Fai da te!
or, do it yourself
As I mentioned, I went on an artists’ retreat this past summer. It’s a regular retreat run by Chris Simpson, but this year it was in a new place. And I’m not an artist in the sense that I imagine Chris intended when he was finding artists to join in, but I was in the right place at the right time, I had creative work that I needed to do, and I thought I could be useful (for example, I was the only driver1, and though the town is close by, there were other places people were likely to want to see, like the local sculpture park, and, you know, Florence).
When we got back, Chris asked us all what work we wanted to exhibit for the show. I finished my first draft of a novella, Six Mile Store; I didn’t want to exhibit the novella (though the other writer, Emma Roper-Evans, did exhibit the Decameron-style tales she had written). I had intended to write a horror/mystery pamphlet starring all of my fellow artists, but I did not have the time or the brain. So I printed out some photographs I took, as well as some excerpts from Six Mile Store.
But the rest of the work. My goodness. These artists are so brilliant, so creative. Their work is thoughtful, moving, beautiful, disturbing. I didn’t take all of these photos, and these are not all of the photos I want to put here. But maybe you can get a feel for it.
So all of the above is a taste of something each of us created, though the larger meaning is lost in every small snapshot, and these limited photographs go no way at all toward giving you an understanding of the little heaven in which we at Fai da te! found ourselves for two weeks in 2024.
Would we have developed discord, or loved each other less, if we had stayed for two months, or two years? I don’t know. I do know that two weeks was enough to change my life, and to build the kind of friendships that I thought were impossible to find in adulthood.
I did screw this up one time in the residency. I finished my work for the day, went downstairs, had a pastis, had another pastis, and on my third pastis we all realized there was no water. I obviously couldn’t drive at that point, so people had to walk to fetch a bunch of bottled water. Extremely not ideal.
Love this