June’s Storyknife fellow, Ching-In Chen sent us this beautiful zuihitsu* in response to their time in residence. We are so pleased to share it with you.

Unfurling Again: revisiting a zuihitsu

          Arriving again three plane rides and time zones away at a practice I return to – patience when there is no one else but me to wait for. In another landscape of air, horizon of blue, I unpeel my wintertime selves, cram myself full of light.

          ~

         From another time and place, Arthur Sze on a collaboration with Susan York, The Unfolding Center:  “Yes, there’s a lot of what I consider breathing tides; inhaling, exhaling, the physicality of breath and the turning points …”

         I didn’t know it, but my earlier self had planned a pause – a breath from my post-hurricane headaches, ever-advancing tension.

          ~

The writer’s conference, greedy with words, watching myself turn in another life.

         Build fragments, small migrations of pen. Watching window, adapting through forest, an ear out as I learn about plants.

A new friend calls and says walk, so I walk on stones and listen for seepage. In the wind, we talk and secret, make private adventures. I cultivate a habit of visiting.

         Listen for sun through the windowpane of a not-present woman’s house. Search anyway for her imprint, her breath recorded in condensed walls.

I am looking to make a routine ritual, even if only temporary, even to say, I have a home, a small temporary one, space for expansive dreaming, for measuring my own breath.

         ~

         Leap. But I am not doing it. This is where the fight begins – a familiar dance visits whenever I gain access to a small sleeve of time. All my wintertime selves rush in from their corners and duties, turn their backs to me, shut their mouths down at the corner. I leave them their space, escape to the library, waiting for crosshatch escape words to stack into a route.

         There is one behind the library, hatched with a short bit of story. I follow until it rains, and turn down a new path, looking for the next page to turn.

         ~

Visiting ocean, I walk to sand, touch a starfish, memorize texture. I lift myself high and lose a field. As an afterthought, I send someone beloved my location in case. I cannot say it is not a pleasurable time, a churn into deep excavation. A layer of muscle and letting go.

         I stretch my own day, my own body. Climb to see a field of ice, intimate array when it starts to dusky rain. Behind me, a man – pilot – carries song like a passport, protection against large creatures, lantern spiraling down through stone.

         ~

         In another time and place, I chastise myself: Sitting with myself, the practice of it, and nowhere to hide. Contending with my own creatures. Inviting old friends, those daily mutants, granting them tiny gifts to battle on page.

         *

These same writing questions from the corner. And the daily process, practice of answer.

———

*If you are unfamiliar with the form, zuihitsu is a genre of Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author’s surroundings. The name is derived from two Kanji meaning “at will” and “pen.”

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Storyknife Writers Retreat received 97 applications for residencies during 2018. The selection committee was incredibly impressed by the quality of the work they received. It was difficult to narrow it down to the three writers who will have a chance to spend time devoted to their writing at Storyknife this year. We are so proud to announce the following three amazing writers are our 2018 Storyknife fellows. I hope you will join us in congratulating them!

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017).They are a Kundiman, Lambda and Callaloo Fellow and a member of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundations writing communities. Chen is also the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011; AK Press 2016) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009). Their work has appeared in The Best American Experimental Writing, The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. A poetry editor of the Texas Review, they currently teach creative writing at Sam Houston State University. www.chinginchen.com

Sharbari Ahmed’s fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Asian Pacific American Journal, Catamaran, Caravan Magazine, Inroads, and Wasafiri among others and is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly. She was on the writing team for Season One of the TV Series, “Quantico” on ABC. Most recently she wrote the screen adaptation of Mitali Perkin’s Middle Grade novel Rickshaw Girl. Her debut book The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai: Stories was released in November 2013 by Daily Star Books. She is a Tribeca All Access Fellow for her screenplay Raisins Not Virgins. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Manhattanville College and the Film Television MA Program at Sacred Heart University. She was born in Bangladesh and raised in New York, Connecticut and Ethiopia and lives in Darien, CT.

Casandra Lopez is a Chicana and California Indian (Cahuilla/Tongva/ Luiseño) writer who’s received support from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf and Jackstraw. She’s been selected for residencies with SAR and Hedgebrook. Her chapbook, Where Bullet Breaks was published by the Sequoyah National Research Center and her poetry collection Brother Bullet is forthcoming from University of Arizona press. She’s a founding editor of As Us  and teaches at Northwest Indian College.

A huge thank you to our amazing selection committee. We are so looking forward to this summer!

This post was written by Ruby Hansen Murray, Storyknife’s September 2017 resident fellow.  All photographs taken by Ruby Hansen Murray. 

A solitary residency can be rough. Going to a new community alone is like throwing yourself into space, something the two eagles across from the post office may have felt, when they fledged on September 1^st, the day my husband left me in Homer, Alaska. The Storyknife Residency that Dana Stabenow manifested is a writer’s dream: a month of unfettered time in a cabin that sits on a bluff on the Kenai Peninsula across Cook Inlet from Mt. Illiamna and Mt. Augustine, a Fuji-like cone, renamed by Captain Cook early on.

The cabin outside of town has a redwood deck, a lawn surrounded by a brushy meadow of fireweed turning red in autumn. Grass with beige seed heads, then fir and a scrubby spruce that screens a neighbor’s shingled house. My host’s house contains one square of golden light most evenings. The cabin has a living area with a microwave, a hot plate, a separate bedroom, each about seven feet square with a slant of high ceiling that gives a sense of space. A bookshelf in the living room of clean pine, a quilted wall hanging. The bedside lamp is sweep of green glass; there are pegs for my clothes. It’s simple and sufficient. The Big Dipper rises in the window over the bed.

I’ve come to write, and I do. These are the weeks of hurricanes flooding Houston, slamming the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, sweeping Florida, and I speak with dear friends who live in that striking environment so unlike this one, but so similarly vulnerable to climate change. I am writing essays about the Osage homeland in the middle of the continent and organizing my novel with an emotional logic. But I’m also curious about the Kenai Peninsula where my husband’s family fished and which was the site of an early oil discovery in Alaska.

It’s also challenging to sit writing in Homer, because you can’t forget that sea otters are likely close to shore, that sand hill crane families glide onto the flats by Beluga Slough each evening.

A week into September, the tourist and fishing season is over. There’s the tug to experience the area—the aquamarine waters and white breakers along the spit or the textures and scale of the glaciers across Kachemak Bay, over and against the views from my desk. Whether I sit in the cabin or drive to town or walk the spit, I’m rewarded. Sunlight glistens on the fur of a black bear that passes and two moose check out the moose-proof cage the gardener wrapped around a high-bush cranberry just outside my window. For most of the month, whether I stay home or explore the world around Homer, I’m in a dream state. The place, the generous friends I make, the opportunity to spend this dedicated time are synergistic and powerful.

It was a friend who first found Storyknife. Only for women, he realized, and forwarded me the link. Repeatedly, he urged me to apply until I relented and submitted an application for a summer residency. There’s no way, I thought. There’s no way that I’ll be selected.

One month later, while my first grade students were at lunch, I got the email saying that I was one of four chosen applicants.

I panicked.

I ran down the hallway, keeping an eye out for the principal, to my friend’s classroom where he was working with a student.

“I got in,” I interrupted, eyes wide.

“I’m not surprised,” he answered. Looking toward his student, he added, “This is what a panic attack looks like.”

I walked back to my classroom, in shock, detached but intensely vulnerable. I didn’t reply to the email; that would have been too real. Instead, I decided to wait for the follow up email which was sure to start with: “We apologize for the email sent in error…”

What came instead was a phone call from poet and director of Storyknife, Erin Hollowell. In what I’m sure was a very awkward conversation, I told Erin that I would be there.

I dealt with my anxiety through action. I arranged for a rental car, booked tickets, and studied the little Frederica cabin pictured on the website. A little deck with a bright red plastic chair. A little writing area. A hot plate and a mini fridge. I tried to see myself there. I tried to see myself as a writer.

On July 1st, I flew from Utqiagvik to Anchorage and then Anchorage to Homer, landing at the airport just outside town. I got my luggage, picked up my aloe green rental car, and drove through the darkening skies to my temporary home where Dana Stabenow was waiting to greet me.

I spent the next 28 days living small, spending most of my time in the sturdy, little cabin, watching the weather change from the window. When the fog rolled in, I snuggled in the reading chair with a book and a blanket. When the fog rolled out, I sat writing longhand at the writing desk or clacking away at my computer keys. When I was hungry, I ate, and when I was tired, I slept. Every day, I wrote.

During my stay, Erin arranged for me to meet with renowned writers Tom Kizzia and Nancy Lord. They were both shockingly generous – they bought me lunch – and offered advice specific to writing in Alaska and more broadly on what it means to be a writer. It was my first insight to what it might be like to be part of a community of writers. So much of the work we do, we do alone. It’s easy to forget that there are others out there, people just like us.

In the months since my residency, I published an essay that I finished during my stay in the Frederica cabin, and I hope that it’s one of many published pieces that will develop during a Storyknife residency. But my 28 days in Homer helped me see that it’s not publishing and it’s not residencies that make one a writer. It is the act of writing, the act of alternately wrestling and coaxing words until they bear some semblance to the beautiful thing in your brain, the refusal to give up when the first (or fifth) iteration is born monstrous, the courage to return to the page again and again, that is what makes one a writer.

The multi-level decision process to winnow the large number of FABULOUS submissions that we received for the 2017 Storyknife residency season was arduous but necessary. We could have easily awarded 42 residencies; which is the number of residencies we will offer each year when all the cabins and main house are built. Our selection committee read and reread the submissions, and finally selected the following four women, each chosen based on the strength of her writing sample.

Behind the scenes at Storyknife, we’re strengthening our business plan, our fundraising plan, and most of all, we’re working towards the vision of building a place where women’s writing is nurtured and celebrated.

Please join us in congratulating these amazing women writers. We look forward to hosting them.

In June
Mairéad Byrne’s most recent book is Famosa na sua cabeça (Famous in Your Head), selected and translated by Brazilian poet Dirceu Villa (São Paulo: Dobra Editorial 2015). She is also the author of two plays, five collaborative books with visual artists, and five poetry collections, published in Ireland, the United States, and on the Internet. She’s wildly excited about coming to Alaska, to make poems in collaboration with the land and sea and skyscape of lower Cook Inlet.

In July
Megan Donnelly is a writer and teacher living in rural Alaska. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a degree in English Literature and credits her father with teaching her how to write an essay. Since moving to Alaska, she has involuntarily landed a plane, eaten whale from the Chukchi Sea, and witnessed polar bears dumpster diving. Her first published essay is forthcoming in The Rumpus.

In August
Bea Chang received her BA from Haverford College and her MFA in fiction from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Awesome Sports Project, an online journal dedicated to inspiring girls’ and women’s voices in sports. In addition, her stories and essays have appeared in Colere: A Journal of Cultural Exploration, Toasted Cheese, Memoir Journal, and Broad Street. In 2017, she was nominated for the PushCart Prize for her essay, “The River My Father Promised.” Since 2007, she has lived in and backpacked through 53 countries. Bea stayed in Seattle for a while, but is probably somewhere else now with her blue alien muse.

In September
Ruby Hansen Murray is a writer and photographer living in the lower Columbia River estuary. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Yellow Medicine Review, Apogee, World Literature Today, About Place Journal and American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry. She is an Island Institute, Hedgebrook, and Jack Straw fellow, who studied at Warren Wilson College and the Institute of American Indian Arts.