of purpose and self, scorn and vitriol from trolls and disillusioned followers, before I found the strength to pivot my own internal narrative from that of “failure” to “opportunity.” It was as I made this shift that I found Elsewhere and in coming here, for the first time in years, I found a space which afforded the safety I needed to reflect back on the journey. 

The thing about windows is that they separate you from the outside world and define a space. It is humbling to live out in the elements, to learn to survive through nieve blanca, snarling, hurling white out snow storms at 12,000 ft or slogging through oppressive heat so saturated with humidity that your lungs are swimming and clothing pastes to your skin as tightly as the sweat which binds it there. Whether facing the walls of bureaucracy at every border, or paddling a murky, crocodile infested river, the thing about it is that you can be nowhere but there, trying to survive the moment. 

The depths of what you take away go unrealized until there is some distance, a pane of something to protect you. A place from which to safely regard the elements and life alike and from there, to take it to the page. The windows at Elsewhere and the spirit inside, afforded me that. It holds space for creativity and an invitation to explore all art forms, from silks to paints, to negative space. Whether I was focused at the desk or awash in my flights and fears, Elsewhere nurtured the process. When I needed distraction or to circle the matter to assure myself it can no longer nip at my heels, contort my cells, nor threaten my life, there were silks to hang from and implements to draw with. Then, when I was ready and felt safe to write, there was the invitation of silence and blank pages.

Something further afforded by windows creating a safe and defined space, is being separated from the hurry and worries of the outside world. Here new and unexpected sprouts of creativity may peep their heads up. As I watched the rotation of month long residents, all in academic recovery, each birthed a creative process which had been unanticipated. Ideas and visions which might not find root or courage to sprout in any other place, seem to thrive within these walls and under the refracted light of the windows. I experienced something similar as my daily “To Do” lists over the course of the tenure shifted from specific and detailed summons:

□ write x# of Pomodoros

 to a general call: 

□ create 

Whether I ended up spending the afternoon taking gravestone rubbings, playing with gothic lettering at the easel, or experimenting with erasure poetry or pastels, all were nutritious, even knowing it would ultimately end up in the compost heap of creativity, to enrich untold future seeds. It was difficult to overcome the summons to productivity, to linear creation and moving toward a defined objective but once I did release, I found a much more expansive experience and self. When your time comes to take up residence in this space, do not fear the distractions. Elsewhere offers unexpected windows into your own well of inspiration and may show you the way to projects you didn’t know were in you.

A final window I spent a fair amount of time peering through, was the view into the community of Paonia. The people who live at this threshold between plains and peaks, this intersection of philosophies and perspectives, and the wealth and conflict generated by that diversity even within the homogeneity of this region, touched something in me. While the 5 months in this town have been the longest I’ve laid my head in one place in 5 years, the truth is that I have been on the move since I was 2 years old, never having lived anywhere longer than a handful of years. To have conversations with folks who have stewarded the same land for five generations of family or meeting other new arrivals, was a fascinating interplay.

I have just watched my last sunset through the Suite window. Crepuscular light yawns over a sea of trees beyond which the open plains stretch to the south. Cupped from the north by the Rockies. In this transitional zone between the two, the canyons hold secrets of eons and peoples past, the peaks from which you can survey hundreds of miles of the wide world. Here in this pocket, is the space far enough afield and safe enough to cultivate vision beyond what can be seen.

You can follow the rest of Her Odyssey at:

Website- https://www.her-odyssey.org/

YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/c/HerOdyssey

Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/_herodyssey_/

Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/herodyssey

Twitter- https://twitter.com/her_odyssey?lang=en

Her Odyssey Route to Date. Red-Walked, Blue- Paddled, Orange-Bikepacked

PC: Skylar Taylor, Jan 2021 Elsewhere Resident

Tomatoes The Cat in Residence, likes to follow the muse around the studios and place himself right where creativity is happening.

Petroglyphs right down the road!

Pomodoros helped keep me on task toward daily writing goals.

Learning to have the courage to draw at the Black Canyon

Alex Gabriel

In 1971 Daniel Buren wrote about the function of the artist’s studio. He describes the studio as the space of production of Art- a space of phenomena and ontology mixed together. Describing both specific physicality and architectures of archetypical studio spaces (in the Western mind), Buren also illuminates how a studio functions psychically. Calling it a “private place, the studio is presided over by the artist-resident, since only that work which he desires and allows to leave his studio will do so.” Some other folk are invited in- colleagues, critics, lovers. To be invited in is to be invited into the refuge of the work- where the work both occurs as a verb of production, and where the work rests in storage. This then shows how form and function intertwine even into questions of where the heart of a work of art sits. Where is the work’s reality? A private studio necessitates portable work that functions as a filter and a window into the artist’s process, hierarchies, positionally and vocabulary.

A two month residency at Elsewhere brought the paradox of the private studio into sharp focus. Residing in the upstairs Suite of the house, I slept, worked, and publicly exhibited in the same physical space. The performance of space and function was impossible to ignore and catalyzed new possibilities for the work. If Buren critiques the studio-gallery system as a system of paradoxes, the function of a residency such as Elsewhere stands as a contrast to his three stated functions: 1. the place where the work originates. 2. a private place/ an ivory tower 3. a stationary place where portable objects are produced.

A residency is instead: A place where the work is disrupted and continued, a public place/ non-personal space, and an ephemeral experience of travel and time.

The importance of a residency lies in its disruption of systems. Because of the collapse of public/private, the artist is invited to inhabit the work. The archetype of the residency is a type of Queer Rest because it emphasizes a romantic idea of artistic process. Time away from the critic, the gallery, and personal life where voices beyond the work can take undue precedence. In a residency, you can sleep next to paintings, and they can enter your dreams freely. Buren’s studio is a filter, and a residency is the doorway to slip into the aesthetic realm fully. To host an open studio when your bed and bathtub are in your studio exposes the human beyond the artist, an act that brings the creative process out of the ivory tower and into the streets. At a residency, the binary between archetype and reality collapses when the first thing you see in the morning is a work-in-progress hanging on the wall across the room. You can become the artist you dream of being at a residency.

TTU 2019

We had two graduate students in residency from TTU follow the link below to our projects page to learn more!

https://willi-moore-zh5n.squarespace.com/config/pages/54d3a3d8e4b0120d64b8ca30

Marian Pham

Ah, 2020. How do we even begin with you.

My stay at Elsewhere in June 2020 was after the residency program had shut down for a couple months in response to the COVID pandemic, alongside hundreds of other residency programs around the country, if not the world.

So when I got rescheduled from April to June, a part of me felt like it wouldn’t be wise or fair. Another part of me wanted to get away and focus on something meaningful. Why do creative professionals sometimes feel guilty when they’ve been given time and space to work on a project? At least, I have been, especially during a global pandemic? Not to mention on top of that pandemic, amidst tense social unrest throughout the country. Insert something here about the work having to be incredibly profound or impactful to have meaning. And no, it doesn’t have to be. Creative energy needs to be honored, and the world keeps spinning, pandemic or no.

In an art business class I’ve taken, our mentor often says “artists are the first to be executed and the first to be commissions during times of social upheaval and political revolution. Well, now, let’s not get too hasty.

But these times aren’t normal, as I’m sure we’ve all heard that so often these days. Our collective society needs to bring on a new normal that serves all people, and corrects the inequities that plague People of Color, among many other things. My first week at Elsewhere was spent grappling with the total upending of the prior months. I drove to Paonia, Colorado during the height of the BLM protests. It felt like I was escaping a reality I had no right to escape. I need to be a responsible citizen and member of society after all, and stay informed on all things important!

After writing out all the feels about BLM so I could at least get it out of my system, I settled into a groove to work on my writing project. The reason I was even at Elsewhere in the first place. I was constantly reminding and reassuring myself that it was okay to take a short break from what’s going on. It wasn’t like I was hiding forever. And all kinds of art is more important than ever right now, so I needed to be in the right mindset to bring this to life.

* * *

My graphic novel is a passion project that stemmed from a desire to tell a story that only I could tell. My immigrant bilingual upbringing, and connection to a culture and heritage that often gets conflated with a war narrative that often ignores how it decimated the motherland and its people. I wanted to change the narrative to remind us that immigrants are not always wanting to talk about war, pain, suffering, and loss. There are plenty of rich and fun content in our history worthy of Hollywood blockbusters.

So I combined two mythologies that serve as inspiration for a fantasy adventure told in a medium that inspired and influenced me greatly as a teenager: manga. I didn’t care for American comics (sorry, Marvel). But I was enamored with the dramatic layouts and panels and ink brush work of Japanese manga, and the vast array of genres and topics that could be told in comic form. No topic was off limits in their eyes, whereas comics in America was always considered too niche and nerdy for the masses...until it no longer was (see MCU.)

But I digress.

A Pearl to Burn follows the story of Phaye, the protagonist who discovers she’s the newest Holy Guardian of Fire, Vermillion Bird. And she’s been tasked with the impossible: help the centuries missing Prince Long, also the Azure Dragon, regain his true form by transporting him back to the Sea Kingdom, where fire can’t burn.

Phaye is a rendition of the Vietnamese Fairy Goddess named Âu Cơ, who according to legend, falls in love with Lặc Long Quân, a dragon of the sea. Their love birthed 100 children, who are said to be from whom the Vietnamese people descended. When the calling to return to their original homes became too great, Âu Cơ and Lặc Long Quân parted on good terms, each taking 50 of their children. Âu Cơ returns to the mountains, and Lặc Long Quân to the sea, and thus, the Vietnamese people’s connection to both land and sea is established.

There is a lot of overlap between Chinese and Vietnamese mythology, as you can see. The similarities of creatures between Vietnam’s ancient origin story with the Chinese popular folktale regarding the Four Holy Beasts probably wasn’t a coincidence, and I’m sure there are now plenty of media that was inspired by these myths.

Remember when I said earlier that I wanted to tell a story only I could tell? While I’m using these existing influences heavily, I’m telling a story through Phaye, a young woman who is thrust into this journey to save the land while also discovering who she is in this context. My goal is to have this story not only universal to all groups of people, but to highlight ancient Asian culture so that it may be regarded the way European Medieval times have always been the backdrop for so many American movies, books, comics, tv, etc. I’m drilling down deep to access my own experiences living on this planet as a first generation Asian American woman living in modern times with tools to tell modern stories in modern ways.

As of this writing, my rough draft is about five chapters in. I experimented with writing long hand first so that the whole story could at least exist before the editing phase comes into play. So far, so good.

I had good company while I was figuring out this process. Shout out to Tomatoes (who’s overly affectionate nature visited me every day) and Potatoes (who showed up in the basement studio during my very last week).

Thanks for reading this far if you have. Until next time, Elsewhere. <3

Jamie Burgess

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.

Alex Gabriel

In 1971 Daniel Buren wrote about the function of the artist’s studio. He describes the studio as the space of production of Art- a space of phenomena and ontology mixed together. Describing both specific physicality and architectures of archetypical studio spaces (in the Western mind), Buren also illuminates how a studio functions psychically. Calling it a “private place, the studio is presided over by the artist-resident, since only that work which he desires and allows to leave his studio will do so.” Some other folk are invited in- colleagues, critics, lovers. To be invited in is to be invited into the refuge of the work- where the work both occurs as a verb of production, and where the work rests in storage. This then shows how form and function intertwine even into questions of where the heart of a work of art sits. Where is the work’s reality? A private studio necessitates portable work that functions as a filter and a window into the artist’s process, hierarchies, positionally and vocabulary. 

A two month residency at Elsewhere brought the paradox of the private studio into sharp focus. Residing in the upstairs Suite of the house, I slept, worked, and publicly exhibited in the same physical space. The performance of space and function was impossible to ignore and catalyzed new possibilities for the work. If Buren critiques the studio-gallery system as a system of paradoxes, the function of a residency such as Elsewhere stands as a contrast to his three stated functions: 1. the place where the work originates. 2. a private place/ an ivory tower 3. a stationary place where portable objects are produced. 

A residency is instead: 

1. A place where the work is disrupted and continued

2. a public place/ non-personal space

3. an ephemeral experience of travel and time

The importance of a residency lies in its disruption of systems. Because of the collapse of public/private, the artist is invited to inhabit the work. The archetype of the residency is a type of Queer Rest because it emphasizes a romantic idea of artistic process. Time away from the critic, the gallery, and personal life where voices beyond the work can take undue precedence. In a residency, you can sleep next to paintings, and they can enter your dreams freely. Buren’s studio is a filter, and a residency is the doorway to slip into the aesthetic realm fully. To host an open studio when your bed and bathtub are in your studio exposes the human beyond the artist, an act that brings the creative process out of the ivory tower and into the streets. At a residency, the binary between archetype and reality collapses when the first thing you see in the morning is a work-in-progress hanging on the wall across the room. You can become the artist you dream of being at a residency. 

James Sylvester

I came to Elsewhere in March of 2020 with the goal in mind of spending time in  mountainous landscape (something I’ve longed to do since growing up in the suburbs of Connecticut, absent much of such wonder) where I could work on drawings and carvings to fuel a new body of linoleum cut and stamp based monoprints, while in an environment that was supportive and nurturing to my goals.  And Elsewhere was just that place.  

Upon arriving at Elsewhere and consistently throughout my stay, Carolina and Henry were more than supportive, generously offering their time to give feedback on my work and studio visits, and always checking in to make sure I was comfortable. Paonia itself is a town that is filled with artists and creatives of all sorts, a fact I was quick to learn upon being introduced to many of them at the meet and greet, all of them humble and friendly folks who made me feel very welcome in their community. 

Paonia offered me a temporary homebase from which I could drive to surrounding national parks and ranges of mountains to gather copious amounts of reference imagery through sketching and photography.  Coming from Maine, where I’ve been living since moving out of Connecticut, it was a treasure to be able to have what felt very much like a temporary home across the country to explore areas of the landscape I would normally not have access to. I spent valuable time making drawings of geography at places like the Black canyon and the Grand Mesa, sketching from such landscapes I had never before been able to witness with my eyes and draw from life such wonders as deep canyons, rocky mountains, sandstone mesas and plateaus. Paonia itself offers its own natural beauty, as it is nestled between beautiful mountains and pierced by the powerful Gunnison river, along which I found myself walking morning after morning. I found a wonderful rhythm in venturing out in the crisp March morning air to sketch, and then bringing my sketches back to the studio where I would work on turning them into carvings until evening.  In the studio, I was often joined by Tomatoes the Elsewhere cat, who immediately exuded the energy of an old friend or some kind of spiritual guardian.  As someone who swears by possessing little to no love for cats, I can personally attest to his status as a truly wonderful, even admirable creature; a great provider of cuddles and comforter to many a residents who found themselves feeling the pangs of homesickness and in need of the warm presence that Tomatoes never failed to provide. 

After spending time carving and hanging with Tomatoes, when the sun went down I found myself happily caught up in the goings on of the Paonian community often accompanied by my fellow residents. Between free ping pong and pool at the bar across the street (often populated by painters, poets, gardeners, herbalists and cowboys alike) open mics and karaoke, music nights of all sorts (from folk duets to improvisational blues ensembles) there was always a multitude of ways to keep yourself busy in the surprisingly eventful nightlife of this small Colorado town. 

This residency truly fueled creative growth of all kinds for me, as I was able to find a fine balance between studio time, community based events where I could get to know all of the colorful characters of Paonia, downtime with other residents, and hiking the inspiring and lively landscape of Colorado.  And then halfway through March, the gravity of the global pandemic Coronavirus began to set in and throw things for a spin. 

This unfortunately (understandably) cut down on the time I was able to spend building relationships with locals and attending events, but Elsewhere remained inspiring nonetheless.  Carolina and Henry did everything they could to ensure the comfort of myself and my fellow residents as the news of the Coronavirus and the onset of quarantine swept the nation and the anxiety and uncertainty of the state of the world swiftly became a factor in my stay at Elsewhere. Even so, Elsewhere was a wonderful place to be quarantined. I spent many nights sitting in the studio's beautiful backyard gazing at the moon accompanied by Tomatoes, and in the cozy living quarters with plentiful in-house libraries that are accessible to all residents. Even when the physical show at the end of the month had to be cancelled in compliance with quarantine regulations, Carolina and Henry quickly came up with an optional alternative way to share our work through a live streamed zoom meeting at the end of the month.  Because of this, myself and my fellow residents were still able to share and celebrate the work we accomplished while at Elsewhere to an online community and receive valuable feedback and experience through having such a platform to talk about our work to an enthusiastic and supportive audience.

All in all, Elsewhere Studios very much felt like a space where any artist could go to make the space their own while feeling the magic of those who passed through before them (sculptures, trinkets, paintings and all manner of things from past residents adorn the living spaces, revealing the rich history of artists who’ve spent time there before). It's an environment that is extremely conducive to allowing you the time and space to exist and work and focus on life as an artist and a human following their own inspirations, while simultaneously finding new ones around every corner of this magical little place.

Hilary Greenstein

How to Be Elsewhere, A Playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3HBO1EwXIR1mMSJlTLDwJG

Artist statement of Tomatoes, Resident Artist:

Tomatoes’ work exists at the intersection of social practice and the examination of the mundane. His primary media consist of cuddles-based happenings and elaborate rodent eviscerations. While at times controversial, he uses these disparate modalities to interrogate nuances of tenderness and violence in our domestic environments. He is also a local educator, working with under-served stray cat communities in the North Fork Valley.

How to Leave Elsewhere

1.     Start and finish three last paintings the week before you leave.  You created so much these past two months, but you can’t shake the urgency to make more. Time moves differently here.  And the paintings are the only Paonia friends you can put in your trunk for the  drive home.

2.     Perform the closing number of the night for your last karaoke appearance in Paonia. Make sure you channel your feelings on stage by laying on the ground. Work the levels.

3.     Ask for a tattoo from a friend in town who you met performing in the Rocky Horror shadow cast at the Paradise. You want her to poke the Elsewhere vortex into your arm. 

4. She can’t meet up so you’ll have to come back. The Portal to Elsewhere is still open.

5. Take one last nap, because Tomatoes always joins you.

6. Walk down Grand and soak in that Truman Show feeling you get from the so so blue skies and everyone knowing your name.

7.  You’re not alone on the 18 hour drive home, the aloe plants you adopted off the Paonia Message board are riding shotgun. They are planted with rocks from down by the river, near the labyrinth. You and the aloe plants can sing to each other all the way home. (See above playlist)

Madison Rubenstein

Corrin Magditch

I am writing this on the final full day I’m spending at Elsewhere, after a month of calling the Gingerbread house my home. Wow, it’s been quite an experience.

This is the first residency I’ve attended. I made the 36 hour drive from Pennsylvania, stopping outside of Denver to see friends who had their second baby in the bathtub just an hour after I left the mountain they call home. And, thus kicked off an experience that I guess I’ll call my own creative birth (albeit, not as quickly or as physically demanding). 

Being in Paonia was such a blessing. Time seems to run differently here, which is something I am not accustomed to but came to love. I was really happy to slow down, to sit with myself, to relax, and to write. I wrote some of my very best work at Elsewhere and I’m so honored to have time to dedicate to my writing, and to share it with the community.

I applied to Elsewhere with the intention to work on a book of fiction I’ve had in my head for awhile. I’ve only written and published nonfiction in the past, so this was my first time committing to fiction, and to such a large body of work. And, as my day-to-day life is spent writing professionally, I have very little time or brainpower to continue writing when I get home. 

One of the things I’ve read in blog posts from other writers who attended the artist-residency at Elsewhere is that they were initially hit with imposter syndrome. That was something that I was not prepared for. Being in the company of two painters, I felt like I could see their creative process happening in such a tangible way and that they had no idea what I was producing while holed up in the Gingerbread house. But, I did the work and I let the feeling of worthlessness stay in the room. I just didn’t let it have any of the power. I invited it to sit with me and watch me write and eventually it got bored and left.

I can’t thank the Elsewhere founders, staff, and community members enough for creating a lasting impression. I know I will have a lifetime’s worth of stories coming out of this place, and some life long friends as well.