Me: So, I was listening to this thing on NPR about an artist colony called MacDowell. Lots of famous writers have gone there. Like, Willa Cather worked on Death Comes for the Archbishop there.

Kyle: Yeah?

Me: Yeah. It’s in New England. So you go, and it’s snowing, and you sit in a cabin without Internet or phone, and work very earnestly on your writing all day for about two months.

Kyle: Yeah.

Me: Yeah!

(Pause)

Me: I want to go there!

Kyle: (Starts laughing)

Me: What? I think I should go to a famous artist colony! During the day, they bring you lunch in a picnic basket because you are working on important art and shouldn’t be bothered.

Kyle: You would hate it there.

Me: No I wouldn’t!

Kyle: You would be bored within a half an hour.

Me: Well… maybe at first. But then you work on your art and forget about being bored. You get past being bored. Or else you take walks in the woods in the snow.

Kyle: (Laughs)

Me: Snow is pretty.

Kyle: You would hate the snow. You would be calling me within a few days wanting to come home.

I disagreed. I pictured myself in a gray cardigan tramping through the New England woods, seeing, say, a red cardinal and a moose, and then going back to work in the cabin. In the evenings, I would hang out with the other artists by the fire and talk about the creative process. Man, that would be great!

I mean, yeah, the lack of Internet would bother me. And yeah, I hate being cold and bored. So what? It obviously worked for James Baldwin when he was writing Notes of the Native Son there.

I told a friend about MacDowell and how Kyle reacted when I told him I wanted to go. She started laughing.

“I agree with Kyle. You get bored at a stoplight!”

Maybe so. Still, I went so far to go to the MacDowell Colony website and look at their application. It requires a letter of recommendation, one of the things I hate the most about applying for things. I started looking around to see if it would be worth the trouble of getting the letter. Then I came upon this article in the New York Times about artist colonies.

“For me there’s no substitute,” the novelist Michael Chabon said in a phone interview, as one of his four young children screamed in the background. Chabon and his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, take turns going to the MacDowell colony for two-week stretches each year. “The work just becomes the center of your entire existence,” Chabon said. “You can’t be a good parent and have your work be the center of your entire existence. They’re mutually exclusive.” Chabon has written important parts of his last three books there: “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” “The Final Solution” and his forthcoming novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”

That’s when I realized that I will not get into MacDowell or a similar place until I win the Pulitzer Prize. And who can blame them for giving Michael Chabon a cabin before me? But, I thought, maybe there is another less prestigious artist colony that also had cabins where I could see moose and red cardinals. I spent a fair amount of time looking around the Alliance of Artists Communities website, but a cabin in Arizona during the summer doesn’t sound as good to me.

I also read this short story in Granta by Kathryn Chetkovich, Jonathan Franzen’s girlfriend around the time he published The Corrections. It’s called Envy. It’s about how they met at MacDowell and started dating. During their time together, Chetkovich felt a steady wave of envy over Franzen’s talent and success while her father died and she got divorced and was generally less successful as a writer. I would be envious too if I dated someone like that, but the story also shifted my view of artist colonies a bit. Now they seem like places where people write about their dying parents and feel jealous of each other. That doesn’t sound as fun.

And really, when you get down to it, a cabin would be wasted on me. Not because I would be bored–I still say I could get past that!–but because the world is my artist colony. I have beauty at my fingertips, freedom to write, and no one to boss me around. I don’t need a cabin in the woods.

Although, if I found out about the right one, I would still apply. Especially if they don’t require a letter of recommendation. I hate getting those things.