Writing residencies are a gift beyond measure, offering time and space away from the many (many, many) demands of daily life that conspire against productive writing.
Typically they involve anywhere from two weeks to a month and beyond, sometimes in a separate cabin or apartment, or maybe a room in a main building, and often meals are provided. And many involve that beautiful word that makes every poverty-stricken writer’s heart beat a little faster: FREE. (For a listing check out the Artist Communities Alliance.)
I’ve been fortunate to have been selected for some over the years and each has been a boost to both my writing and my fragile little ego, given the affirmation involved. But one sat at the top of my wish list. Alaska has been on my bucket list for years, and when I saw that one of my favorite crime writers, Dana Stabenow, had created the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer, on the Kenai Peninsula, I started applying — and getting rejected. Story of the writing life, right?
Until this year when the writing gods smiled and I opened an email to find I’d been accepted for a monthlong residency in May. It’s been an unspeakably bad year on the personal front, and this news shot a ray of hope into a very bleak time. Among the many terrific things about Storyknife is that it’s for women writers; that it offers fellowships for Alaskan Native or Indigenous writers, and also for writers of popular fiction and crime fiction — sometimes overlooked in favor of work viewed as more literary.
I’ve got a special project in mind for my time there, so for the next 20 weeks (but who’s counting?) I expect to be X’ing off the days on the calendar like a prisoner waiting to bust out of her cell and jump on the next plane to the Halibut Fishing Capital of the World.
Gratitude. So much gratitude.
March 19, 2017 – The most amazing thing has happened. A novel that I’ve worked on off and on ever since traveling to Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 has finally sold. The first version was (rightfully) rejected all over the place. I rewrote it, collected more rejections, and almost by accident turned to writing crime fiction, which did sell. Those novels had another, perhaps more valuable, quality – they taught me how to write: how to plot, how to develop characters, how to structure and pace a novel. After writing three of them, I took advantage of a monthlong residency last year in Mexico (thanks, 
