Ginger Strand @ Macdowell

When Ginger Strand told me she was going away to the Macdowell Colony for the month of August to work on the followup to her excellent debut novel, Flight, I begged her to send me some sort of dispatch I run here, like my friend N.M. Kelby's letter from Sewanee. So I was pretty excited to see Ginger's email turn up in my inbox last night.

Artists! Woods! Shooting stars! That is the fabulous concurrence to which I was recently exposed here at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where I am happily spending August.

Somehow word spread about the meteor showers. Rumor flitted from table to table at dinner, hot on the heels of the news that a certain novelist had been given extra sausages. Stories of stellar resplendence rolled with the 3-ball down the pool table. No one could quite explain it, but the attempts were creative: earth had rolled into a projectile meteor belt; the planet was tilting on its axis toward cosmic chaos, one of the gods had ashed a cigarette. In any case, there were shooting stars up there, and several of us decided to go to the golf course across the street to watch them. By 10 p.m., the appointed congregation time, word had spread further and the outing had grown--in the way colony outings often do--to the size of a Roman legion. We waited for last minute bathroom runs, then phalanxed onto the darkened road.

Immediate controversy arose over the use of flashlights. One of our number--a fabulously gung-ho sculptor--had vowed not to use her flashlight unless absolutely necessary. MacDowell has been impressively resistant to lighting, and as everyone knows, the woods are lovely, dark and deep. Going lightless can be challenging. However, one can usually follow either the hump of the rounded gravel roads, or the thin, jagged line of sky that parallels it, finding guidance, as humans will, either above or below.

In the absence of light, however, a Greek chorus of doom began summoning the specters of werewolves, ax-murderers and passing Volvos, and a few flashlights were duly, if grudgingly, engaged.

On the golf course we skittered about like electrons, convening on what seemed to be the fourth green. One of the privileges of a MacDowell residency is a complimentary country club membership. No colonist has ever been known to use it. Our knowledge of the country club begins and ends with fact that its bar, while laughably cheap, closes at sundown, a fact that causes a periodic rustle of malcontent not unlike the whispering in the tops of the local white pines.

The green appeared to be wet. Hesitation overtook the collective. Our joint vision of reclining on the grass while stargazing grew as fuzzy as a pre-cable television. Luckily, someone remembered: We're artists! We're untamed and reckless in our pursuit of Intense Experience! With great relief, everyone instantly dropped and assumed what yoga calls "corpse pose."

The stars hove into view. There were many of them.

"Look at the huge one," someone said.

"That's an airplane."

"I see the Big Dipper!"

"Where?"

"Over there, by the ice cream cone." Cuisine had been somewhat spa-like of late, and visions of ice cream and pizza sprouted like periodic mushrooms in our ranks.

"Which is the north star?"

"The dog star?"

"The north star."

"I can't find Orion."

"It's over by the ice cream cone."

I didn't see the ice cream cone. I did see a rather large martini glass with a large glowing olive, but this too may have been a kind of cosmic wishful thinking.

"Which are the Pleiades?"

"That cluster of stars over there."

"But that one's moving."

"It's a satellite."

"The big thing that's sort of red and green?"

"No, that's an airplane."

After a few moments, it became apparent that none of us, with the possible exception of one painter with a dark past as a science nerd, had the slightest idea of where we were in the universe. In fact, many of us had little idea where we were in New Hampshire, and I, who had twice wandered for hours in the woods on the way to my studio, barely knew where I was at MacDowell.

"Is that red thing Venus?"

"The airplane?"

"No that star thing, to the left and up from the ice cream cone."

"Look, there goes one!"

The meteor streaked overhead, a tiny spark, a daub of gold paint leaving a watery trail down the canvas. We all shut up and lay there, side by side on our backs, painters and photographers and writers and filmmakers and composers and sculptors. The stars and satellites and airplanes and planets winked back at us. We were lost, but we were lost together.

Wanna read more from Ginger, about how reality can inform fiction? Okay then.
photo: Orianna Riley