#34. Distraction

The historic March 2023 nor’easter at MacDowell

You may have noticed I’ve been away for six months—“away” from writing newsletters, at least.

For three of those months, from the beginning of March until June, I was in residence, attending remote and luxurious artists’ residencies in the northeastern United States — at MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire and Monson Arts in Monson, ME — each of which in its own way cultivates an atmosphere of monastic focus and disconnection from the “outside world.” At MacDowell, artists’ studios have no internet and poor cell service; only the library has reliable wifi. In Monson, pop. ~500, there is no cell phone service whatsoever, and one is encouraged to assimilate into the Cabot Cove milieu of small-town simplicity and boat idolatry. Both residencies are located in bucolic Thoreauvian environments of forests, lakes, and meadows, which further disincentivize prompt email responses.

While in residence, I was working on chapters of the book project that shares its title with this newsletter. There remains much to do, and the book is still far from drafted; I would not even say I completely drafted the chapters in question. But I found these residencies to be productive of writing, reading, and thinking.

Artists’ residencies are designed for this sort of thing: to provide artists with uninterrupted time to create, and to build in-person communities across disciplines. They tend to follow the model established by MacDowell, the country’s oldest (the notion of an artists’ retreat first gained traction in the region as the “Peterborough Idea”). They work largely by subtraction — by reducing the things that residents have to think about during the day. We are fed good, healthy food, given workspaces and equipment and sometimes cash, provided with optional edutainments in the form of peer lectures and performances. At good residencies, you do not pay a cent for the privilege; they run on donations and endowments. (Monson’s was the product of a foundation established by a Maine woman following her acrimonious divorce from a philandering founder of Intel. The foundation currently has around $200 million to play with.)

Residencies are not utopias. The workers who keep them running often seem to enjoy their jobs and value the work they do, which is to provide space for art to happen, but residencies are nevertheless reliant on other people’s labor, a classic utopia-puncturing discovery. Nor do they exist fully outside larger economic and social forces— such barons of empire as Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan helped to fund the construction of the initial studios at MacDowell; some residencies are notoriously mismanaged and drama-filled, others known to abuse workers and residents alike — nevertheless, in residence, it’s easy to speak around the dinner table in utopian terms. This was my second stint at MacDowell and it’s hard not to think of it at the happiest place on earth.

They were also opportunities to continue the project I’ve set myself over the post-pandemic years of becoming more focused, attentive, and present, on the one hand, and less anxious and work-obsessed, on the other. Some of these habits were already fairly ingrained. I meditate more or less daily. I abide by the Pomodoro technique to organize my working day. I practice — and for many years now have practiced — a “screen Shabbat” (avoiding phones/computers/screens from Friday to Saturday night) and have worked to reduce my screen time the other days of the week.

This year, I’ve tried to further reshape my life around reducing distractions in my work, social life, and consumption habits. MacDowell and Monson gave me some space to think about the ways my brain works to defeat itself (with fears, anxieties, desires, ancillary work-related tasks)…these are observations of long standing, but the occasion of a ~three-month retreat allowed me to consider them anew, among some unrelated, currently redacted, life-changing events. As a result, I am writing less for instant online consumption and writing more slowly and privately (and writing more longhand, too), and spending more time not writing at all and instead engaging in other offline pursuits (e.g. parties).

I’ve also come to recognize (and reflexively pity) in other people — students, friends, peers — the same lack of attention, the same addiction to phones and online life. Their art/writing/work suffers from an inability not only to focus but to de-focus — to sit and be bored, and in being bored, to let things happen internally that cannot happen under conditions of constant low-level stimulation. I wonder whether we aren’t being hard enough on ourselves, or honest enough about the connection between what we spend all day doing and our ability to think, or how much time scrolling takes up in our lives, how many books go unread for a lost hour or two each day. I know I’m not saying anything new (we have all read the Jenny Odell). This is just to add the hopefully consoling personal remark that repairing my ability to be present has been the work of some years and has been so far worth the effort, if only for my mental quietude and happiness, and more generally that I believe that the experiences of daily boredom and idleness, and the obverse states of focus and mindfulness, are critically endangered psychic species.

Yes I saw this on Twitter, how ironic!

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Finally, the requisite professional and personal bragging, a bumper crop from the first half of 2023:

—In May, I won a Peabody Award for Reeducated and “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State.” It’s The New Yorker’s first-ever Peabody Award (mine, too). I previously won an Emmy Award — also The New Yorker’s first — for the same project.

—I published a short story, “Wiesbaden,” in American Short Fiction. It’s an old story, drafted in 2011 and revised sometime around 2015, a lightly fictionalized episode from the life of Dostoevsky. Interesting to me mostly as a piece of writing that came out of my transition from fiction to nonfiction…

—The essay I published last fall in Virginia Quarterly Review, “Shadows, Tokens, Spring,” has been selected for this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing, available in November.

—I received a Lando Award from the de Groot Foundation to support The Fugitive World. This is a new grant for migration-related writing in any genre. Well worth applying if you have a relevant project.

—The Dial, where I’m helping here and there as an editor, has published six issues so far this year. A few pieces I was excited to work on include stories on microfinance in Cambodia, reparations in Cape Town, and unexploded ordnances in the North Sea, as well as an oral history of a citizenship program for Sephardic Jews.

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xo
Ben