Valentine Pierce — writer
Restoration Resident — June 2006
My residency at A Studio in the Woods ends tomorrow and already I feel the loss. For the first time in my life I have not had to put my creative writing on hold or squeeze it in after a long day of working. It is hard to explain what it feels like to know that when you get up in the morning you can just sit and write — a journal, poetry, prose — all day long until you are too tired to pick up a pencil or sit a keyboard, until your ability to put words together cohesively slips from your fingers — not from the fatigue of a long day at a job but from a long day of words bumping up against each other as they struggle to get from your brain to the page.
No one interrupts you except to let you know lunch or dinner has been prepared. No one thinks you should go to bed at a “decent” hour. The only need you have to fulfill is your own need to write, your need to be doused in words, your need to turn a notebook of scribblings into something legible, accessible, your need to see that sheet of paper come out of the printer ready for editing, refining.
I tell people that I am nocturnal and that all my adult life I have been an insomniac. I brought sleeping tablets, just in case. I think they are on the shelf in the bathroom. I’m not sure because I have not needed them. When I arrived, I found that forest is so alive with life and sound at night that I still wasn’t sure I would ever sleep. As it turns out, by the time I crawl into bed, the most I can do is sleep. I have spent an entire day working out phrases, structuring sentences. Exhausting. Rewarding.
I brought my crochet with me. It’s a hobby and good for calming the mind, the nerves, whatever might be jangled. Since I have been here, I have not finished 10 rows on the throw cover I am making. Normally, I’d finish it in a week or less. First, I don’t have time because I try to use every waking hour writing. Second, it is something I usually do at the end of my day to settle myself for sleep and since I have been here, I have not had any trouble sleeping.
One of the best things about A Studio in the Woods is that it is free of distractions. If the phone rings, someone else answers it. Hungry? Food is always available. It is outside the city so there are no emergency sirens blaring at all hours, no traffic spinning on concrete, no loud voices demanding to be heard, and, best of all, no googol of cell phones ringing a zillion ways a thousand times a day.
Since I have been here, the primary thing I have been working on is my book, “Come Hell and High Water: A Writers Notebook on America’s International Disaster.” It is 10 months of notes, 95% handwritten, sketchy and in a personal shorthand. Essentially, it’s a time-consuming and long project better done consistently day after day. As I was writing this journal and before I even knew about the residency, I would ask myself why on earth I was doing it. I probably have a dozen journals and several notebooks just sitting in a box in storage. I never have the time to even go back and look at them, let alone type them.
After I applied for the residency, I thought, if I get it I am going to work on my notebook, my novel, my poetry – I am going to work on everything! Since for all of my adult life I have only worked piecemeal on my creative writing, I had no sense of time for my projects. Once I started on the journal, I realized I would most likely not get to the novel. As for the prose and the poetry, they fall naturally into place in my notebook. I have been able to smooth out the rough edges of my essays, decipher and clarify my prose, finish some of my poems, and gain appreciate for poems I wrote hastily and never revisited.
I can’t tell you how good this has been for me. My life has been so chaotic, even before Katrina, that I was beginning to think I would never get settled again. I was homesick and longing for summer rains, red beans, and the lyrical sounds of our myriad dialects. And even though I am not in New Orleans proper, as we are wont to say, I am home. My first week here, we had red beans. About a week after I got here, the rains started. How I have missed rain and I am going to miss A Studio in the Woods but I look forward to coming back next summer as a volunteer, to do whatever I can to help ensure it continues to offer artists a place of calm, peace, respite and sheer delight as they experience the joy of living and breathing their art.
Biography
Valentine Pierce is a poet and performance artist. Her creative and journalistic writing has been published throughout the U.S. and she has been featured on radio programs and cable television programs. Pierce has frequently produced her own shows, including “It’s Personal,” for which she received a grant from the NOJHF. In its review of the “From a Bend In the River" anthology, which included Pierce's, "Rivers of My Soul," the Times-Picayune called her one of the stalwarts of the New Orleans poetry scene. The poem was also choreographed by the Newcomb College for Women dance department for the inauguration of Tulane University’s president.
