Chatting Offline

I never knew a residency would be a riot of conversation. But sharing three meals a day with twenty other people, who are constantly cycling in and out, means that when you’re not writing, you’re talking. The meals determine the tenor of the talk. Breakfast is gentle, people waking up, yawning and remembering, aloud, what it was like to be a cheerleader in high school.

During lunch, people are moodier, depending on how their work is going. They either glob a bunch of food on their plate and high tail it out of there to continue battling it out in the studio, or they take a seat, grateful for the distraction, bitch about the American cheese on offer, and reminisce about school lunches.

At dinner, everyone’s done for the day. The writing and the art are over; now the work is the conversation. The talk is rarely casual. It’s about how the writing is going, where someone is stuck, how to be honest in relationships, how to create vulnerable characters, what they’ve regretted for the last ten years, and theology: what a poet means when he says a poem is a prayer. Dinner conversations can shake you, a little. People are still composing, but now it’s speech instead of painting or writing. They are quoting themselves without others knowing it or noting someone else’s anecdote for a scene they’ll write tomorrow.

There’s a little sign for “silence” that you can put on the table, if you don’t want to talk to anyone, but I’ve never seen anyone use it.