Residency as Instruction Manual for Self

Difficult to believe that I'm already in the final few days of my residency at The Museum of Loss and Renewal. More than anything else, more than the list of things I thought I 'might' do while I was here, more than the pile of great creative nonfiction books I have read, or the quiet nights of sleep, or the routines that I have fallen into, more than anything, my time as a resident here has taught me how to really listen to my own process and writing / research needs. 

Having undertaken (often remote) residencies in the past, this stay has had a different focus and came as part of an intensive time of academic research. This posed its own challenge in terms of what I needed to achieve while I was here and the expectations I had set on myself. But in the ways I have come to know, though had long forgotten, a period of residency usually offers me exactly what I am not expecting.

My weeks here have seen a transition from summer to autumn and with the shift came a slowly-rising awareness that all of my questions--about how to juggle research projects, or how to juggle research and creative writing, and especially how to juggle a writing-teaching-research-job and the rest of my life--an awareness that all aspects of these questions are exactly the wrong set of questions to ask myself. 

The process of being here allowed me to begin to hear the frantic grappling for answers, the insane pressure that this grappling was bringing. It was quite profound to just sit with the feeling of having been, and of being, in the midst of some type of circus act where everything is up in the air and cycling through / around / over my head. And then it all just...stopped.

Instead of worrying so much about outputs on my residency weeks, I went back to a statement by my artistic collaboration partner Martha Cook who says: 'It may not happen now but it may be the seed.' 

I realised that if all I do is worry about dropping one of the too-many pieces of my life, and continually worry about when and how I will finish projects, I will not likely have room to breathe, or to live, or to look around me at the seeds and roots that I have nurtured and that will grow when I give them space to do so. This has been really helpful in taking the pressure off. It allowed me to explore my research in a different way, much like the early stages of my PhD when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say, what I could say about what I'm passionate about: creative writing, poetry, language.

It is enough to sit with this new awareness, an instruction manual I have found for myself, as I begin to prepare to return to the rest of my life, to the world outside.