Sunday I went to Nilofer's to join Sujata, Satya and Lakshmi. We were saying goodbye to Sujata, who leaves in a few weeks to go to India for several months on a project. Exciting for her; sad for us. I do wish now that I'd taken some time long ago to apply for a Fulbright; the timing just never quite worked out, and now I'm not willing to go for such a long stretch. Maybe in the future.
I'm partly thinking about going away just because I'm finishing up reading the Headlands' apps, which means that I've been reading all these cover letters extolling the virtues of intensive writing time in a community of artists -- they do make it sound good! :-) If I could, I might go back in time and apply for this myself; Kev's planning on a semester at Berkeley next fall, and it would be awfully nice to be in Marin at the same time. Ah well...I've never really thought seriously about applying to artist residencies, though it does seem like there are quite a few interesting ones out there. Something to think about in the future.
It's not easy judging these applications, by the way. Most of the writing coming in is quite good, and it's very difficult to judge prose against drama against poetry -- never mind judging the subtler aspects, like lyrical against language poetry. In the end, I think I mostly have to go with what seems both exceptionally well-written and what stays with me -- this morning I'm going through the winnowed-down stack of applications to select the ones that I've remembered and been moved by. I don't know if this is the best way to judge the applications to the residency, but it's the best I can think to do. So here goes...