Real Time, Residency Time

I'm just coming back to real time after nine days in residency time. That's another way of saying my relationship to the clock is still in flux. In residency time a day seems to mean a week--that much is packed into a 14-hour day. And when you're done, and when you count up the hours of classroom time spent with your students, you realize: 21 hours, that was half a semester. It's a little dizzying when you think of it. That it manages to be good time as well is also another kind of miracle. Well, good is a little lax. We'll just call it serious, awake, but down-to-earth, if it is at all possible to be down-to-earth at 6200 feet. I'm talking about the winter MFA residency at Sierra Nevada College, in Incline Village, just a few hundred feet from Lake Tahoe. I imagine it will be a different experience when we get together again, in August, when the air is hot, jet skis and power boats must be tearing across the surface of the cold, cold lake. This time it snowed and snowed, temps went down to minus -15 one night. I spent a lot of time looking for bears, looking at the snowpack for tracks, but I never saw one. Probably I was trying too hard. There are 400 or so living around the shores of the lake, and they are much beloved by the locals, well, at least some of the locals, who believe the human/bear coexistence is a happy thing.

It's sunny. It's snowing.

Out the window of the dorm.

A fed bear is a dead bear. Alas.

Alexi Zentner, me, Brian Turner. Against hallucinatory wallpaper.

The Prim Library, where I taught my workshop.

Bikes in snow.

Sunny, a local bear, who came to a sad ending. But that is another story.