On spending a week at a writing residency

It is fair to say I had no idea what I was really getting myself into when I applied for and ultimately accepted a week-long writing residency at the Sundress Academy for the Arts. I knew there were sheep, and I knew I was going to write. I had plans to write solely or at least mostly into a new project, a YA-novel-in-verse based on my own horny senior year of high school.

The sheep at Firefly Farms.

I drove from Pittsburgh to Knoxville—and then back again—for most of the residency’s first and last days. But aside from that, I was fully free to do whatever I wanted to, as long as I fed the animals. I’m used to having responsibilities. Not just work, but feeding children and doing dishes. Also I am used to talking to my family a lot. But a week by yourself is nothing like that. I had easy food to heat and eat so meal-time was not onerous, and I had none of the usual daily markers of my schedule. No school pick-up, no dinner by 6, no shower-read-bedtime routine, no TV-after-kids-go-to-bed with my husband.

A picture of my residency bed, with a showbox of stickers, frozen mac and cheese, piles of papers, “Adventure Time” on my macbook, and my open notebook in my lap.

Turns out it was too quiet. Or lonely? I can’t tell. I ended up watching a lot of “Adventure Time” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” because I just needed noise, friendly noise, in the background.

People who love me checked in on me throughout the week to ask how it was going—and then again after I came back. They asked me if I wrote so much. And . . . I honestly have no idea how to quantify what I wrote. I did write a lot. According to my notes, I wrote at least 13 new poems and revised a handful of others. I also made my own coffee every morning and it tasted good, set off the house alarm trying to take out the trash, and watched “Bright Star” finally.

A red wall with a tree painted on it and a cooler on the floor, with notecards taped all over it to organize the story.

I organized the existing material I for the book had by making notecards and sticking them to the wall of my room. I decided that for now, every character in the book will just have the same name as the high school friend I see in my head when I write them. Otherwise I don’t know how to hang onto it all.

It was surprisingly hot sitting by this lake. I was sweating—full-on fucken sweating.

I sat by a lake to read my old high school journal. That thing is radioactive. Teaching high schoolers was a daily reminder that being in high school is very hard. But oh, ugh. Save us all from direct exposure to our teenage selves. I had to read the journal backwards to front, mostly skimming. Skimming and reskimming and slowly zeroing in on useful details. The best of which was probably this one sentence: “I feel like I’m on a death mission with all these crushes.” And oh, little Sarah, you kind of were!

Reading as an adult, I saw things little Sarah didn’t. I mean, obviously. But so many times I kind of criticized myself for being so paranoid about my relationships with these boys I loved and desired so. Only it’s so clear in retrospect: I was NOT paranoid! They were pulling away, and then they did dump me. I was just perceptive and trying to understand the gap between what they said—it’s all good—and what they did—refusing to make eye contact or pulling away from my touch. I also saw at least one boy who I had on the hook, and deep apologies for fully not understanding what I was doing, friend.

Fall leaves at the University of Tennessee Arboretum.

I walked around a lovely arboretum one afternoon. And then read all of the emails and instant messenger conversations I found printed out and stored in a file folder. I shared some of those with my friends, who read them the same way I did: through half-closed eyes or the scrim of their fingers.

I thought so much about it what it was like to live my high school life that I had dreams about that time. Dreams about those boys, the halls of the high school, and the random outdoor and semi-public spaces where we hooked up. And I think this is where the real value of the time was: I had time and space to live inside my project. I brainstormed all kinds of problems to solve, narratively and structurally—in my notebook and in at least one long phone conversation with my husband. In many ways, this is work I could not do at home. There just isn’t space in a day filled with paid work and family work and relationships to live inside your own head so much.

Blue notebook of poems, purple notebook journal, and a pile of old printouts.

I also think I wouldn’t have been able to read my old journals and emails at home. It’s too much, too intimate. Better to do that in a place that is not yours, where you can leave all the residue behind you, instead of reading it in your own home and letting the revenants wander through your daily life.

It was a truly beautiful time to be in Knoxville.

I’m not sure this was really pleasant, to be honest. It was very productive. It was also alienating: I felt outside space and time, without tether. And I felt very sad—because high school Sarah was often quite sad. When it was time to come home, I was ready.

Of course, I came home to a mountain of fucking work. I drove on Sunday, and then Monday morning was right back into my old life. It took me until that weekend to realize one more thing about the residency: I wasn’t working, but I was never really resting, either. Every day was functionally a workday, living inside this creative project that is only slightly more defined than “shapeless.” I had thought of the residency as a break from my life, and it was, but it was no break. And what a relief it was to sit on my own couch doing absolutely nothing for days.

[sixty-minute memoir] Signals and Noise

I had this idea many years ago to create a wiki that was structured like TV Tropes only it would catalogue red flags, those signs in a relationship that something was wrong and you had to get out. “The Dictionary of Red Flags,” I would call it. The idea was to rigorously catalog and cross-reference women’s stories—not just the ones that end in rape, date rape, and abuse, but everyday stories of bullshit, too—to show that we werem’t making these things up. It was a way to take the fuzzy science of intuition and make it logical, irreducible. I may still try to pursue this idea, who knows. Stay tuned! Or email me if you’re into the idea!

I remain fascinated by the idea of red flags. And I wonder what more stories could have done for me when I was young and flailing about. I suspect there’s no saving everyone from all bad encounters. But as a teenager, it was almost impossible to recognize the red flags because all I could see anywhere was red. I was lusty and confident. I had a firm grasp on my sexuality. I had a firm grasp, sequentially and with mixed results, on a number of boys, too. The noise was overwhelming: anything could be a sign that he liked me, he wanted me, he’d be good to me, we had a chance. The noise was filled with signals. The real signals were no better than noise, ultimately.

I was in the marching band my entire high school career. There are some marching band logistics you should know before I tell this story: the band was organized by ranks. Each rank was stable throughout the year, and each had eight people. The rightmost member of the rank was always a senior and the rank leader. The leftmost member of the rank was second in charge and an upperclassman, never a freshman.

This is the band my sophomore year, marching in the Rose Bowl Parade. I am not in this photo. My dad took dozens of pictures of me. Turns out, though, that he took dozens of pictures of my friend Caitlin. We admittedly look a lot alike.

So my freshman year, I was in my friend Dana’s brother’s rank. Eric played saxophone and was generally a solid guy, as far as I can remember. His friend Justin, who also played saxophone, was in our rank, too. I can’t remember if he was the leftmost member of the rank or if he in fact marched right next to me in the middle of the rank. As an adult, looking back, this is the first red flag. Why didn’t he get his own rank? I have some vague memories that Justin, Eric, and . . . a third saxophone player whose name I forget? . . . were mischievous, naughty. But to be disallowed from having your own rank? What did Justin even do?

I had a miserable crush on him. Again, with adult eyes, I can tell you that it was less a crush and more an overwhelming physical chemistry. But anyway, I thought he was great. The band trip that year was to Disney World, taking that week after Christmas and before the return to school. My friend Eve and I spent nearly the whole trip hanging out with Eric and Justin. I remember a banquet with other bands where I was devastated because Justin was dancing with some older girl from another school district and barely registered me as a person. After days of riding rides together.

I remember so distinctly being inside that big ball at Epcot, sharing the tiny car, and our legs touching. I had these dumb curly shoelaces and he was commenting on them. I didn’t even want to move my feet as we talked about those shoelaces because that would mean my leg would no longer be pressed against his and I wasn’t sure how I could get back to that place once it was over. And now he had forsaken me. I cried, lying across three banquet chairs, obscured by the tablecloth. (Shoutout to Nate Dawg, yes he called himself that, who was like the only person who noticed and checked in on me.) So here’s another red flag then: why did two 17- or 18-year-old boys hang out with 14-year-old me and Eve for the entirety of their senior band trip, save that one banquet? Also, as I learned that same night, he had a whole girlfriend at home. So really, multiple red flags. But it was all so noisy. I believed so fully we would get together. I never believed at all even a little that we would get together. The whole trip hung in that place before the hookup, where it is all anticipation and fortune-telling.

A few years later, let’s say I was seventeen and Justin was 21, I ran back into him. Somehow. I don’t even know. He was in school at the University of Pittsburgh, and I was at least a little older but definitely still in high school. We went on a date. He played a CD in the car but skipped to the next track after the first minute of every song: “I remember how it goes,” he explained. Was this a red flag? Or just seriously fucking annoying? I couldn’t tell then, and I can’t tell now either. We went to the Borders and wandered around for a bit. Then we made out in his car until the windows fogged up. He put his dick back in his pants after some period of time, saying we shouldn’t press our luck. Was this normal desire or a red flag, the part where I was jerking him off in his car in the parking lot of the Borders?

We went back to my house where we continued to make out on the floor of my family room. I remember knowing, with certainty, that he was trying to get his dick in me. Not like generally trying to get in pants. But specifically angling himself so his dick would be in my vadge. This is definitely a red flag. This was, even at the time, a red flag to me. I knew I was a virgin, but he didn’t. But also there was no condom anywhere, and I was very clear that unprotected sex was a very not okay thing to try. The night ended, and I did not talk to him again.

I told Dana all about it, though. Dana who was Eric’s sister, who knew Justin better than anyone else in our grade. I told her I didn’t want to see him again because he was a little rapey. It was a whole vibe he had about him. I bet it was all the red flags I’ve outlined above hitting me, but I couldn’t have told you those were important signals in all the noise. I only know that somehow the signals had reached me and coalesced into a strong sense that I should, in no uncertain terms, go out with him again. Dana laughed and agreed wholeheartedly. Whatever it was about him, I was not alone in recognizing it. And Dana probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was exactly, either. But it was real and to be avoided.

Did I go out with him again? Did I talk to him again? I know he knew that I called him rapey because I remember him confronting me about it, joking with me about it. That was a red flag and I knew it in the moment.

On Valentine’s Day, I got a Valentine in the mail from him saying it had been too long. I think he spelled my name wrong, “Sara—” it said, probably. Lol: an obvious reason to not go back out with him, but not necessarily a red flag. His printing was blocky, done in a think pen like one of those Papermate Flair felt-tipped pens teachers all love. It was distinctly unsexy. I threw the card away. This is likely the first time my intuition told me things I couldn’t explain but I listened to it anyway.

I still don’t know how a teenage girl can untangle the signals from the noise. Desire alone is so noisy. And the body wants things the mind and heart often do not—especially when the hormones of puberty are pumping away. But how do you know a guy is a creep when the only signs are subtle, or subtler than flamingly obvious anyway. I think back at how I used to flirt—I watch high schoolers flirt, from a distance as their teacher—and subtlety has no place in that world. Yet still, small signals are going up all the time, and we missed them at our own peril.

This is, I think, why the “Dictionary of Red Flags” project still appeals to me. The impossibility of adolescence is eternal. And the way that the culture devalues instincts, small signals, and women’s voices continues to endanger girls who are trying to navigate the impossibility of adolescence. What would it be to read stories and actually see an articulation of a thing you had only ever felt?