Reggie Young — Lafayette, LA
Writer-in-residence, June 2005
Unlike some of the previous residents, my work has more to do with concrete monstrosities and pollution urban sunsets than the natural world, but that might be why the time I spent at A Studio in the Woods was more constructive than it might have been if I spent it alone in a New York City brownstone. Retreating to the woods to write may seem like an old fashion, romantic notion, especially for someone who writes about anything but the natural world, but my experience at A Studio in the Woods was one of the most productive of my entire career. One of the popular notions about retreats is that through isolation writers find themselves forced to write, but a good retreat places a writer in a situation where she or he is free to write, and that’s the environment I found myself in during my residency. At A Studio in the Woods, I found myself liberated from the concerns of teaching, home life, and the world at large and empowered to engage myself in the process of constructing my own fictive realities. I went there with the idea of doing some revision work an old novel manuscript and to finish a short story. At the end of my three weeks residency, I left with a full draft of a completely novel.
Reggie Young
Biography
Reggie Young is a fiction writer and poet from Chicago, and he is currently a professor in the Department of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He, along with Marcia Gaudet, compiled and edited Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays by Ernest J. Gaines and wrote the introduction to the collection (Knopf, fall 2005). He is the recipient of an ATLAS Fellowship from the Board of Regents of the State of Louisiana, which will support the research for his upcoming critical book—Phantom Limbs Dancing Juba Rites: The Secular Rituals of “Marvelous” Spiritual Realism in Black Art Expressive Texts (Palgrave McMillan, spring 2007). His novel, Crimes in Bluesville, will be available from iUniverse in the fall of 2005.
