Year End: On moving to the woods

I do fantasize about [moving to the woods]. One of the things that I find difficult about Portland sometimes is that I am a super big extrovert. I am very enthusiastic, talkative, and outgoing in social situations, or at conventions, or doing events and stuff. I love it, but it takes so much from me, and the idea of living somewhere where nobody is ever inviting you to their gallery opening… There’s never an interesting band playing in town. There’s never a conference happening that you want to go to. There are no conventions. There are no airports. You’re just there, and there are three other hippies who live down the block, and you just get to live in the woods and make stuff.

I fantasize about that all the time, and I worry that if I ever actually get it, I will go mad, but then again, I guess in that environment I would still have an internet connection. So, how much of that community is online? How much of it is in person? I do feel that it’s very important to me to have interpersonal time in the real world. I do think having continued access to conventions, or events, where I can go and meet people face to face, and have this recognition of, “Oh, you’re not a metric. You’re a person. You’re not a weird collection of bits liking my tweet. You are a human being with an entire, rich, internal life of your own who has decided to pay attention to the work that I do.” That’s pretty magical.

I guess I think of New York City as kind of a wilderness, and then I also think of the actual wilderness as a wilderness, but any place that’s not one of those two extremes is not somewhere that feels good for me. Before I moved to Arkansas, I was just being a mess and floating around, which was its own internal wilderness. That was what I wanted and that is what I have and that is what I was looking for, I think. The only place I could live except for deep in the woods is New York City.

I grew up in Austria. I was surrounded by nature. My playground would be going into to the woods. Living in a cosmopolitan city ever since then, I’m interested in this idea that we’re so removed from nature, and the nature we know has been so intensely cultivated. Public parks. The simple idea of a lawn. These things that people think of as a garden, but obviously it’s not really a garden at all. I think that’s my fascination, how far we’re removed from nature. We live in an image of nature instead of interacting with nature itself.

I live in Woodland, North Carolina. It has a population of about 800 people. You can drive through the town holding your breath and you’ll make it through without suffocating. I have a porch and I have the internet which means I have access to most things that people want or need. I can buy good books and good coffee and rent movies. I miss walking around in a city though. I don’t walk around as much here and walking is important to me. But things happen here, people say things that you’d never hear anywhere else.

[Up here, being a pharmacist] was the only job I could get. I don’t want to be a pharmacist. I want to make it clear that I am not a pharmacist. I’d have to go to school for that and I don’t want to do that. I assist the pharmacist. I bag the medicines and put them in alphabetical order and I answer the phone and work the cash register. A lot of times I stand around and get paid to think all day.

I’ve moved around the country a lot. I have trouble staying in one place. I’m surprised that I’ve stayed here as long as I have. But rent is cheap here, and I get paid more here than I did in New York. And there is something here that I can’t get anywhere else—some quiet and a lot of space to think. Hardly any distractions.

I go home several times out of the year, and stay for a certain period of time, to really sink into the life there. As the seasons shift and change, and the place shifts and changes over a longer period of time, it’s important for me to be there as much as I can. I’m always going back and forth. I think eventually, maybe in a few years, I’ll become a snowbird. That is what we call it in Florida—people who fly down during the winter. I might do that, because there are a lot of other types of projects that I want to invest my time and energy in out there. I also want to work with my home communities in a positive way.

I do see myself spending more and more time there, hopefully being able to continue going back and forth. I love being in New York City as well. It’s also been important for me to be able to be here, to connect and have a community of artists around me, and to also be engaged in the dialog from the perspective of being here.

I live rurally, and so I have easy access to the woods, which I’ve just realized I need. Even when I was a little kid, I was always at the creek. It’s just part of who I am. I go on walks and I’ll sing and get ideas that way. But the biggest inspiration is the frame of mind that it offers me. I have a meditation practice, and that’s very related to my time in nature, just practicing being present and opening myself up to that connection.

It’s important to have active time creating, but it’s also important for me to gauge when I should put my time in what place. Like whether it’s literally picking up the guitar and playing, or if it’s taking a walk and allowing my subconscious to wander and figure things out.

I think our best American writers are regionalists. But those regions they’re describing only exist in their brain. Willa Cather’s Nebraska, as well as her Pittsburgh, are creations of her mind… West Virginia as a setting might be a bit unusual for readers who look for airport literature. But it’s my place. Like Shane McGowan’s Ireland, or Nick Cave’s Berlin. I don’t know if that Berlin ever existed, probably not, but it surely feels like it did.

Mostly you need to realize that you make your own place as a writer. You make your own New York, your own Beat Hotel. Look, your friends are amazing! Just look at them, you don’t have to become famous and hang out with cool friends. Your mom is much cooler and more complex than you can even imagine.