Residencies: Can You Pickle That?

My husband Erwin enjoys taking long train rides when he travels to his hometown in Romania. He says it makes more emotional sense for journeys to be long, enduring ordeals. That hopping on a four-hour-flight dodges the greater truth of how far Romania is from Germany. And how far Erwin is from the boy that grew up in a tight-knit Saxon community outside of Sibiu.

Given this lens on travel, my trip today has been perfect. A winter storm hit the East Coast this morning, pelting us with ice pellets: not quite hail, not quite rain, not quite snow. You’ll never make it out of Lynchburg, everyone said, including my taxi driver. Sure enough, the flight was delayed and then we sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes. Taking off was as hard for the airplane as it was for me.

It aches to leave the kudzu-covered telephone poles, the hazy outline of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the warm breath of a Southern winter. To leave the States, in general, always hurts a little: I don’t have to work so hard here to translate myself, and I love having American friends and family in the same time zone.

More than anything, I’ll miss the seamlessness of my writing life with the rest of my life. I’ve often struggled with the loneliness of the long-distance fiction writer: not just living abroad, away from my mother tongue, but how unbearably private and secluded the work can feel. During the last month, I enjoyed interrupting long stretches of writing with conversation, ping pong, singing, talking, dining, and drinking with my fellow residents. Often these social breaks would help me solve a problem a thorny scene was presenting. I already deeply miss the faces and voices of the artists I came to know and care for so quickly.

I feel slightly panicked about how to preserve the momentum the residency inspired. Was it the daily walk? The buckets of potatoes we consumed? Looking out at horses from my writing desk (see photo above)? Ping pong? Before I try to talk Erwin into buying a ping pong table or moving out to a horse farm in Brandenburg, I guess it’s crucial to admit that the air of a residency is rarefied: sinless to try and replicate. But on my long trip home to Berlin, (the flight took off, after all), I’d like to bring a few things back from my residency routine, even if I can’t pickle the whole experience. Such that the fiction I’m working on never quite leaves my consciousness, like a song I can’t get out of my head, whose chorus keeps stubbornly resurfacing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYey8ntlK_E