Research, Intuition, and Lies: Applying to a Writing Residency

Research, Intuition, and Lies: Applying to a Writing Residency by Sandra Gail Lambert

I'm worried about not having adventures anymore. I tell myself that one can make an adventure of anything. It's a mindset. My wife and I don't need to travel to a faraway place that costs so much and risks an airline breaking my wheelchair. We can just go on a hike near our house. Even if I've hiked that trail over and over again since 1989. It's always different. Adventure is in the mind. I just need to open mine.

Nope. No. Not the same. Instead, I research artist residencies—the type that are funded fellowships and sometimes even feed you. Spending six weeks in a mansion chockfull of innovative, productive artists, with the people who cooked us three meals a day, and a staff who changed my sheets once a week was transformative to my writing. There was that month surrounded by the salt smell of aqua waters, and three times I've been given three weeks at a residency only a two hour drive from my house. Its walkways wind in a careful way through an endangered coastal scrub habitat.

Behind each of these acceptances are years of many, so many rejections. And each application can cost forty dollars. That adds up. But it is also true that even the rejected applications have made me a better writer. Which is always my goal. Just that. To become a better writer. So I think of the fee as a reasonable cost for my very own, don't have to leave home, writing intensive. That's why I apply to at least one residency or fellowship a year. (Especially one that seems so "out of my league" that I'm embarrassed to tell anyone I tried.)

Here's how it works. They'll want a resume, CV, list of accomplishments, whatever. Which is, if you think about it, our past. Early on, I always applied as a fiction writer. But one year I read over the resume and noticed that these memoir thingies I'd been writing now and again, they were getting published a lot more than my fiction. And I liked being published. So I wrote more creative nonfiction (as I now knew to call it) and more was published and my resume looked better and better. From then on I applied for fellowships in the nonfiction category. And sometimes I was accepted. Updating a resume changed the trajectory of my writing.

Another part of the application is the writing sample. This is our present. Within the parameters of their page limits and a probably flawed intuition of what the anonymous judges want to read, I have to make a decision the best I can. Assessing my own work from a perspective outside of myself isn't easy or comfortable. Yet, this is often the most important part of the application. Sometimes, such as for an NEA Fellowship, it can be the only information the judges have access to. I have to say to myself, "these ten pages here, they tell a story and are my best writing, writing that has worth in the world." It's no small thing to make this declaration.

Finally, a lot of places want at least a paragraph if not a full on essay about what you plan to accomplish if you happen to be accepted for their residency. I'm filling out an application now (in August) for a residency at least ten months away. This future is unknown to me and to many (most? all?) writers. Both the residency people and you accept that your reply is a fantasy. But I try to write this invention of the near future with certainty and hopefully in a lyrical and compelling manner. For past applications, sometimes, this creation has become truth. It turns out having to let my mind play with possibility is another way to make my writing better.

Here's another truth. Sometimes I just lie. In the past month I've filled out applications for Storyknife in Homer and National Park Artist-in-Residence Programs at Zion and Acadia. Storyknife and Acadia say they’re accessible. I don’t ask if Zion is. Better to find out if I’m accepted and then they can figure it out. It’s a Federal program so there’s a chance they will. The writing sample I choose is an essay recently published in a fancy journal. I mention more than once about my upcoming book from a respected press. I wax on about how I'd use the residency as an opportunity to complete a collection of travel essays that "braid together the glorious exploration of unknown landscapes with the inherent ableist dangers of moving through the world as a wheelchair user." Too much, right? I'll tone it down. And I do have plans to write these essays, so that's not the lie.

The truth is that by next summer I want to have a completed draft of a big, fat science fiction space opera of a novel. But I can't put this in the application. It seems the way I've chased the successes in creative nonfiction has left other writing behind. I don't have the type or bulk of publications in fiction that residencies look for. And what they're looking for is literary fiction, not what is called "genre" writing.

But I'm old now. I want to write what thrills me. And when I was a young reader, my first loves were science fiction novels and short stories. Podkayne of Mars, The Left Hand of Darkness, Dune, Picnic on Paradise, Theodore Sturgeon's "The Green Monkey." These are what I aspire to but, you know, without the sexism, fat-hating, racism, and other creepy stuff.

The applications are submitted. I remember that a writing friend applied for a residency in Reykjavika few years ago that had a call out for disabled writers. I could get myself to Iceland. I email her for details.   

Audio Version: