Residency check in

Hello from Ragdale!

Good morning from beautiful Ragdale, my temporary home for the month!

I have been a resident here for a week, arriving on the Metra train in the late afternoon last Monday. Ragdale is located in Lake Forest, a wealthy north shore suburb of Chicago, and it’s hard to articulate what an extraordinarily special place this is. Tucked off a busy suburban road is an oasis of pollinator gardens, kitchen gardens, houses, and sculptures, where all footpaths lead to the expansive remnant Shaw Prairie beyond. The people working at Ragdale are all working artists and many are former residents, from the executive director to the garden & land manager. I didn’t realize how moving it would feel to be living in a space where the baseline assumption is that what I’m doing is worthy of time and space, without having to justify or hedge or explain myself.

I’m putting in 12 hour days at the desk, broken begrudgingly for food and bathroom breaks, and stretch my hands regularly (thanks Draw Stronger!) to avoid the claw-hand I worry is on the horizon. I’m trying to not distract myself with diary comics or fun drawing or any glittering side quests: I’m here to churn out pages on my next book and I’m taking the gift of this time extremely seriously, not just for myself but also for what I am asking of my family. I have already missed all the back-to-school events, I missed the last week of summer break, I missed Leo’s last day of daycare. Today I am missing Ilan’s first day of fourth grade, and Ada’s first day of second. Tomorrow I am missing Leo’s first day of Pre-K, his first day at his big-kid school. The kids are resilient; my mom has come to help for as much as she can, leaving this week; and my husband Tom is the best. Before I left I had a meltdown, crying with grief at how much I’ll miss my kids, the bedtimes and breakfasts, the daily gossip and bickering and the many silly jokes. He listened, and said that I have already sacrificed so much for our family, that the kids are old enough, and that he doesn’t want me to be “another woman in history who abandons her dreams because her dipshit husband can’t take care of his own children.” We laughed. It helped.

I’ll save more meaningful reflections until the end of my residency, but I wanted to share a little behind-the-scenes pictures of where I’m staying:

My Quarters: “Prairie View”

There are four buildings at Ragdale that house residents: the historic Ragdale house is home for writers; the Barnhouse has administrative offices, the main kitchen and dining room where residents gather for dinner prepared by Chef Linda, live/work studios, and bedrooms for visual artists with separate studios; the Sybil Shearer Studio house, a building with two sound-proofed live/work studios for a dancer and a composer; and the Hart House, a former private residence with live/work studios and a full kitchen.

I’m in Hart, in the room that I’m told is their preferred place to house cartoonists: we might need more space than a prose writer, but we have less specialized studio needs than many visual artists (like, no need to worry about fume ventilation, or floor drains, etc).

There are two rooms in my suite: a spacious bedroom with a large desk facing the prairie, and an attached sunroom with another large desk. I dragged a comfy white armchair from the bedroom into the sunroom, so my sleep space is as separate as possible from my thinking/reading/working space. It’s *perfect.*

Shaw Prairie

Every night after dinner I walk the prairie. I’ve done some writing in my book about how prairie feels like home, as a Texan who put her taproot deep in Illinois, and being here anchors that fact even deeper in my heart. All y’all can have the mountains and idyllic forest glades, the lagoons and coves; I’ll take the tall grasses that obscure the earth a foot beyond your feet but serve the sky on a platter. I’ll take the sound of the wind and the need for fire to burn it all down every now and then. That’s my home.

More later, but I’ve already spent too much drawing time here on my computer. Back to it!

xo m

PS: I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks while drawing, and my favorite from this last week was The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. Aaah!