Sunday, October 3, 2021

A Gift from Larry

Caitlin Thornbrugh

Kansas City & Boston
July 2021

A Gift from Larry
On Wednesday mornings in Pickens County there is a mile long flea market. I didn’t measure, but it feels like the tables of cowboy hats and peaches and shampoos and cabbages and antacids and guns laid out in a line, would reach back to Kansas where I’m from or Boston where I’m going after Rensing. I walked the Pickens Flea like a new duckling, following Ellen, our intrepid leader and residency director, who takes us straight to her shrimp guy. He drives them in fresh from the coast. My fellow perusers were an artist, Rachel, searching for objects to transform into cameras, and Jessi, who was not a huge fan of crowds, but lended a gentle eye and presence. 
I found myself in Pickens based on a recommendation from a fellow writer, an Irish poet named Lawrence O’Dwyer, who I call Larry. While at Rensing, he lived and wrote in the same Guest House I was now living in and encouraged me to apply. You can read his post on this same blog from October 2018 on butterflies and the beauty of the Guest House’s porthole window. There is a comfort and beauty to sitting where Larry sat in 2018, looking out the same window, and I think of all the other writers who have also created here. In Larry’s post, he wrote, “Windows and studios are just structures – it’s who makes them and opens them up to this kind of work that’s important.” I am quoting this here, because it’s Ellen and the welcoming village she has helped to build that make Rensing a place that fosters creativity and community. When I first stepped out of the car to meet Ellen, my glasses fogged up from moving out of the air-conditioning into the hot, humidity of a southern summer. She smiled and said, “Yes, you’re a gift from Lawrence.” 


I was at the residency to return to a book I started more than two years ago. A book about water, about rivers, about the body, about love. A lot of the writing work that needed to happen was opening, organizing, reordering, culling, filing. The work of a puzzle, but one that often feels like it is made of liquid. Elusive and waiting to be poured. Rensing makes this puzzle work possible. I looked through the porthole window and began typing. 



No comments:

Post a Comment