On Friday, I return to New York City, to Brooklyn after 5 weeks on Captiva Island in Florida. The Rauschenberg Residency has been an enormous gift to my mind, my spirit, my writing and creativity.  The staff is so open and helpful and skillful and happy to be working in a place that is all about allowing artists to make whatever work they can while here.  I stayed in the Print House with an International Artist , Minouk Lim,

who has started to make huge waves in the art world.  I met dance theater people who have worked or known people I’ve known from the theater and dance world. One of the artist is disabled but makes super huge sculptures.  One of the writers here was working on the first major book on Norman Lewis.  Every residency I’ve done reminds me of how many amazing poets, painters, dancers, composers, actors, scholars, etc there are and how this culture allows a few of us to be part of places designed to take care of our needs, our desires.  RR29 has lived up to all it has set to be be.  A place where the staff will help you do what you want to do or show you that you can do it.  Amazing.  I wrote new poems.  Drafted essays on June Jordan and poetics. Read Angela Jackson’s bio of Gwendolyn Brooks, Eudora Welty’s wonderful book One Writers Beginnings and of course We’re On: A June Jordan Reader (Alice James Books), a must have for serious students of American poetry.  And Laura Penny murder mysteries.  With fellow residents I saw The  Post where Meryl Streep chewed up some lovely scenery and journalism is celebrated.

Now I have to leave this beautiful bubble and return to the “real world”  but of course this too is the “real world” just not the one we get to hang around in too long.