Life-altering Moments at Artist Residencies

northern New Mexico, 2011

In June 2010, three months after a PET scan showed no cancerous activity in my body, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico awarded me with my first artist residency. Then, on January 27, 2011, bulky luggage in hand, a guitar bag strapped around my shoulder, snowflakes fluttering through the night sky, I set foot in Taos for a six-week residency. I was living in San Francisco at the time, sharing a flat with three roommates. After ridding my body of Hodgkin lymphoma with over half a year of chemotherapy and radiation treatment, it was my first adventure away from the city where my body had manifested a blood cancer.

The Wurlitzer Foundation provided me with a home: Casita 9n on quiet Burch Street. The tiny adobe home was nestled beneath cottonwood trees. The casita’s backdoor opened to a snow-covered field. Every day, scores of crows and magpies squawked and flew about the trees that had sprouted from this land. Albeit fleeting, it was the first home of my own. I was thirty-one years old.

A few weeks after I had settled into the crisp wintry air and rhythms of the rural town, after I had plunged into the memoir I was writing, I rented a car to explore the high desert beyond Taos. Locals called that part of northern New Mexico “God’s Country.” As I drove north on Highway 64, I gazed upon the surrounding landscape: the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the unbelievably vast sky above, the sun glimmering through gray cloudscape. I teared up. I was alive. I was healthy. I had been graced with this opportunity to see and breathe in this immaculate landscape that felt like home to my very marrow.

self-portrait: typical morning at Casita 9n

My time at Casita 9n provided ample time to sit alone with myself. It provided the solitude needed to reflect on the ordeal I had weathered. My wounds were still fresh. I was in the long process of healing. Through my memoir, I was figuring out what to make of that tumultuous epoch and who I wanted to be in my rebirth.

Once I left New Mexico and returned to San Francisco, I was changed. For some time, I had yearned to live on my own. The residency in Taos validated that the solitude and autonomy I had with a home of my own was exactly what I needed in that precarious juncture in my life. As a result, a few months later, I left San Francisco—a city I had loved and called home for seven years—and moved to the sunny side of the bay.

Five years later, on the last day of a three-week winter residency at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in southern Wyoming, my wife texted to ask if I had read her last email. It wasn’t like her to be cryptic, so I immediately opened my inbox. I found a picture of a ClearBlue pregnancy test that read: PREGNANT. My jaw dropped. I rapidly blinked as though my eyelids were windshield wipers in a thunderstorm and leaned toward the laptop screen and squinted at the image to confirm what I thought it said (and meant). She was pregnant! HOLY SHIT! My immediate reaction was joy and excitement with a tinge of disbelief because a few months after I was declared cancer-free, I took a sperm test at the encouragement of my then-girlfriend and the sperm counts were low. I wasn’t quite sterile, but I wasn’t far from it. My first oncologist had told me that chemotherapy had a small chance of making me sterile. I took the risk and opted to not freeze my sperm before I began treatment. I placed the prolongment of my genetic seed in the hands of the cosmos. Years later, through a pixelated image I received in my Hotmail inbox, I received my answer.

On our last night at Brush Creek’s artist camp, I sat on a log in a snow-covered field with many of the artists I had befriended. We hunched over a crackling fire, its light dancing on our faces. I shared my good news with them. They congratulated me. As I sat with them, staring into the flickering flames, I felt content, like I was exactly where I should be in that moment of my life. But I also felt a weight upon me. I figured it would be a while before I had an experience like this with another band of fellow artists.

And I was right.

Three and a half years later, in a remote corner of northern Wyoming, I met and joined another motley group of artists over a sumptuous dinner at the Ucross Foundation. My wife and our rainbow child were thirteen-hundred miles away. Ever since he was born two years before, I had never been away from him for more than a day, so it was peculiar to be there by myself—a solitary unit, all of a sudden. It was weird to sleep in a room by myself. I had a hard time falling asleep without my son by my side, without the owl-shaped sound machine I didn’t realize until then that I had grown accustomed to.

On my first sun-filled morning at Ucross, I felt so light and happy to cross paths and chat with a couple of the other artists. As always, it was exhilarating to have the opportunity to put my day job aside for a brief period of time to completely focus on what I love. It felt great to be among other creatives again. It was rejuvenating to have a chunk of time to myself to be just myself. Fatherhood had consumed me. For over two years, my artistic self had been mostly shelved. In large part, he had to stand past the curtains circling the stage. It was invigorating to welcome him back onstage. To be fully reunited with him.

Amidst a group of ten fellow artists, I inevitably met other parents. They were much further along in their parental journeys; their children were already adults. But in short time, I found that I absolutely loved talking about my son when they would ask about him, or when something would come up in our chats that brought him to mind. It was a gift to be temporarily relieved of my everyday fatherly duties to concentrate on my writing, but it was useful to understand this didn’t mean I stopped being a dad just because my son wasn’t around. It feels a bit silly to say this, but I didn’t realize this distinction until I was there in Wyoming, far from him.

Since 2019, our world has changed. My world has felt even smaller the past three years. I yearn to be back in the ephemeral and curious world of artist residencies amongst kindred creative spirits. It is an immense privilege to be a part of those spaces. I hunger to bring my artistic self back into the spotlight. I long for the next adventure.