The MacDowell Colony | The Gift of Time and Space

Editors’ note: The following is an extended version of the story that appeared in Yankee’s July/August 2019 issue.

“We are given tacit permission to become foolish children at MacDowell. We are given the time in which to daydream—exactly what we were punished for when we were children.” —Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, author

“Those two months in that cabin at MacDowell rekindled a creative fire I thought I might have lost forever.” —Joyce Maynard, author

At the MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest and most famous retreat for artists, situated a mile north of downtown Peterborough, New Hampshire, a leafy path leads to a place called “the amphitheater.” Granite benches face west through a stand of trees, and the view opens to the broad expanse of Mount Monadnock. If you visit the colony on the second Sunday in August for MacDowell Medal Day, the only day each year that this cloistered community opens to the public, walk down into the amphitheater. Think about those who have sat here, and what has been given to the world from the 32 cabin studios spread among these meadows and forests, home as well to bobcat, fox, fisher, and bear.

Years ago, founder Marian MacDowell would greet new arrivals by saying, “It will take you a week to get used to it. After that, the work will pour out. Wait and see.” Indeed. On these grounds, Thornton Wilder wrote his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (“I would write a page,” he said in a letter, “and then go out and walk around in the sunlight until I had stopped crying”). Leonard Bernstein composed his Mass here; he said that in winter his studio was so quiet he could hear snow falling from upper branches to those below. Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring was nurtured here. Willa Cather came here. So, too, did James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Jonathan Franzen, and Michael Chabon. More than 8,000 creative souls—writers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, photographers, and cartoonists—have stayed where Marian MacDowell, a concert pianist, and her composer husband, Edward, first began to nurture artists, back in 1907. (Marian grew the colony through grit and resolve after Edward died a year later.) To date, MacDowell alumni have been awarded 79 Pulitzer Prizes, 30 National Book Awards, nine Grammys, and eight Oscars. And while famous names will always catch our eye, the colony’s mission equally touches those more obscure who also burn with talent and desire. “Nobody cares if you have a Tony Award or it’s your first play,” says David Macy, the longtime resident director. “There are people here age 80, and people at 25. People who have many awards, and people who have yet to get a first book deal. But once here, they are at the same place at the same time. They all have to disentangle themselves. They usually arrive exhausted. And many have to fight feeling like a fraud. There’s the feeling that the studio you are in was used by a giant. At dinner, you realize the woman sitting across from you won a Pulitzer. You think, Do I belong here? Just today, a writer told me that when he saw Richard Yates had stayed in his studio, he got chills. It happens all the time like that. But that goes away. “The food brings people together. There is a constantly changing cast of characters around the dinner table, and ideas are exchanged, and it is fuel for the fire that starts work all over again the next morning. The culture says we are all of a piece. Everybody goes to the studio by themselves and comes back on the same paths.”

Each new arrival, or “fellow,” learns there is only one unbreakable rule at MacDowell: No one visits an artist’s studio without an invitation. On this crisp October day, I have been invited to the studios of a journalist and two playwrights, who were among the mere 316 to be accepted last year from 2,300 applicants. While Medal Day allows visitors to wander through the studios and chat with the artists, that time is shared with hundreds of others; this was a chance to get a glimpse into what it’s like to live so intensely. As Macy says of the MacDowell experience, “The last time you were taken care of to this degree is when you were a child.”

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Clair MacDougall craves quiet. It’s as foreign to her as a new language, though: The Australian freelance journalist has lived in Liberia for the past six years, writing about war, social upheaval, and Ebola for The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and Smithsonian, among others. She immersed herself in one of the poorest places on Earth, a sprawling peninsula in the Liberian capital of Monrovia called West Point, where about 100,000 people live amid violence and desperation. She filled dozens of notebooks with stories of those displaced by civil war, some of whom were children forced to become soldiers or prostitutes. She is here at MacDowell to wrestle her words into a book.

On this cool morning, MacDougall has wrapped her neck in a turquoise scarf, her long brown hair pulled back in a bun. Light pours in through a window by the desk in her studio. A bed sits against a back wall. She arrived at MacDowell for a seven-week stay only a matter of days ago. Her goal, she says, is simply to complete a few chapters, get a sense of the narrative, and figure out how much more reporting she’ll need when she returns to Liberia. I tell her it seems impossible to imagine a more dramatic culture shift from her journalist’s world to this rural studio. “I needed a chance to think clearly,” she says. “In Monrovia it can be very difficult to get peace and quiet. Within the first few days, I noticed the difference.” MacDougall is also seeking a chance to catch her breath. “Being an independent journalist, you’re thinking always of your next assignment. Just how to keep going and surviving. You don’t have peace of mind. “I need to put what I’ve seen these last six years in context,” she continues. “I need time and space for that to happen. I’m adjusting to be out of survival mode and be more meditative and reflective. This experience is very rare. Sometimes I  just walk in the woods and I’m able to think more meaningfully about the work.” She looks around her studio and out the window to the trees beyond. “I value the silence,” she says. “I see this space as a sanctuary.”

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James Anthony Tyler is relaxed and eager to talk. This is his final day at the colony, and soon he’ll be packing and saying good-byes before catching a ride to the airport. He’s a playwright from Brooklyn, and a successful one—his Artney Jackson premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival last summer—but he admits that his month here did test his confidence while working on a new, untitled play, which revolves around the parents of a mass shooter. “The community needs someone to blame and the most obvious targets are the parents, who also blame themselves,” he says. “It’s been a struggle to figure out the right way to honor the truthfulness of this story.”

What helped, he says, was being around others who were also wrestling with their work. Just as important, he adds, “you hear what artists are working on in so many disciplines. You talk about process. And you realize how processes are different and also similar. It can be exciting and also scary. It’s a different world here at MacDowell.” When Tyler first arrived, the quiet unnerved him. “You’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s so dark—that was terrifying.” It took about two weeks, but he did get comfortable, he says. “The other night I walked back in the dark, and I was relaxed. I realized that I knew nothing was going to happen.” Back at home in Brooklyn, he says, “I have my phone at my desk. Texts are going off. I check email. But there’s no phone or Wi-Fi here in my studio. Usually you have to fit your everyday life to creating art. Here, art is your everyday life. “Someone reminded me that writing is not always just writing. It’s talking. Taking a walk. Not just being at the desk. For me, it’s been about being with other artists and being forced to try and make the work happen.” He smiles when talking about doubtinghimself. “Yesterday I went to an artist’s studio to look at her work, and we ended up talking about being open to the story when it wants to come and having faith that I’ve done it before and it will happen again. It’s just not as fast as I want it to happen. Hopefully I’ll get to the other side of it soon.” Then Tyler asks if I have a Sharpie. He has known from his first day that Ta-Nehisi Coates, a National Book Award winner and one of the most influential African-American writers in the country, once sat where he now sits, rested on the bed where he rests. Leaning against one wall of the studio are a number of pine tablets—which everyone here calls “tombstones”—each filled with signatures of artists who lived and worked here before. One of the final creative acts that he will do on this day is take down a tombstone and carefully add “James Anthony Tyler.”

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When Jiehae Park sits at her desk, her window opens onto a forest flush with fall color.This is the second time the New York playwright has been to MacDowell. “When I come here,” she says, “it’s a slow shedding of all the noise of everyday life that builds up and interferes with this magical thing of creativity. It’s mysterious and, at its best, just happens.”

After her first residency, she did what would be unthinkable to most urbanites. “Back in New York, I canceled my Internet,” she says. “If I had to use it, I would go to the library. It was great.”(She confides that eventually “the real world intruded” and she did sign up for new Internet service. “But I lasted four months. And I wouldn’t have known what it felt like otherwise.”) Park is working on a new play, a very ambitious project that she calls “my passion.” It’s also the same play, it turns out, that she came here to write four years ago. “It was too big [back then],” she says. “I ended up writing a completely different play…. There was another artist here who saw that I was really stressed about my big project. He said, ‘Just stop and do nothing. Just be here.’ I took his advice. I put my laptop down for three days. And then I was walking around my studio one night and I thought, Oh, this could be a play.” She smiles. “ And I wrote it in four days.” I ask what she remembers most after she leaves. “The generosity,” she says. “This place takes care of artists in the most thoughtful and loving way. It allows those of us lucky enough to be here to only think about our work. We’re all trying to do this crazy thing of creating what didn’t exist before.”

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Of all the traditions that have endured at the colony, none is more revered than the lunchtime picnic baskets that are delivered daily, each placed gently on the doorstep of a studio. And no person has been more revered than Blake Tewksbury, who since 1980 has looked after the artists and whose delivery of the lunch baskets embodies the care bestowed upon them.

My visit to MacDowell ends with this friendly, rumpled man, who sits down with me in Colony Hall, the gathering place where breakfast and dinner is served, and where everyone lingers and chats. He tells me a story that seems to get at the heart of a place that few of us will ever know, but one that has touched millions. “There was a colonist here and she was struggling, and when I took her the basket she’d open the door and I’d always encourage her,” he says. “I gave her a book, The Little Engine That Could, and each day I’d say to her quietly, ‘I think I can, I think I can.’ She eventually eased into the work. “And one day we were all at the amphitheater, and the mountain was purple—it was almost a religious experience to see it, so simple and beautiful. And before she left she gave me a painting of that scene, and it’s one of my treasured possessions in my home.“We get to see the victories and defeats,” he says, “and we are privileged to have these experiences with these people. It makes for a rich life for each of us. A very rich life.”

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About MacDowell Medal Day

Every year since 1960, the MacDowell Colony has celebrated the arts in the national landscape by awarding the MacDowell Medal in the Arts. The day of the ceremony is one of the most unique free events in New England: On the second Sunday in August, the colony is open to the public, and visitors can meet the artists and see what they are producing. Each studio becomes, in essence, a gallery in a sprawling museum. The medal recognizes the lifetime achievement of someone whose work has influenced artists in all fields. Past winners include Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder, architect I.M. Pei, novelist Toni Morrison, and filmmaker David Lynch. This year’s MacDowell Medal Day, on August 11, honors the conceptual artist Charles Gaines. (The introductory speech by author Michael Chabon, chairman of the MacDowell board, is worth the visit in and of itself.) This event makes clear that enduring art not only lives in the past but also is being created now, today, before our eyes. To learn more, go to macdowellcolony.org. For a behind-the-scenes look at MacDowell, watch season three of Weekends with Yankee, which visits the colony in episode four, “The Arts.” For details, go to weekendswithyankee.com.