The Green Room Problem

The residency sits on a bluff above the Pacific. You can see it from the highway — white buildings, red tile, cypress trees bent permanently inland by a wind that has been blowing since before anyone thought to name it. From below, it looks like a sanatorium. From inside, it looks like a place where serious work gets done. Both of these are true.

I arrived on a Sunday in October. My room had a desk, a bed, a window facing the ocean. The window was large enough to make the ocean the primary fact of the room, which I think was the intention. You were meant to sit at your desk and feel the presence of something that didn’t need you, and this was supposed to produce literature. For three days I sat at the desk and looked at the water and produced nothing.

The other residents arrived in clusters. A poet from Berlin who carried a leather satchel and spoke about duration. A novelist from Lagos who had just published her third book and seemed, from a distance, to be managing the transition from emerging to established with an ease I found suspicious. A memoirist from Denver whose name I recognized from a podcast about grief. An essayist from London whose work I admired and whose physical presence — tall, deliberate, given to long silences that turned out to be the silences of someone listening rather than someone performing attention — made me conscious of the noise I generated to fill equivalent gaps. There were others. I’m compressing.

The schedule was this: mornings were for work, afternoons were unstructured, evenings were for communal meals prepared by a chef named Arturo who had previously cooked at a restaurant in Carmel that had closed under circumstances no one discussed. The food was good. The wine was better than the food. Tuesdays and Thursdays, two residents gave craft talks in a converted barn that still smelled faintly of hay and linseed oil, and the rest of us sat in folding chairs and asked questions that were, almost without exception, statements about our own work rephrased as curiosity about the speaker’s.

I want to be precise about the schedule because precision was the thing I was losing.

By the fourth day, the view from my window had changed. Not literally. The ocean was the same ocean. But I noticed that the horizon line, which should have been a comfort — the simplest geometry, the oldest boundary — had started to feel like a dare. The water just went. It went and went and it didn’t care whether I was watching. Somewhere around the fifth day I became fixated on a particular rock formation to the south, visible from the dining hall, that looked like a fist or a tumor or a fist becoming a tumor. No one else mentioned it. I began to worry that no one else could see it.

I should say what I was supposed to be working on. My publisher expected a novel. I had signed a contract eighteen months prior on the basis of forty pages and a synopsis, and in the intervening months the forty pages had not become forty-one. The synopsis, which I had written in a single afternoon with the fluency that comes from describing a book that doesn’t exist yet, now read like a message from someone I used to know. The character at the center — a woman traveling through Eastern Europe, collecting stories from strangers, which was Kudos but sideways, which was every autofiction premise but sideways, which was possibly nothing at all — refused to coalesce into a person with blood and weight and a reason to get out of bed. She was a function. She moved through the synopsis like a cursor across a screen, activating other people’s narratives, leaving no residue of her own.

I told this to no one. At dinners I said the work was going well. I said I was finding the space generative. I used the word generative and I hated myself and I used it again the next night.

The essayist from London — her name was Fiona — sat next to me at a Tuesday dinner and asked me what I was afraid of. Not in the work. In general. She asked it the way you’d ask someone to pass the bread, and I said, Before I started writing I was afraid of not writing, and now I’m afraid of writing, and the shape of the fear is exactly the same, which means either writing changed nothing or fear is the wrong word for what I’ve been feeling for the past fifteen years. Fiona looked at me for a long time. Then she said, That’s very honest, and took a piece of bread, and the conversation moved to someone’s fellowship application.

I had been honest. This is the thing about literary communities that I had understood theoretically but was now experiencing as a low-grade fever: you could say the truest thing you’d ever said, the thing that cost you something to say, and the room would absorb it. Not with hostility. With professional appreciation. Ah, the honesty. Lovely. Now who wants more wine.

The poet from Berlin — Joachim — seemed genuinely fine. He worked every morning from six until noon, ate lunch alone, walked the bluff trail in the afternoons, attended every communal event, contributed to conversation without dominating it, and went to bed at ten. He did not appear to be performing wellness. He did not appear to be concealing damage. He simply was a person who wrote poems and lived at a residency and found both of these activities sustaining in a way that I could not access or decode. I spent more time watching Joachim than I spent writing. I studied his posture at dinner, the way he held his fork, the rhythm of his attention. Either he had solved a problem I couldn’t name, or he was so far past solving that the question had dissolved. I couldn’t tell. I still can’t.

One evening during the first week, we had a bonfire on the bluff. Someone had brought a guitar. Someone else was reading tarot cards, ironically, though the irony thinned as the night went on and the cards kept saying things that were accidentally true. The fire was too hot on one side of my face and the ocean wind was too cold on the other and I sat between these two temperatures and watched the novelist from Lagos laugh at something Joachim had said. She threw her head back. The firelight made her teeth look like they were made of copper. I noticed the tendons in her neck, the specific architecture of a throat in laughter, and I thought: I am studying this woman’s neck as though I will need to describe it later. The cataloging thought. So familiar it had no flavor. I almost stood up and walked away but the bluff ended in the ocean. So I stayed and my face burned on one side and froze on the other.

By the second week my body had started to register what my sentences wouldn’t. I woke each morning with a jaw so tight I could hear my teeth when I turned my head. My hands developed a tremor — not visible, nothing anyone would notice, but I could feel it when I tried to hold a pen, a low vibration like a phone on silent. At night I lay in bed and the sound of the ocean was the sound of the ocean was the sound of the ocean, and I wanted it to be something else and it wouldn’t be. It was water hitting rock. My back ached in a place I couldn’t reach. I drank more wine than I usually drink, which was already more than I should, and one night I stood on the bluff at two in the morning and the fog was so thick that the ocean was audible but invisible and I had the thought, clear and complete like a sentence arriving whole: I am the synopsis. I am the woman moving through the landscape, collecting other people’s material, generating no heat of my own.

Thursday of the second week I gave my craft talk. I had prepared notes. The notes said things about structure and surprise and the sentence as a unit of thought. When I stood at the podium in the barn that smelled of hay and linseed, I looked at my notes and then I looked at the folding chairs and the fourteen faces and I said: I sit at a desk and I’m afraid. That’s the process. I sit and I’m afraid and sometimes the fear produces sentences and sometimes it doesn’t and I have never once been able to tell the difference between the days when it works and the days when it doesn’t, and if anyone here can tell the difference, I would like to know, genuinely, because I have been doing this for thirteen years and I still don’t understand the mechanism.

The room was quiet. Then the poet from Denver, the grief podcaster, said: I think that’s really brave. And someone else said: That’s so refreshing. And the novelist from Lagos asked a question about my revision process and I answered it — automatically, competently, from the part of me that knows how to be a writer at a residency — and the moment closed over itself like water over a stone and by dinner everyone was talking about the view and whether Arturo’s risotto was better than last week’s and I sat with my wine and my tight jaw and understood that I had done the most honest thing I was capable of doing and it had become content. Forty minutes of content. Two questions. Applause.

What I can’t explain — and this is the problem, the green room problem, the thing I came to the residency to solve and instead only sharpened — is that I don’t know which version was real. The woman at the podium saying I’m afraid, or the woman at dinner answering questions about revision. They were both me. They were both performances. The fear was genuine and the competence was genuine and the fact that one interrupted the other and then the other resumed, seamlessly, without damage to either — that’s what I can’t get past. The form accommodates everything. You can bleed on the podium and the podium wipes clean.

The last three days. Arturo made a bouillabaisse that was too salty and no one said so. Fiona and I walked the bluff trail and she told me about her divorce, which she narrated with the same austere precision she brought to her essays, and I realized I was listening the way I listened to everyone, scanning for material, and I was disgusted with myself and I kept listening. The rock formation to the south had not changed. It was still a fist or a tumor. The fog came in every evening around five and erased the horizon and gave it back every morning around eight and this cycle, this daily disappearance and return, was either the most obvious metaphor in the world or no metaphor at all, and I could not determine which, and the inability to determine which was, I think, the closest I came to writing anything real during those three weeks.

On my last morning I packed my bag and stripped the bed and wiped down the desk, which had accumulated three weeks of coffee rings and nothing else. No pages. Not a sentence. I stood at the window and the ocean was doing what it does and I had always known what it does and knowing had not helped and not knowing would not have helped either.

In the car, driving south on the highway, I passed the residency from below. I didn’t look up. I was sweating through my shirt though the morning was cool, and my hands on the wheel were steady now, the tremor gone, as if whatever had been vibrating had either stopped or migrated somewhere I couldn’t feel it. I thought about Joachim, fine in his room, writing his poems. I thought about Fiona, narrating her life with such control that the narration had become the life. I thought about the fourteen people in the barn and the word brave and how brave is what you call someone when you don’t want to engage with what they’ve actually said.

I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I pulled into a gas station in Moss Landing and bought a stale muffin and a coffee and sat in the parking lot eating and the coffee was terrible and the muffin was worse and I ate all of it. A woman at the next pump was arguing with someone on the phone about a water heater. The argument was specific and heated and had nothing to do with literature. I listened to every word. When she hung up she saw me looking and said, You don’t want to know, and I said, I do, actually, and she laughed and got in her car and drove away.

I sat in the parking lot for a while after that. The coffee went cold in my hand. A gull landed on the hood of my car and looked at me with one eye and then the other and then flew away, having determined I was not food.