What’s an artist residency? It’s a place (think the famed Yaddo and MacDowell out east) where artists and writers go to shut out the rest of the world and zone in completely on their creative projects.  I recently had the extreme pleasure of doing an artist residency at the Ragdale Foundation, an artist residency program in Lake Forest, Illinois, and, I’m thrilled to say, finished three previously languishing stories for my short story collection.

Ragdale’s been around since 1976. It was founded by poet Alice Judson Hayes, the granddaughter of Arts and Crafts architect Howard Van Doren Shaw who built the beautiful, spacious place in 1897 as a summer home for his family. Thirty miles north of Chicago, it “overlooks 50 acres of prairie, now hosts over 200 emerging and established artists of all disciplines each year.” It has 8 writers studios (decked out with porches, libraries, copious writing desks) , two art studios (good light, spacious), and one composer studio complete with piano and minimal equipment.

Some famous alumni are Audrey Niffenegger, Wendy McClure, Jaqueline Michard, Sara Paretsky, Alice Sebold, Curtis White and Sandi Wisenberg.  Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay were friends of the Shaws and are said to have attended plays there.

The nitty gritty: Not everyone gets in.  You have to fill out an application, write an artist statement and get a few people to recommend you for the program. Once you’re in, it costs $25/day (a meager fee considering that you’re provided with all meals plus housekeeping). Financial aid and fellowships are also available. Artist residencies include your own studio, access to a full kitchen stocked with breakfast and lunch stuffs, and full (delicious) chef-cooked dinner  every night with the other 11 residents. What’s funny is that although you go there ostensibly to be alone and completely in your thoughts, one of the best parts of the residency for many ends up being those lively dinners with 11 other people who’ve been creatively engaged all day, just like you.

After dinner, you can sneak away back to your studio with no guilt, or linger to discuss art and ideas with other residents.  (Among the spectacular residents in my session were a children’s book author writing a kiddie book on the life of the Buddha, a blind poet/performer who was there with his amazing seeing-eye dog, and Alice Hayes’ granddaughter Ramona, who wrote this wonderful story based on her grandmother and who I’m pretty sure I know from another life.)

Initially, having all that free time can send people into freak-out mode, so resident adviser Regin Ingloria wisely warned us that we might just sleep or spaz for a day or two (I did both) but would soon acclimate and start working. He was right: we all made more progress than we even thought possible-a groovy reminder that the human brain is innately creative, but that sometimes we need time and space away from practical concerns to get in that flow. (Incidentally, that’s Ragdale’s motto and the phrase on their t-shirts: “Time and Space”).

Ragdale is more than just a residency program; increasingly, their staffers Leslie Brown, Susan Page Tillett, and Regin Ingloria are holding public events and readings to step up Ragdale’s community involvement. (On May 10, Scott Turow will be doing an event for them; email l.brown@ragdale.org to register). So, I urge you: Get involved! Go to a Ragdale event! Get on their mailing list! But most of all: Apply! That novel’s not going to write itself. Photos from my stay are below, but if that doesn’t compel you to get moving on that novel/art project, this link might.

Stewie on novel writing

Literago is on vacation for two weeks –

– but we’ll see you on March 7th, brightly-eyed and bushily-tailed.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Go to the Artifice release reading on February 27th!
Limited edition screenprints! Theatrical readings! Free beer!
All info here.

And this Saturday, February 20th, both will read at the free Myopic Poetry Series, curated by Larry Sawyer. The magic starts at 7pm, Myopic Bookstore (1564 N Milwaukee Avenue). Check the series website for future poets — including Matvei Yankelevich, whose book on Kharms totally rules. (img src)

The magazine, sponsored by the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute and edited by Alyssa Martinez and Mark Schettler, is brave and graceful and not lame. Some of the work it publishes is of SAIC folks, and some isn’t. In Preparation is in print and online, too.

The opening shindig starts Friday, February 19th at 6pm and goes until 11pm at HungryMan Gallery (2135 Rockwell). It’s free, with a suggested donation of $1 for your copy of the journal.

There’ll be readings from a lot of people (Andrew Gamble, Emma Furman, Mink Smithsonian, Dan Kugler, Alyssa Martinez, Alexandra Lukens, Tyler David Sherman, Peter O’Leary, Rebecca Cooling-Mallard, Molly Shea, Wendy Spacek, and others), and art from a lot of others (Garret Durant, Dain Oh, Evan Conley, Arend de Gruyter-Helfer, Ben Bertin, Eric Kaepplinger, Benjamin Love, Robb Todd, Juho Heikkinen, B. Ingrid Olson, Mikhail D. Poloskin, Raychill Winterton, Matthew Sairio, and Robin Juan).

Come support! Congrats, friends.

Then again, children’s lit is, of course, lousy with farms. There are enough tractors and cluck-clucks and benevolent, overall-clad farmers to make you long for anything BUT the pastoral setting for your story-time travels. I have spent the past year of my life mooing and neighing and baaing, surely more than I have in the past thirty-odd years combined, and there’s more to come. But have I begun hiding all farm tales behind the couch? Nah. I’m cool with farms.

Here we have two groovy farm-related books, one new, one published a few years ago.

Jarret J. Krosoczka’s PUNK FARM tells the story of some rockin’ farm animals—cow on drums, sheep on vocals, chicken on keyboard, goat on bass, and pig on guitar—who kick out the jams all night long. As the band prepares for tonight’s big show, their farm animal fans line up around the barn, waiting to show IDs to the bouncers (that would be the horsies). The band is a big hit, belting out—you guessed it—a rendition of “Old MacDonald,” and ending with a true-to-life, “Thank you, Wisconsin!” The next day, Farmer Joe is bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to work; the animal rockers are much more bleary.

The paintings are lively, colorful, and cartoonish in a child-pleasing way, and while I don’t know about your kid, mine snaps up any opportunity to belt “EE-I-EE-I-O!!” repeatedly. But I can’t help feeling that the book misses some great opportunities. There are so many silly directions you could go with the conceit of a farm animal rock band, right? Instead of much of the story being devoted to several verses of that familiar song, the band could’ve cranked out farm-takes on some classics, hung out backstage with some pretty heifers, and slamdanced (”Careful with the horns, dude!”). And considering that this book came out in 2005 and features a bovine percussionist, I was pretty surprised that a “More cowbell” joke didn’t show up as a wink-wink moment for the parents. And you kind of have to wonder why the concert wasn’t billed “LIVESTOCK”…and so on. Still, it’s a very fun concept, and not just another baby-animals-on-display title.

A totally different sort of farm music can be found in the just-released OUR FARM: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary, by Maya Gottfried and fine artist Robert Rahway Zakanitch. Gottfried imagines the voices of various animals, then lets them narrate the sweet, mostly free verse poems that make up this book. Take the beginning of “Freedom!”, by J.D., a piglet:

I’m free!
And I’m running, and I’m running,
and oh, I can feel the sun on my snout.
There goes a fence post!
(…)

Or this haiku, by Barnaby the rabbit:

See me in the grass?
Maybe I will hop to food…
Or go sniff pansies.

Barnaby, J.D. and the other animal “poets” on display in this lovely book (the lamb on the cover makes me swoon a little every time I look at it) are real-life residents of Farm Sanctuary, a shelter for neglected and abused animals, and a portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to the organization, which “works to end cruelty to farm animals.” Gottfried captures the animals’ characters—shy, gentle, twitchy, docile, frisky, playful, wise, and so on—in her poems, and their personalities seem equally realized in Zakanitch’s watercolor and ink paintings, which blend into and are accompanied by rough pencil sketches on bright white pages, bringing to mind a young artist’s sketchbook full of inspired doodles dancing with more finished pieces. The whole book feels carefree and springy, artful in a loosey-goosey (sorry) way. (I will not be at all surprised to find it on prominent display at Anthropologie.) It’s nice, too, to see farm animals’ genuine nature represented—the wary eye of a rabbit, the curious gaze of a goat—rather than the ubiquitous anthropomorphic take. I’ll be reading this one to Thalia, living vicariously through the warmth its pages exude, until we can get out and take some farm tours of our own later this spring. . .

Visit the book’s Facebook page.

To wrap up its muchly-praised theatrical run of Magical Thinking, Court Theatre presents The Center Did Not Hold, a (free!) reading of treasures magpied from two of Didion’s most badly-assed collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. The reading, which starts at 4:30 this Sunday, February 14th — Valentine’s Day! — features Hyde Park glitterati like Mary Beth Fisher, Chris Sullivan, Sean Graney, Kaitlyn Bird, Christopher Piatt, Heidi Coleman, Chloe Johnston, and Paul Durica, phew. The show’s at Court Theatre, 5535 S Ellis Ave, in Hyde Park — bring your lover, then hit the Point.

Artists featured in “The Following Are Pages Torn From Our Most Favorite Imaginary Children’s Books” include Ben Tanzer and Dom Holmes, Jill Summers and Andrew Thompson, Zach Dodson and Allison Burque, Joe Meno and Cody Hudson, and James Kennedy and James Kennedy’s younger self. The pages themselves feature poppies, a dolphin parade, and something called a “squichon.”

The show is free and runs through the end of the month. Josh hopes to make it an ongoing series — The Torn Pages Show — and also to make a coloring book from tonight’s glory. To help, visit his Kickstarter page.

My verdict? Ridiculously awesome (ridicu-awesome). You can read my interview with him here and the Bookslut interview with him right here.