In the northern corner of Georgia about where the state abuts North and South Carolina is the artist’s Lost City of Atlantis. After being shot like a cannonball out of the insane last days of my teaching semester—papers, finals, grades, graduation, grades and more grades—I found myself twisting up a two-lane road in the Georgia mountains to an artists’ residency program at the Hambidge Center, a scattered collection of secluded cabins loosely surrounding a common house hand-built out of rocks (called, yes, The Rock House), where I was to spend the next twelve days. I was six hours from Wilmington with no cell phone signal, no computer, no idea what I was doing, two suitcases, 48 cans of diet Coke, and a backpack of books, yellow legal pads, and a pack of black, fine-tipped Paper Mate Flairs. At 3 p.m. on May 13, I pulled into the gravel drive of the Hambidge Center, and on May 25th, at 5:45 a.m., I pulled out. This is the story of what happened to me while I was there, and why you should apply, frantic fellow artist, if you are reading this account.

How I Became One of Those Writers who Goes to an Artists’ Colony (or …What Time is the Orgy?)
Let me start with the truth in the hopes that it will set the tone for everything else I’m about to tell you. I applied to Hambidge because a cute boy asked me to. Let me clarify by stating that the person in question is the great American poet and dear friend of mine Young Smith, who, by standard definitions, is neither cute nor a boy, but if you read his collection “In A City You Will Never Visit” (it’s on amazon.com), then you would change your mind about standard definitions and do whatever he asked, too. His idea was that we would spend the two weeks collaborating on a new work combining my playwriting with his poetry to create a sort of you-put-your-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate-no-you-put-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter extravaganza for the theater. The idea flew with the review board, and I was accepted. I was officially a Hambidge Fellow, an honor carried by many a painter, sculptor, potter, writer, poet, photographer, musician, and those involved in this mysterious thing known as the “fiber arts.” I was thrilled, but I can assure you that I had no idea what to expect.

Now let me confess: I, too, had this deranged idea of what goes on at an artists’ colony. In my mind, I pictured disheveled, somewhat shifty malcontents milling about with paintbrushes or worn used-bookstore copies of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground muttering about Art and Life and Struggle. What I didn’t picture was naked people, which is apparently what everybody else in my life imagined when I told them I was going to spend two weeks at an artists’ colony in the Georgia mountains. If I had five bucks for every time someone said “So, you’re going to an orgy?” when I told them what I was doing, I’d use it all to cover my expenses for my Hambidge residency this year. I hate to disappoint, but there was no orgy. I also saw not one person holding a copy of Dostoyevsky anything, although I did hear a writer from D.C. doing a tai-chi workout in The Rock House, and I did have an interesting conversation with a photographer from NYC about JesusLand, a religious amusement park she stumbled upon in Georgia while shooting her recent project on small-town America.

The First Thing I Learned Was That a Day is Long

The Hambidge Center is settled in Rabun Gap, which is close to the North Carolina border, in the secluded Georgia mountainside. This landscape is beautiful. It is quiet. It is primordial. The mountains around Hambidge are 200 million years old and were too high for the Pleistocene ice sheets to mow down. Arriving in this area is like traveling back in earth time, which is to say that it feels old. The air is pure and sweet, and large, healthy trees grow in the forests that surround each artist’s cabin.

Hambidge does its best not to disturb the natural order of things, and that includes disturbing the natural order of the creative process. The Fellows’ cabins are distant from each other, and, of course, my cabin, the Son Studio, happened to be the furthest away from everybody and situated at the end of a long, curving gravel driveway. Despite the instinct to recall images from the movie Friday the 13th ,and the fact that the cabin had no phone, let me clearly state that Hambidge and Rabun Gap are safe. Really. But let’s be honest: a woman alone in the woods with no phone…I’m a writer after all, and I can go Stephen King on that idea, but in reality, I never once was freaked out except the last night, and that was only because a spider crawled in my hair right before I fell asleep. If any of you were paying close attention at the beginning of the article and wondered why I left on May 25th at 5:45 a.m., that’s why.

The “schedule” for the Fellows is this: do whatever all day and all night but be at The Rock House for happy hour at 5:30 and dinner at 6; after dinner, go back to whatever you need to do. For the first two days, I slept. I made the Hambidge dinner itinerary, and as I set the table and chatted with the French-trained chef, I considered myself a pretty blessed writer, indeed. It took me a few days to adjust to having no phone (I could get reception if I drove ten minutes into Dillard, the closest town), no plans, no visible technology that wasn’t invented by the Egyptians BC, and no one dropping by to chat (Hambidge policy does not allow unexpected visits to the Fellows). Without being plugged in, clocking in, clocking out, expected anywhere, due at a meeting, scheduled for an appointment, headed to dinner, making conversation, avoiding conversation, or otherwise distracted, the first thing I learned about being at an artists’ colony is that a day is long.

And wow. What a revelation. I had, if I wanted, twenty-four hours to think, to read, to write, to research. I couldn’t believe it, but in four days, I’d read seven books--every one of the books I’d brought along for my preliminary research. My sense of clock time all but vanished, and I would find myself poring over a book at 4 a.m. or chewing my pen as I stared beseechingly at a half-completed sonnet (“please, poem, please finish yourself!”), and time, like the mountains, became relaxed and old and untroubled by the noise of the world.

By the end of my residency, I’d spent good, quality creative time with Young, completed a poem that didn’t stink (said sonnet did, eventually, finish itself), created sketches for several more that looked as though they were going to really stink, and devised a structure of an entirely unrelated theater project I am working on with friends in Wilmington. And I am, by no means, a prolific or even a particularly disciplined writer. In my normal life, I don’t write every day. But here, well! If this could happen at an artists’ colony, well, sign me up for next year.

The morning I left, the dawn was beginning to break, and strands of serpentine fog curled along the bottom of the trees. Soon, this fog would wind its way back up into the hills, as it did each morning, when the sun crested the ridgeline and bathed the woods in a wash of golden light. At Hambidge, the natural cycle of coming and going, growing and changing is easy to accept. Things arrive, they depart, they return: the dawn, the fog, the artists who are privileged enough to get to come here. Driving out that morning, I can’t say I was sad because it was my time to depart. Somewhere, another artist was packing diet Cokes and maybe paint or her fabrics or her instrument, and she would, too, curve up Betty’s Creek Road in Rabun Gap, GA to spend two glorious weeks in solitude. Son Studio would be there for her. Just like it will be for me when I return. And for that, artists everywhere should be eternally grateful to Hambidge for wanting us, for supporting us, and for being there when it is our turn to come and go.

Local Artists, Please Apply
I can’t say enough good things about Hambidge. In its mission, it plainly states that artists need time, solitude, and setting to properly create. For me, my twelve days at Hambidge gave me those gifts in abundance—plus I met other artists from around the south east, I didn’t have to have an orgy with any of them, and I experienced the greatest freedom any artist can have, the full-tilt space and support to create on my own time and at my own pace. After all, it’s art, not ideology, that keeps a society civilized, and the Hambidge Center has known this for 74 years. There are many of you out there, fellow artists, some of whom I know and others who I hope to know, who should look into spending some time alone with your art at Hambidge. Who knows, maybe I’ll see you there this summer.