Back from Residency

I am back from a week at the Pocantico Center in the Hudson Valley, New York, where I spent each day in workshops with Chen Chen, Nick Flynn, and Brian Turner. While I’ve taken countless poetry classes and workshops (mostly online) and been to several writing retreats, this was my first official Residency, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Generally speaking, a writer’s residency offers both a place to stay and dedicated time to write. They are typically something you apply for and are free to participants who are accepted. Sometimes, you also receive meals, a stipend, or travel expenses. In this case, I paid to attend, but many of the participants received scholarships (I didn’t apply for one).

This residency (through the Hudson Valley Writers Center) was less a quiet place to write and more a full week of intensive classes and creative community. If I’m honest, I’d love another week just to think and write and process everything I learned. But as someone without a Master of Fine Arts, it was incredibly valuable to participate in various types of workshop experiences—and I’ve squirreled away even more generative and revision techniques for my own classes (yay!).

Some highlights from this community of writers:

• Making real connections with the instructors. In addition to the workshops, the faculty ate with us, chatted with us, gave a live reading of their work, and were generally just around and available. It was very cool.

  

• Talking with the board members of both The Pocantico Center and Hudson Valley Writers Center. One board member even told me she’d love to attend my book release party for Quietly Wild. These are the sorts of things that can change the trajectory of a writer’s career, even in subtle ways that may be hard to see at first.

• Developing friendships with amazing, witty, intelligent people who care about writing and think the way writers think: in loops of language that circle back to earlier subject matter, in metaphors and symbolic description, in precise vocabulary and long, winding sentences in which revelation happens somewhere along the way.

  

• Hearing your own work differently, seeing how it lands on the ear, or on the mind of someone from another culture or worldview. If you’re lucky, someone will understand you and your work. If you’re very lucky, someone won’t - which will give you a chance to explore clarity, mystery, and intention in your writing.

  

• Listening to other poets’ work enlivens your language and shifts your writing in almost imperceptible ways. You’ll hear resonances. You’ll notice how repetition in a manuscript can both ground and challenge a concept. The things you judge in your own work, you may find yourself admiring in someone else’s.

• Mistakes or breakthrough’s in your manuscript (not to mention blocks you’ve been unable to push through), may begin to reveal themselves between classes, in your dreams, or while you walk around.

• Abstractions and big-picture thinking become easier when people ask you questions. Questions are portals for a body of work.

Some things I might do differently next time:

• Bring earplugs. Turns out I am now an old lady who goes to bed very early and wakes up even earlier.

• Bring more protein. I did a ton of walking around the gorgeous grounds and OMG I was so hungry.

• Take a day to decompress afterward. Maybe a hotel before heading home? Just to journal, nap, and stare at trees.

• Bring copies of my books. I cannot believe I didn’t think to do this—it would’ve been the perfect chance to share.

• Bring my fancy camera. I wish I’d taken even better photos of the place and the amazing people I met.

  

All of this reminded me why I love being in community so much. Conversations with other writers, whether on a retreat, in a residency, or through a screen, shapes the work in ways we can’t always anticipate, but it also shapes our lives and how we think. It reminds us of our biases and perspectives and opens the world just a bit more every time. I am incredibly grateful for this experience and for being in community here, with all of you.

What’s coming up next?

If you’ve been craving a structured, supportive environment to gather your poems and shape them into a small but mighty manuscript, I’d love to have you in Chapbook Summer. It’s a 5-week class for poets who are ready to move from scattered drafts to something cohesive, confident, and ready to submit. We’ll talk about revision, arrangement, titles, themes, and the deep satisfaction of making something that you can hold.

Spots are filling, and I’d love for you to join us!!

Chapbook Summer: a 5 week mini-manuscript class

Alix Klingenberg

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May 31

Make something small and wild and wholly yours

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Or you can just register here: Chapbook Summer! Paid subscribers get $50 off with a code that can be find in the post above! Or you can always message me to get the code or ask any questions you might have.

With a tired mind and a happy heart,
Alix