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FAWC

    ARTIFICE

    Hovering Between Nature and Culture

    The artists in FAWC’s group exhibition have an elusive grasp on the natural world

    By

    Nature isn’t always natural, suggests the Fine Arts Work Center’s summer exhibition, “To Move a Mountain.”

    Coady Brown, an artist who curated the work by nine former FAWC fellows, writes in the exhibition statement about flowers as romantic symbols. She includes one of her own flower paintings in the show — a simple bouquet against a background the color of a faded yellow highlighter. The synthetic color and Brown’s stylized brush stokes divorce these flowers from nature. Jagged forest-green shapes describe leaves, but they are not a realistic description of foliage. These leaves and flowers belong more to the language of abstraction and painting — the domain of culture.

    Bouquet #15 by Coady Brown. (Photos courtesy Fine Arts Work Center)

    Of course, many aspects of nature — including flowers, vegetables, parks, and animals — have long been controlled, domesticated, and poeticized by humans. This exhibition highlights that mediation and suggests that when we look at an artwork depicting something from the natural world, we’re not really seeing nature in any pure sense but rather a reflection of our culture.

    The exhibition, spread across two rooms in the Hudson D. Walker Gallery, is sparse. Colorful paintings dominate, but there is also sculpture, photography, and drawing. The first room is anchored by two large-scale works, a painting by Dani Levine and a charcoal-and-pastel drawing by Alina Perez. Both works are landscapes, in a sense, but their colors are decidedly synthetic. The landscapes in these paintings are not records of specific places but rather springboards to explore sexuality, kitsch, and abstraction.

    Edgeways by Dani Levine.

    Perez’s painting depicts a sleeping mermaid with her head resting in the lap of a nude woman. The setting sun, aqua blue water, and roses in the foreground knowingly evoke a kitschy, sentimental visual language — the sort of thing you might see airbrushed onto a beach towel. Perez’s soft touch and her use of pastels further this association. The idealized curvy figures of the two women belong to a similar world — they’re more pinup girls than observed bodies. The elements of this picture are codes of human aspirations for escape and fantasy.

    I Am the Orchid, and You Are the Sun by Alina Perez.

    Levine’s painting is nearly abstract, but there’s reference to the landscape in a patch of blue sky and a shape that arises like a sail. For Levine, the landscape is an armature to explore material concerns — each element of this painting is created with carefully chosen pigments, mediums, and grounds to evoke different qualities of airiness and density.

    Like Perez and many other artists in the exhibition, Levine also uses the landscape as a setting for asserting identity. The orange shape rising upward is an abstracted labrys, a double ax adopted as symbol of lesbianism. It’s her sail — or flag — planted in the landscape.

    Cheyenne Julien and Lamar Peterson also insert depictions of their communities in bucolic settings, subverting the notion of the pastoral as a white space. Peterson’s painting belongs to a recent series by the artist depicting black men in gardens. In Untitled, a man sits cross-legged on a blanket in the grass surrounded by flowers, mushrooms, butterflies, and images of animal’s heads. Purple mountains lie on the horizon; fluffy clouds and a cheerful sun hang in the cerulean sky. The high-key color, flattened space, and outlined objects suggest coloring books and children’s drawings. In this painting, the garden is a product of the imagination — a cultivated space of innocence and escape — and a cultural domain where Peterson’s African American men can rest, free from any cultural expectation of them as urban and beleaguered.

    Untitled by Lamar Peterson.

    Julien is an artist living and working in the Bronx. In her figurative paintings and drawings, she uses humor, exaggerated features, and dramatic color to comment on urban life. In her painting in this exhibition, she depicts a curvy woman in a thong bikini from a low angle — basically, a booty shot. She’s painted in black and white, but the background is an explosion of colorful flowers and psychedelic swirls. Like Peterson, Julien is bringing someone from her community into the garden, but the statement here is more uneasy, the connection more tentative and humorous.

    Untitled by Cheyenne Julien.

    In Sno Cones for Us … Sno Cones for You …, Pat Phillips melds a variety of painting and drawing languages in a collage-like composition. Echoing Peterson’s work from across the room, this painting has a pair of flat, cartoonish characters but also realistic renderings of chairs and oversized hands drawn with charcoal. The spirit of collage runs through this exhibition, although none of the works is an actual collage. Widline Cadet’s image of two hands holding a bouquet of flowers uses flash photography and a patterned backdrop to create a stilted, artificial connection between the elements in the image, in much the same way that Brown paints each flower in her bouquet with a distinct gesture, thereby eschewing any sense of a unified whole.

    Sno Cones for Us … Sno Cones for You … by Pat Phillips.

    In Phillips’s painting, artifice reaches a climax. We’re in the suburbs here, nature has been eclipsed by the synthetic, and it’s not pretty: the painting, which appears to be made on a stained dropcloth, is littered with images of plastic and metal chairs, empty pizza boxes, a shopping cart, and the ultimate consumerist perversion of anything natural and nourishing: sno cones.

    An Echo of Gratitude by Widline Cadet.

    If Phillips’s work is at one end of a spectrum ranging from the natural to the artificial, Raul De Lara and Anina Major are at the other end. Their pieces, more than any other in the show, feel earthy and relatively free from intrusions of human culture. De Lara used walnut and oak to create a sculpture of an oversize leaf. The circular grain of the wood mirrors the leaf’s organic shape, and there’s a clear parallel between the subject and material — both are sourced from trees. But look closely, and you’ll notice the leaf is affixed to the wall with a wooden bolt. Industry can never quite escape the frame.

    Monstera by Raul De Lara.

    Major’s ceramic sculpture Solitude hangs about two feet from the ground, suspended by rope and a chain from the ceiling. The spiky ball looks like a giant sea urchin. It’s covered with glazes in earth colors — white, black, grayish blue, and yellow ochre — that drip down the way water might fall from an object arising from the sea. That feeling of it lifting from the sea is also suggested by the rope, which transitions from blue to white as it stretches upward, holding the sculpture like it was caught in a net.

    Solitude by Anina Major.

    The suspension of Major’s sculpture — both physically and metaphorically — encapsulates the tension between nature and artifice in this exhibition. These objects come from the natural world but can never really belong to it. They’re suspended above it, maybe reflecting something of nature but only through the lens of human culture and creativity.

     

    Unnatural Nature

    The event: “To Move a Mountain,” group exhibition of former FAWC fellows
    The time: Through Aug. 22
    The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    Elena Kovylyaeva’s Creative Wandering

    Looking at things that have been thrown away and waiting for something to happen

    By

    When Elena Kovylyaeva arrived in Provincetown in October as a Fine Arts Work Center visual arts fellow, many of the shops in town were getting ready to close for the season. They were discarding unsold and unwanted merchandise in trash bins and side alleys along Commercial Street.

    Elena Kovylyaeva looking through items she found in Provincetown. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    “All this cheap plastic stuff shipped here for the short summer tourist season, and then it’s thrown out,” says Kovylyaeva. “That’s what I’m interested in.”

    Her studio at FAWC holds some of these throwaway items arranged in rows or piled haphazardly. They include Styrofoam heads; velvet décolletage necklace displays; boxes of plastic stands for sculpted crystals; faux-ivory Buddha heads with red tassels; small decorative mirrors; and deflated, brightly colored pool floats.

    Elena Kovylyaeva’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    Kovylyaeva was born in Belovo, Russia in 1991, just as the dissolution of the Soviet Union was taking place. At five, she moved with her family to Düsseldorf when the German government opened its borders to ethnic Germans from the former U.S.S.R. After high school, she studied in Berlin and Leipzig before moving to Baltimore, where she received an M.F.A. in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I never lived anywhere for more than two or three years,” she says. “There’s not really a home that I can return to.”

    Kovylyaeva’s creative path has been equally circuitous. When she moved to Berlin at 19, she studied film and comparative literature, although she says she always wanted to be a visual artist. “I was very shy. I needed time to grow up,” she says. “I don’t think you have much to offer when you’re that young.” In 2014, she enrolled in the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, where she specialized in painting and graphic arts. Her schooling in Leipzig was academic and very traditional. “We did life drawing full-time for a few years, every day, all day,” she says. Eventually, Kovylyaeva left figurative artwork behind for a practice more rooted in abstraction and concerned with surface quality and found objects.

    Drawings by Elena Kovylyaeva from life-drawing sessions at Provincetown Art Association and Museum. (Photo by Chet Domitz)

    In the middle of her studio, arranged on the floor in a grid, are 112 postcard-size lenticular photos of Las Vegas. They depict images of buildings from the Strip that she found, oddly enough, in Provincetown.

    “I want to do something with this stuff,” Kovylyaeva says, but at the moment she’s not sure what. “I just have to stare at things for a long time and wait for something to happen. I’ll look at them more and just move them around.”

    This extended process of looking includes making as few decisions as possible. “The decisions,” she says, “are based on what the material itself can or cannot do. That’s why the decision isn’t coming from me deciding what I want or having an idea in advance.”

    In Baltimore, Kovylyaeva made art by soaking fabric and paper with plaster. The images weren’t rendered. Her hand was largely absent. Rather, she let the material process do the work of building abstract, topographical surfaces.

    Elena Kovylyaeva came to FAWC expecting to find inspiration in nature. Instead, she was drawn to the cheap plastic tourist items that shop owners left on the street during the off season. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    In Map, she built an image (or is it an object?) with layers of plaster, which simultaneously suggests earthly terrain, architecture fragments, and skin. The visual experience is important to Kovylyaeva as a painter, but she’s just as interested in the haptic, tactile quality of the material. “Perception enters through two different senses at the same time,” she says in her artist statement, “that are combined into something in between — touching with the eyes, looking through the hand.”

    Map, ink, acrylic, oil, paper, plaster, and fabric by Elena Kovylyaeva.

    Kovylyaeva’s interest in this relationship between the tactile and the visual is also evident in Bones, a work made from diamond-shaped metal scraps. The title refers to Kovylyaeva’s use of the discarded “bones” of someone else’s project (she found this material in an abandoned factory in Baltimore). The sharp edges and pinkish colors, like raw flesh, evoke castoff bones after the meat has been devoured. The tips of this piece are perceived as sharp through touch and sight.

    Bones, plaster and oil on found metal objects by Elena Kovylyaeva.

    Making art from the scraps of a metal workshop was a turning point for Kovylyaeva. “That’s when I started using found things in my art,” she says. “I’d play around with them. The pieces themselves were defining the form and shape and the direction of the work. I didn’t have to decide.”

    In Provincetown, Kovylyaeva made her first major piece with a Risograph printer at FAWC. She was interested not in using the printer itself but in the discarded master pages that a print job produces. In a Risograph, plastic sheets soaked in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink are used to layer colors and make a print. Afterward, they’re thrown away. Kovylyaeva retrieved the discarded sheets from the trash, put them between blank newsprint, and then used a roller to transfer the remaining ink from the sheet to the newsprint.

    Riso master pages affixed to a studio wall. (Photo by Chet Domitz)

    Titled Remnants, this work examined the intersection of materiality and memory, says Kovylyaeva. Repetition was part of the process. The visual remnants of each sheet faded even more each time it was used.

    In addition to working with found materials, Kovylyaeva has spent time returning to an earlier creative practice. Affixed to her studio wall are images from life-drawing sessions at PAAM. As an art student, she says, she rebelled against this sort of work, but adds, “I always enjoyed life drawing. It’s similar to walking around and finding materials. You’re really in the moment. It’s actually pretty abstract thinking to translate shapes into lines.”

    A tabletop view of a pile of newsprint with ink from Riso master pages in the artist’s studio. (Photo by Chet Domitz)

    Kovylyaeva’s experience of Provincetown has affected her thinking about what comes next. When she returns to Germany, she’s not likely to settle in Leipzig. “I like that Provincetown is so far away from everything,” she says. “I have always lived in cities, and I found it nice to be far away from all of that. Right now, I don’t know where I’m going to choose.”

    In her artist statement, she writes, “Searching for clues to inform my next piece, the act of looking itself becomes my grounding — the creative wandering a substitute for home when home is hard to find.”

    Sharp Edges, No Decisions

    The event: A showcase with Mengwei Ma, Elena Kovylyaeva, Carlos Arturo Zerpa, Kevin Fitchett, and Sara Martin
    The time: Friday, April 18, 5 to 8 p.m.
    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    HALF-REMEMBERED

    Mengwei Ma Blurs the Bounds of Reality

    A filmmaker fills the gaps with feeling and memory

    By

    On a Sunday afternoon in the cold, milky light of late March, Mengwei Ma, a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, is making a film in the Province Lands off Snail Road. Cherrie Yu, another FAWC fellow, lies in the dip behind the first dune, pretending to sleep. Wind lifts white poplin. Cold numbs bare feet. The horizon looks a little off, like something half-remembered.

    In the dunes in Mengwei Ma’s new film, Cherrie Yu looks toward the unseen. (Film still courtesy Mengwei Ma)

    Nearby, five people move quietly, murmuring cues, steadying the boom, and adjusting camera lenses. Around them, the sand is filled with shallow craters — the aftermath of a previous 14-take scene. The mood is hushed, careful, and a little otherworldly.

    The camera, focused on Yu, starts rolling. From just off-camera, Elena Kovylyaeva calls out, “Why are you eating sand?” and then, “You don’t have to eat sand.” Yu sits up, blinks, and crawls away.

    Ma scans the playback monitor as if she’s looking for a loose thread. Her short film, Cherry and Chestnut, is still taking shape. Conceived in January in rough scratchings on parchment, it’s coming to life with help from four other visual arts FAWC fellows: José De Sancristóbal is Ma’s director of photography; Carlos Arturo Zerpa is her producer; Yu plays Cherry, the protagonist; and Kovylyaeva plays a spectral presence — her face won’t appear on screen, only her feet and her voice, with her lines to be dubbed later in Mandarin. Like much of Ma’s work, the film blurs the lines between real and imagined, ritual and routine.

    “Before shooting, I do scene work,” says Ma, which involves imagining and real-world scouting. To find this spot in the dunes, she wandered for hours the day before. “I try to think about why I’m writing this, what I’m getting out of it, what I need, how I should feel, and how I want to make people feel,” she says.

    Cherry and Chestnut begins with a simple quest: Cherry, in search of her ex’s recipe for grits, returns to the spot in the dunes where she once buried a cookbook. What she finds instead is a spirit.

    The spirit possesses Cherry and names itself Chestnut, Ma says. For one night, Cherry is someone else — the difference between the two is like the difference between “grits and sand,” Ma says, reading from the logline. “The possessed and the possession.”

    Ma’s work lingers in the in-between — where identity slips, where time folds, when language starts to fray. Her films, mostly in Mandarin, include asides and subtitles in English. What is lost in translation, she thinks, might not really be lost at all. Small gaps in language, she says, “can be filled up with feeling and memory.”

    The idea for Cherry and Chestnut came during a walk from Ma’s studio to the Provincetown library. “It was already pretty dark, and I was looking at this town,” she says. “It felt very unreal to me — like I was in a Miyazaki film or a Japanese fairy tale with European characters.”

    The mood stuck. She started thinking about ghosts, and what it means to haunt a space you don’t belong to. “If you don’t have a body, you don’t have your past,” she says. “Or maybe you have too much past from other people, so you don’t know who you are. If you find another lonely soul, maybe you just take that body.”

    She pauses. “That’s comforting,” she says, “but also very scary.”

    Ma grew up in Zibo, a city in eastern China’s Shandong province. After getting her undergraduate degree at Syracuse University, she earned an M.F.A. in film at Columbia.

    She knew she wanted to make a film in Provincetown but not about the people here. She didn’t feel close enough. She feels the distance, she says, “between the actual life here and my life.”

    That sense of dislocation, of drifting slightly outside the frame, is a theme in her earlier films. Ma’s 2024 short, something out there, was made “in memory of the spring of 2023,” the film’s dedication states. She shot it in the Beijing apartment she shared with an ex-boyfriend and their orange cat.

    Ma’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center is a place for meditation, yoga, writing, and research. It has also become a prop house, equipment room, and holding area for her filmmaking. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    In the short, Ma’s character avoids the world as it reopens post-pandemic and retreats into her private universe. In the hallway outside the apartment, she sits at a white table, drinking tea and whiskey and making excuses to people on the phone. Only when the table disappears does she realize how much it anchored her. Someone had put the table out on the street, and it was taken away. “It’s all cleaned up down there,” says her character, looking out the window. “Everything is gone.”

    Ma’s 2018 film, Que Sera Sera, was inspired by a visit to the seaside city of Weihai, China, where she reunited with Yang Zhou, a childhood friend she hadn’t seen in years. The feeling between them reminded her of Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun — a painting that casts Hopper’s model, his wife, Josephine, forward and backward at once. “He did it when they were quite old, but he painted her like how she looked when she was young,” says Ma.

    “There was something about the hotel room I was staying in,” she says of her time in Weihai. “I could see the reflections of the mountain. I felt the passage of memory. Even the color of the towel made me want to make something and have Yang act in it.” She returned to Weihai in her third year at Columbia and spent several months filming. Que Sera Sera became her master’s thesis.

    In the film, Ma plays a character wandering through Weihai watching strangers. She meets Yang, playing a character called Meng, beside a still carousel in an almost-empty amusement park. Just before the reunion, Ma’s character thinks, “Swimming, getting married, lying on the beach, or dying all feels the same in a town like this.” But reuniting with an old friend doesn’t feel the same. It is both more and less than she imagines.

    Later, the friends sit in a café and open a package Meng ordered to mark the occasion. Inside is a puzzle made from a childhood photo of the two friends. The pieces spill out between them, but they never complete it. The image in the photo is never fully recovered.

    Ma isn’t drawn to tight narrative arcs. What she wants is space — for feeling and maybe for connection. “I want to make art because I feel very lonely,” Ma says. “We’re all connected. And in playing with that relationship, you don’t feel so lonely anymore.” Slowly, the viewer realizes that the distortions in her work — pauses, translations, the strange logic of dreams — aren’t a barrier. They’re the way in.

     

    The Possessed and the Possession

    The event: Showcase and reading with Mengwei Ma, Elena Kovylyaeva, Carlos Arturo Zerpa, Kevin Fitchett, and Sara Martin
    The time: Friday, April 18, 5 to 8 p.m.
    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    ARTIFICE

    Kevin Fitchett Is at The Masters

    A FAWC fellow returns to Provincetown to write a novel about family, heartbreak, and golf

    By

    Five years ago, when Kevin Fitchett was a Fine Arts Work Center fellow for the first time, he mostly worked on poetry. Now he’s back, and fiction has taken the front seat. The reason is simple: “I’m better at it,” he says. He’s here to finish his novel, The Masters. But in Fitchett’s work, the boundaries between poetry and fiction — and his life and art — are porous.

    Kevin Fitchett at Provincetown Harbor. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    The two forms have always co-existed in Fitchett’s writing. He studied both poetry and fiction while getting a master’s in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. And during his first FAWC residency, he worked on an earlier version of the novel. Fitchett still writes a poem once a year, he says, but most of his poetry now feeds his book: “I’ll have a character say my best poem ideas in dialogue,” he says.

    The Masters follows fictional poet Ken Pritchett as he travels with his father to Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club on the eve of the Masters Tournament (which begins this year on April 10). Ken and his wife are in a trial separation, which has made him “kind of unhinged,” Fitchett says. “He calls the feeling élan,” — which means a vigorous spirit of enthusiasm. “He’s fired up. He can swim in a frigid river and not even flinch. He’s happy. And he’s horribly sad.”

    Ken has recently published a book of poetry titled Lamb-Bow after Lambeau Field, the football stadium in his hometown, Green Bay, Wisc. Poems from Lamb-Bow appear in the novel as prefaces to chapters or within the narrative, as Ken reads his work to other characters. The poems — which Fitchett has been writing and setting aside for years — also serve as a catalyst for communication between Ken and his father because, although the two “never talk,” Ken’s father reads everything his son writes. “My writing is the one medium we’ve given each other a free pass at for spreading sincerity,” writes Fitchett in Ken’s voice.

    The similarity between “Ken Pritchett” and “Kevin Fitchett” is no coincidence. The novel “could sound like my life,” Fitchett says. Like Ken, Fitchett grew up in Green Bay — “a drinking town with a football problem,” he says. The novel “takes place in the places I know. I also got divorced when I didn’t want to, and I’m good at golf.” But those parallels are balanced by plenty of departures from his experience, he says. “I’m creating an artifice, not writing nonfiction.”

    He studies other writers as he works on his fiction, and he’s careful about what he selects. “I prescribe myself stuff,” Fitchett says. He spreads a few of these prescriptions out on the table in front of him: Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock, Richard Ford’s Be Mine, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Book One. Each volume is an “apothecary vial,” Fitchett says — if he absorbs anything else, his writing will be thrown off course.

    Fitchett doesn’t usually read books that rely on action for narrative propulsion. He prefers “indeterminacy,” he says. “Characters that are constantly shifting.”

    He recalls a line in American journalist and novelist Frank Norris’s 1901 essay “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” in which Norris writes of “the drama of a broken teacup.” In Fitchett’s writing, “the drama isn’t in the fissure in the china,” he says. “It’s in why we care about breakages in general that are small compared to civil war or right whales going extinct. It’s in what was said, years before, by the person holding the cup.”

    The dialogue in The Masters opens a window on hidden tension, grief, and heartbreak. Good dialogue is of critical importance to Fitchett. It enables the reader to feel when something is about to happen — “The subconscious, coming like a big wave,” he says. “You see the little hump, and then, boom, it hits. It leaps out at you in a strange form.”

    Humor is also important to Fitchett. “The great writers, literary lighthouses, they’re always funny,” he says. “They can be wickedly funny in a quiet way.” In The Masters, Fitchett pokes fun at his characters’ “shithousery” — meaning their sometimes underhanded, “smirky” sportsmanship — as much as he exposes their deepest fears and motivations.

    But sometimes telling instead of showing is necessary: Fitchett likes when authors “grip the story and tell you why something is important,” he says. “I admire fiction with authority.” He opens Munro’s The View From Castle Rock to the short story “The Ticket” and reads aloud: “This is the story, or as much as I know of it.” A line like that can “forgive a more discursive style,” Fitchett says.

    In an early chapter of The Masters, Fitchett’s opening line is: “On the tenth hole at Wawonowin Public, my dad passed to me the only lesson he’d ever taken himself seriously enough to give.” The lesson: it’s OK to have secrets. (As the novel goes on, Ken learns that this sentiment is many-layered.) The first sentence is refreshingly straightforward, especially as that chapter proceeds into moments of mystery and opacity.

    The novel is like a mosaic, Fitchett says — fragments of imagery and scenes create a bigger picture. The imagery of golf plays a vivid part: “You can write beautiful scenes,” Fitchett says. “There’s iron and dirt and grass and this perfect white ball with crimson font.” In one chapter, he writes of a storm at the golf course: “…the western air over the clubhouse a matte and total shale, an ultrasound-like churning at the center. The club glowed under this development. Its emerald siding and white doors — the colors of Augusta National — were brittle in the sunlight coming from the still-clear east.”

    Fitchett’s novel is almost done, and he’s a ruthless self-editor: “If I have a scene that doesn’t work up to something hilarious, vulnerable, or revelatory, then I’ll cut the whole thing.” Once the novel’s finished, Fitchett says, “it has to be radiant. Otherwise, no one will publish a white guy writing about golf and getting divorced. It must be too good to refuse.”

    During his first FAWC fellowship, “I wasn’t good enough to write what I wanted to. But now I am. It just took practice,” he says. “You’re building up to a skill level, like golf. You know when you can be a professional — your scores say it.”

    It would have been horrible if he had published what he wrote five years ago, Fitchett says, “because I’d look back at it and say ‘ugh.’ ” But infinite improvement is the goal: “Maybe I’ll say ‘ugh’ forever,” he says. “I hope I do.”

    STORIES

    The Charged Fiction of Jason Ferris

    A FAWC fellow writes stories of transformation that burn like coals

    By

    Starting a short story, Jason Ferris writes the first sentence, then rearranges the words. “I’ll stare at it and stare at it,” he says, “until finally it has enough of a charge that it explodes into the second sentence.” But maybe the second sentence should really be the first. He switches them. Writing is “a constant struggle to find the music,” he says. “But once I hear that hum, I can follow it through the entire story.”

    Jason Ferris “is trying to express things not easily expressed.” (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    Ferris, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, has mainly written short stories. The energy of the form, like an opening sentence, appeals to him. “There’s an urgency in the burst of a short story,” he says. “You’re tossing something hot in the air and trying not to burn your hands.”

    Ferris grew up in Leonardtown, Md., near the mouth of the Potomac, and graduated in 2021 from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, having majored in creative writing, publishing, and editing. During his last two college years, Ferris says, “I wrote one story, then another, and another. I noticed that they all had the same narrative voice.”

    After a couple of years, he thought he was writing a collection. The stories were more cohesive than that, though — they were narrated by the same person and took place over the span of a single summer. Ferris decided to call the stories “chapters.” But that introduced the pressure of novel-writing, he says. In a novel, he says, “you’re luxuriating in the text — you’re swimming in it.”

    Ferris remembered a book he had read in 2020: Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Its nine chapters feel like a story collection, he says, but it is considered a novel. In the introduction, it’s called a “work of fiction.”

    “I loved that,” says Ferris. “It doesn’t box you in. It doesn’t circumscribe you.”

    He was writing a work of fiction, he decided. His chapters would be able to stand on their own while maintaining a larger narrative arc. He worked on his project through graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At FAWC, Ferris continues to work on it. It’s now titled Strangers by Nature.

    In addition to reading Greenwell, Ferris has been enjoying authors Alexander Chee, Justin Torres, and Carmen Maria Machado, but he didn’t start out as a voracious reader. When he was handed children’s books as a child, Ferris remembers feeling distinctly bored.

    “I thought, ‘Nothing interesting happens to these people,’ ” he says. He started writing his own stories, elaborating on the plots he found lacking. “I was a writer before I was a reader,” he says.

    In Provincetown, he’s taking a break from reading. “I had too many voices in my head,” he says. “I needed to turn the volume down and focus on just my own.” Ferris’s narrator has a particular outlook, he says, that shapes everything. Certain themes emerge: identity, relationships, sex, power.

    The story follows a young gay man, an aspiring comic artist, who has returned home to southern Maryland, “a place that’s been shaped by certain types of closeted-ness, certain types of masculinity,” Ferris says. When the narrator’s grandfather, who owns a well-known golf course, dies, the family unit shatters. The narrator, who is unnamed, remains in town, navigating frayed relationships with his family, his ex-boyfriend, and various men that enter and exit his life. “It’s a very claustrophobic book,” Ferris says.

    The main character is like Ferris in some ways. They’re both gay; they’re both from Maryland; they both have family members who are involved in running golf courses. In other ways, he says, they’re entirely different. Ferris wouldn’t call the book autobiographical; it simply borrows from his life.

    In one chapter, titled “An Effort of Opposites,” the narrator remembers tender and tense moments with his Bulgarian ex-boyfriend, Kristian. Sex is described in explicit terms, yet these scenes don’t feel gratuitous or vulgar.

    “When I first started writing stories that were toying with queerness,” Ferris says, “I was afraid to access the sexually explicit world.” In his freshman year of college, he read Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, in which much of the story is told through sexual encounters. “The book opened doors and windows,” Ferris says. “The whole house blew up.” Sex now features heavily in his writing. It’s “where things take place, where change happens,” he says. “It’s where climax happens of the sexual nature and of the story nature.”

    In that same chapter, the narrator remembers Kristian teaching him to say his name with a Bulgarian accent: “Kree…stee…yan — with that Slavic R that sounds a little like an L,” Ferris writes. “It closed a distance between us, no longer foreigners to each other.” Through learning the language, the narrator feels a connection to Kristian that wasn’t accessible through English.

    “I’ve given the narrator an obsession of mine,” says Ferris, “which is trying to express things not easily expressed. Sometimes, it’s easier to say things in a different language than your own.” Ferris, whose partner is Bulgarian, is learning the language. Saying a certain slur word for gay, Ferris says, “I feel a sting, I feel pinched. It has a charge.” But when he says the corresponding word in Bulgarian, it doesn’t evoke the same negative feeling. Speaking a different language is a way to “hold hot coals without getting burned,” he says. He tries to convey this idea in his writing.

    In another chapter, the narrator enters a strange relationship on a dating app with a man who pays for degradation. The narrator sends this man pages from his comic books, where he creates superheroes. The story considers the narrator’s and the man’s desires for transformation: “the superhero story, the queer story, the belief that something powerful lies dormant inside,” Ferris writes.

    Like the narrator’s comic-book heroes, Ferris says, queer characters can transform themselves and transcend their circumstances. “Something that has made someone’s life difficult can suddenly have incredible potential,” he says. Superpowers, or queerness, can give someone family or the ability to make other people feel important, Ferris says. “It’s the thing that makes them special.”

    When his FAWC fellowship ends, Ferris plans to stay in Provincetown for the summer. After years of moving around for school, “this is the first place I’ve been calling home,” he says. What home means, exactly, he’s not sure — he set his stories in his home state to examine that question. “When I don’t have an answer to things,” he says, “that’s when I’m writing.”

    Fellows’ Exhibition

    The event: Artists’ showcase with Cherrie Yu, Edd Ravn, Lucas Martínez, and Jason Ferris
    The time: March 7-17
    The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St, Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    ARTISTS

    Edd Ravn’s Cabinet of Curiosities

    A mud wall, privet berries, and centipede legs turn into art in a FAWC studio

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    About six weeks into Edd Ravn’s fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in the fall, he decided to smear his studio wall with mud.

    Edd Ravn gathers material for his art on walks in the dunes. (Photos by Emily Schiffer)

    “I was thinking about the idea of a white wall being this supposedly neutral zone to view an artwork,” he says. “And I was thinking, ‘What would it mean to situate this room and identify it as a place within a larger place?’ ” So, he went out to a pond in the Province Lands, scooped up a bucket of mud, and lugged it back to his studio, where he used it to turn his white wall a rich sandy brown.

    To Ravn, mud is “so evocative and deep and full of possibility.” No two muds are the same — mud from the volcanic soil of Italy is very different from the sandy mud of a Provincetown pond. “If people did this all around the world, you’d have studios of all different colors,” he says.

    A place-based approach to art defines Ravn’s work. He draws on a variety of influences in the paintings, sculptures, textiles, and salt-encrusted tree branches that will be showcased for 11 days starting this Friday at FAWC.

    The mud wall in Ravn’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center.

    Art and nature were guiding forces in Ravn’s life from an early age. His childhood home in southern England abutted a forest that he spent countless hours exploring, building “dens,” climbing trees, and making “extremely bad snares,” he says — an experience that led him to develop a relationship with those woods.

    That relationship with the natural world waned somewhat as he got older, he says. He studied art as a profession, first as an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow, then in a master’s program at Yale. While he learned a lot, his art didn’t reflect what he really wanted to make. “I was making what I thought I should be making rather than taking those steps to make the ‘me’ stuff,” he says.

    It was only after he graduated, when he spent four years as an artist’s assistant in New York, that he began to discover the art he wanted to make. His earlier connection to the natural world started to re-emerge.

    Ravn’s studio at FAWC is filled with natural materials. There’s a bucket of privet berries and melted snow on the floor, a table covered in blue jay feathers and horseshoe crabs and golden reishi mushrooms, jars of earthen pigments, and a centipede specimen with its detached legs alongside it. It feels like walking into a Renaissance-era cabinet of curiosities.

    Ravn’s studio table.

    Ravn gathers many of these finds on his walks in the dunes, which are a key part of his artistic process. “Whenever I’m outside, I’m trying to pick up on cues or lessons of things I could bring into the studio,” he says. In New York, he painted only with rainwater, while at FAWC he uses ocean water and melted snow.

    When Ravn collects materials, he usually has no clear idea of how they will become art, he says. Instead, the artistic vision tends to emerge from putting things next to each other. “I’m being constantly infected with the different shapes and textures and forms and histories,” he says. Books of Klallam poetry, Tibetan Buddhist teachings, and postwar Japanese art strewn about the room also contribute to the mixture in Ravn’s brain out of which his art appears. “Often, I’ll be making something, and then it takes me a couple of months to realize where it came from,” he says.

    One example is a collection of ash branches that he displays on his mud wall. They are bent back on themselves, and the ends are bound to the main stem with thin wire, forming dramatic looping patterns. The idea was inspired by Ravn’s mother, who is a basket weaver, but it was after he made the piece that he realized the wire binding technique exactly matches the way that tiny vines in the dunes wrap themselves around branches. “There’s definitely a form of mimicry going on here,” he said.

    While Ravn’s inspiration is organic, his work is not low effort. He will spend months learning and refining techniques like dyeing, bioplastic manufacturing, and bacterial culturing to expand his artistic repertoire. And these techniques can have impressive results — his studio has a sheet of bamboo paper that he modified to look uncannily like the bark of a beech tree. When asked how he did it, he smiles and says, “Top secret.”

    Ravn’s work is a collaboration with the Earth.

    This combination of well-studied techniques and osmosis-like inspiration is clearest in Ravn’s paintings. One is a greenish brown with splotches of purple on the edges, a large burned hole in the center, and creases throughout. The piece was painted, burned, and creased by Ravn, but he created the diffuse pattern by leaving the folded-up painting outside for days to be exposed to the elements. The result, he said, is something that he “wouldn’t be able to do with a brush.”

    Ravn says he is conscious of the environmental impact of his work. When he was in New York, he was shocked by the amount of waste involved in making art. “I have a choice at every stage of my practice to try and be more responsible,” he says, which has hardened his resolve to fight the harmful effects of globalization by collecting or growing his own materials.

    Ravn also searches for sources of inspiration in spirituality. His father is a practicing Buddhist, and Ravn himself studies Tibetan Buddhism. That religion’s conception of interconnectedness plays a big role in his work. He says he was raised in the Church of England, whose ideas about nature play a role as well, and his English, Irish, and Norwegian ancestry has encouraged him to explore those countries’ folk traditions.

    “If someone walked into the studio and they wanted to talk about pagan rituals, or postwar Japanese art, or biodynamic farming, there are so many different routes into the work,” Ravn says. “I’m super interested in the way people view my work, because it takes me a long time to even slightly understand the painting in front of me.”

    Ravn’s work is a collaboration with the Earth. His materials come from the land around him. He will set up a painting, but it’s the sun and rain and wind that give it its visual texture. And natural processes, like vines curling around a branch, become part of the art he makes.

    On a walk to the pond where he collected the mud for his studio wall, Ravn considers where his ideas come from.

    “I think if there was a genesis, it happened a while ago,” he says, as he looks out across the pond. “I don’t know if I’m working with, as some people say, a demon or a muse. It feels like I’m just building upon what’s already set in motion.”

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on March 6, stated that Ravn scooped “bucketfuls” of mud from the Province Lands. Ravn says that it was just half a bucketful.

    INTERPRETATION

    A Poet and Translator Celebrates ‘Life Cropping Up’

    FAWC fellow Lucas Martínez uses folk traditions and language as his subjects

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    Lucas Martínez arrived in Provincetown with two instruments: a charango, which is a small Andean guitar, and a classical guitar, on which he practices milonga folk songs.

    Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Lucas Martínez. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    As a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Martínez draws on lyrical traditions that include both sonnets and folk songs, though his poetry sounds distinctly modern. Milonga is a folk genre that was started by immigrants and Indigenous people working in Argentina’s port cities along the Río de la Plata. “They would have these dance parties,” Martínez says, with two guitarists playing and singing in call-and-response. That style inspired the form of some of his poems, along with variations like the payada, “almost like rap battles — off-the-cuff coming up with rhymes,” he says.

    “I wanted to be associated with these songs and culture that I was a part of but living far away from,” he says. “That I could say, ‘This is something I belong to’ in a poem — that was really exciting.”

    But he wasn’t quite satisfied by that idea. What did it mean for a poet to belong to a folk music tradition, he asks. “What legs does it have today, politically, socially, romantically?”

    Martínez also does translations, and in that realm he encountered similar questions. How can translation convey the meter and rhythm of language or preserve its cultural potency?

    For Martínez, these questions aren’t just central to the art of translation or poetry — they are the art. His poems often take the imperfection of translation as their subject. “I’ve written poems that investigate the question ‘How do you write a milonga in English?’ ” he says.

    In two poems titled “Accompanied Milonga,” he offers an answer, with stanzas organized in two columns that mimic the musical notation of guitar accompaniment. The first syllables of each line are sequenced to represent a milonga’s typical chord progressions — “mi, do, si, si, re,” for instance.

    Martínez’s interest in poetry came, in part, from songs he first heard in Claremont, Calif., where he grew up in a bilingual family that introduced him to a polyphony of musical traditions. His mother, a professional cellist from Detroit, played classical chamber music. His father, a biologist from General Las Heras, a small town in the province of Buenos Aires, loved South American folk music of all sorts. Martínez was raised on poems, milongas, and tangos with words by Jorge Luis Borges set to Astor Piazzolla’s music and South American folk songs, like “Duerme Negrito,” a lullaby popularized by guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui.

    At Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., he took a poetry class taught by Mary Szybist. He was having trouble sleeping, and he revisited Yupanqui’s lullaby. One of Martínez’s first sonnets was born in the class, with these lines: “Terrified to find out they’re all leaving you behind/ aren’t you? That they are snipping the nights/ in half and living tomorrows you haven’t dreamt of/ yet?” In the original song, Martínez says, the mother needs her child to sleep so she can work in the fields. His poem responds to a “political reality in Latin America where things like rest or sleep don’t inherently belong to you.”

    With Szybist’s encouragement, Martínez enrolled in an M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Virginia. There, he began doing literary translation. Among his first projects was translating works by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, a Puerto Rican poet and artist in residence at the Virginia Center for the Book.

    Inspired by poets like Evie Shockley, he began writing poems that called attention to their own forms. “If you’re interested in how a poem exists as a visual object on the page, you can translate more than just language but musicality as well, by using visual elements. That became part of my writing.” He started working on collage and visual poems, with slanted stanzas and clippings from other translated works.

    Grammar itself is a protagonist in one of his poems, questioning the failure of language to capture the natural world. “Grammar asks. The Mojave desert./ be more concrete explain The truth,” Martínez writes in a collage poem of translated clippings by Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and others.

    Borges remained an influence, and a contrapuntal poem titled “Considering a Latinate Question” takes a distinctly Borgesian turn. It has four columns that can be read horizontally or vertically, with different meanings conveyed each way. The first two columns are quotations from letters between two translators of Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Ben Bellit, arguing about how to accurately translate his work. The second two columns are clippings about trees and Argentina from letters between Martínez and his father.

    At FAWC, Martínez is completing a manuscript of mixed media, essays, and collage poetry. “I might be accused of being a formalist,” he says. But the charge would be inaccurate. He continues to work across literary styles, writing sonnets, collage, and free verse. One of the first poems he completed in Provincetown was an ode to David Byrne.

    Martínez has an unromantic approach to writing. “I know people who say, ‘I only write before dusk,’ but I’m not one of them,” he says.

    In a poem titled “Weed,” inspired by the writing of horticulturist Marco Wilkinson, Martínez celebrates that unpredictability. “I like the idea of a weed as a form,” he says. “This life cropping up where it’s unwanted, dealing with a relationship to a place you aren’t always in.”

    SELF-PORTRAIT

    Cherrie Yu Is a Perpetual Student

    In her multidisciplinary practice, a FAWC fellow is inspired by daily routines

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    In 2022, when Cherrie Yu was a few years out of graduate school, she landed a year-long residency at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio’s visual arts program in Dumbo, Brooklyn. But upon arrival, she says, she found she didn’t want to make art.

    A still from Daily Diversions by Cherrie Yu.

    Yu, now a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, felt burnt out from the fast pace of the previous few years: in 2013, she graduated from high school in China and came to the U.S. to study at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which led directly to getting an M.F.A. in performance studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Afterward, she moved to New York City and pushed to secure an artist visa to stay in the country. At the residency in Dumbo, Yu placed her creative output on hold. Instead of immediately making art, she says, “I started to do things outside of the studio that felt enriching to my life.”

    In the mornings, she went into Manhattan, leaving her large studio empty. She’d play ping-pong in Chinatown for a few hours, then take a Cunningham technique dance class in SoHo. She was also working for a bookbinder. “I just wanted to be around other people,” says Yu.

    In the late afternoon or evening, she’d return to Dumbo. “When I got back into my studio,” she says, “I was carrying those things with me, whether it was memories or how the experience felt in my body.”

    She arrived in Provincetown for her FAWC fellowship and began editing Daily Diversions, a short film she had recorded over the summer. The video, with no narration, is composed of scenes in which ping-pong players and modern dancers occupy the same gymnasium. They don’t interact; they’re intensely focused on their own activities.

    A still from Daily Diversions by Cherrie Yu.

    The film explores the disconnect Yu experienced. “I always think about moving back and forth between those spaces,” she says. “What does it mean to travel from one community to another, and what kind of things are being carried between them?” The two activities she filmed are studies in contrast: one is pedestrian and accessible; the other is artsy and esoteric. But the viewer is also challenged to acknowledge their similarities: the athleticism and nimble energy inherent in both and their embodiment of discipline and improvisation.

    The film also functions as a self-portrait. Yu grew up playing casual table tennis in Jiangyin, a small city on the Yangtze River near Shanghai. In New York, it was an activity that connected her to the city’s Chinese population. Yu’s development as an artist, on the other hand, happened in the U.S.

    A print by Cherrie Yu referencing dance movements.

    “I started to be confronted by the reality that my artistic voice was shaped in Western institutions,” she says. “I’m trying to figure out how to recognize that in how I choose my tools, what I read, and how I decide to make frameworks for my inquiries.” In the video, the connection between the different cultural worlds she inhabits feels tentative, like an open-ended question.

    Yu’s creative identity also straddles multiple worlds. Majoring in English in college, she was introduced to performance art by two theater professors. In her recent work, she continues to perform but also inhabits the roles of choreographer, director, researcher, and visual artist. Over the summer, Yu directed others to create her film. Here in Provincetown, her energy is more inward-focused: instead of leading large collaborative projects, she’s experimenting with different forms of visual art like printmaking.

    “I’m coming back to my artist self in this space with so many other artists,” says Yu. “It feels like a homecoming.”

    Cherrie Yu in her studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    Yu’s studio at FAWC is loosely organized into different projects. One surface is covered with prints she has been making. In one of the images, green calligraphic marks reference dance movements. Across the room, Yu has a few small gouache paintings related to Daily Diversions. A book sits on a table: The Politics of Collecting by Eunsong Kim. The center of the studio is divided into two related stations: one with a pile of film stills printed on small pieces of paper, the other loosely strewn with materials like transparent paper and wire mesh that she’s experimenting with as surfaces for projection.

    The studio is a visual representation of Yu’s curiosity. She’s a perpetual student of different art forms — new experiences are what fuel her work. Taking up ping-pong and dance after moving to New York is one example. For other pieces, Yu relies on archival film material, such as the Time and Space Concept Symposium produced by the Artist Television Network in 1978 or Trisha Brown’s dance performances from the 1980s. Typically these are pieces of history she wants to look at or listen to.

    Yu looks through film stills in her studio. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    “Part of my work is to devise different ways to engage with archives,” says Yu. “There’s almost some sort of call or something unresolved in the archives that makes me want to give it another voice.” In some of her video and performance pieces, she directs reenactments of archived events or dances, often adding humorous touches that undercut the seriousness of these historicized cultural affairs.

    For her upcoming exhibition at the Fine Arts Work Center’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Yu is again working with archival material. Hundreds of film stills piled on her floor depict different bodily movements or actions. She’s considering ways to project them.

    Yu works in multiple disciplines. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    “What is the world I want to build?” she asks. Since working in FAWC’s print shop, Yu has become fascinated by overlaps between printmaking and video projection. “I’m lifting the action outside of the frame and imprinting the image onto another surface,” she says of her in-progress video installation.

    Although the final form of her upcoming project is not yet settled, Yu trusts the process. She’s been collecting these images habitually — she likens the activity to practicing dance.

    “Before it’s anything,” Yu says, “it’s something you have to do every day.”

    Fine Fellows

    The event: Showcase with fellows Cherrie Yu, Edd Ravn, Lucas Martínez, Jason Ferris
    The time: March 7 to 17
    The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St, Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    FELLOWSHIP

    Ten Poets, Writers, and Translators Welcomed at FAWC

    Winter fellows are also visiting artists in the Provincetown Schools

    By

    The Fine Arts Work Center’s 2024-25 fellows have been in Provincetown since Oct. 1 — their orientation wrapped up last week with a thrift-shopping expedition, bonfire, potluck, and the board of trustees’ annual fellows luncheon, says Fellowship Director Thierry Kehou.

    Painter, printmaker, and cartographer Mark Adams speaks to the FAWC fellows about coastal geography and the glacial and ocean processes that helped form the Cape. (Photo by Thierry Kehou)

    Monthly “FAWC Fridays” will begin on Nov. 1. “We invite visiting artists and writers to give talks and readings,” says Kehou. “Our fellows are highly encouraged to attend those events.” Along with a lineup of nationally recognized artists, FAWC Fridays include live music and catered food. They will continue until February, when they’ll be replaced with “Fellow Fridays” — opportunities for solo exhibitions and readings by the fellows occurring every other week.

    This winter, some fellows will also be visiting artists in the Provincetown IB Schools as part of a longstanding partnership with FAWC. “The fellows are invited to partner with classroom teachers,” says FAWC Executive Director Sharon Polli. The fellows and teachers collaborate on short-term residencies from January through April, culminating in a showcase of student work. “They can be visual art, printmaking, painting, drawing, or poetry,” says Polli.

    Every year, she says, students submit poetry to the Cape-wide “Voices of Peace Poetry Contest.” Their poems focus on peace and activism. “We’ve had many winners,” Polli says, “who have worked with fellows and have gone on to become Cape-wide youth voices calling for peace and engagement.”

    The fellows enjoy a sunset sail on Cape Cod Bay aboard the Bay Lady II. From left: Lucas Martínez, Cherrie Yu, Kai Conradi, Acie Clark, Dani Levine, FAWC Administrative Director Naya Bricher, Carlos Zerpa, Edd Ravn. (Photo by Joshua Willis)

    Brief profiles of this winter’s 10 FAWC writing fellows follow.

    Acie Clark, from Florida and Georgia, is a trans poet, assistant professor in the Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing Dept. at the University of Central Arkansas, and a teacher at the Interlochen Summer Arts program. They are working on their first collection of poems and have published or forthcoming work in Shenandoah, Foglifter, Passages North, and The Massachusetts Review.

    Kai Conradi, from K’ómoks territory in Cumberland, British Columbia, is a fiction writer and poet. Conradi is a recipient of funding from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and has been published in Poetry, The Malahat Review, Grain, PRISM, and Best Canadian Stories. They are working on a novel and a poetry collection.

    From a small town in Maryland, Jason Ferris, a fiction writer and essayist, is hard at work on his first novel. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been published in Rivercraft, Essay, and Carve magazine. His writing was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, and he was a finalist in the 2021 Carve Magazine Prose and Poetry Contest.

    Kevin Fitchett, from Negaunee, Mich., is a returning fellow from 2019-20. According to his statement on the FAWC website, his novel-in-progress “follows a mediocre, almost-divorced narrative poet on his Winnebago pilgrimage to Augusta National.”

    A poet from Louisville, Ky., Parker Hobson has been published in Best New Poets, 32 Poems, and Denver Quarterly. He’s also a musician — his album Loss Program was released last month. Hobson works as a radio and multimedia producer for the nonprofit Appalshop, “a media arts collective based in the coalfields of East Kentucky,” according to his FAWC statement.

    Jiaqi Kang is from Geneva, Switzerland and now lives in Oxford, England. They are the founding editor-in-chief of Sine Theta magazine, an international creative arts publication “made by and for the Sino diaspora,” according to Kang’s FAWC statement. Kang’s work won the Wadham Rex Warner Prize in 2021 and the White Review Short Story Prize in 2022. They have been published in Joyland, The London Magazine, and TOLKA. While in Provincetown, they’re looking forward to “reading, walking, cooking, and writing little stories.”

    C. Mallon holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s especially interested in the relationship between the sounds of words and their meanings. According to her FAWC statement, her narratives focus on purgatorial places, characters damned and haunted, and landscapes arresting and hostile. Also, sometimes, “the transformative spirit of a good dog.”

    Sara Martin, a returning fellow from 2018-19, lives in Philadelphia. According to her FAWC statement, her job history is varied: “reptile care, donuts, 19th century prison tours, marine debris removal, ice cream, pet insurance investigation, libraries, urban farming, and Halloween parties.” In Provincetown, she’ll be working on a manuscript and documentary about death rituals in the United States and cultural attitudes concerning cremation.

    Born in San Bernadino County and raised in Claremont, Calif. on ancestral Tongva-Gabrielino land, Lucas Martínez is a writer and translator. He considers English and Spanish his native languages. According to his FAWC statement, he plans to spend his months in Provincetown working on translations and “a manuscript of writing that includes collage, translation, essay, and poetry.”

    Matthew Wamser, a fiction writer and essayist, is from Milwaukee, Wisc. He has an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and has published work in The Missouri Review and Salamander.

    Readings by the fellows will take place from February through April.

    FELLOWSHIP

    Here to Make Films, Explore Chance, and Paint With Rainwater

    FAWC’s visual arts fellows get a taste of the Outer Cape’s natural history

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    The 20 winners of seven-month winter fellowships at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center arrived in town on Oct. 1. As usual, the cohort includes 10 visual artists and 10 writers. They are in the middle of a “robust orientation schedule,” says Thierry Kehou, FAWC’s fellowship director.

    The 2024-25 FAWC fellows arrived on Oct. 1. Seventeen of the 20 fellows pose for a group picture. Top row, from left: Ian Page, Parker Hobson, Carlos Zerpa, Mengwei Ma, Elena Kovylyaeva, José De Sancristóbal; middle row: Kevin Fitchett, Matthew Wamser, Acie Clark, Lucas Martínez, Dani Levine; bottom row: Jason Ferris, Edd Ravn, Sara Martin, Kai Conradi, Cherrie Yu, Jiaqi Kang. (Photo by Joshua Willis)

    Kehou, a writer and translator, is himself new to Provincetown. He and his family arrived in town in June from New York City, where he co-founded the Lampblack Literary Foundation, a nonprofit supporting Black writers. He has also been director of programs and partnerships at Poets & Writers.

    Last week, cartographer, geologist, and painter Mark Adams led a coastal geology lesson for the fellows. “He showed them how the Cape came to be,” says Kehou. The fellows also went foraging for mushrooms in Wellfleet with food writer Elspeth Hay. Afterward, they made mushroom ragu in FAWC’s communal kitchen. “I could smell it from my office,” says Kehou, “which is pretty far away.”

    The orientation has also included a sunset sailing trip, movie night, and a tour of Commercial Street. “The fellows are having a blast,” says Kehou. “The orientation is grounding them in this place and its history.”

    In past years, FAWC’s visual arts fellows have largely been painters. This year, “there are quite a few fellows who work with film — still images and moving images,” Kehou says. There are a lot of interdisciplinary visual artists working in a variety of mediums, he adds.

    Brief profiles of the 10 FAWC visual arts fellows follow.

    José De Sancristóbal uses photography, film, and writing to explore the way lens-based images inform society, particularly how cameras are used to regulate and monitor citizens. His work draws both from realism and fantasy, distorting traditional ways of identification.

    Born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, Alejandro Guzmán creates works that encourage viewers to confront their relationships with structure and space. His mixed-media, geometric, sculptural works seem otherworldly yet entirely physical. Guzmán is a returning fellow from 2013-14.

    Elena Kovylyaeva is based in Leipzig, Germany. Her work has been exhibited in Germany and the U.S. Using found materials, Kovylyaeva focuses on a tactile experience — her work, mostly done in muted colors, is cracked, frayed, and folded.

    Dani Levine is an artist and educator currently living in Astoria, Queens, in New York City. Since 2023, she’s been an artist in residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. According to her artist statement on the FAWC website, Levine’s paintings “converse with queer-feminist aesthetics to explore themes of chance, agency, and resilience.”

    Born in Zibo, China, Mengwei Ma is now based in Beijing. A writer, director, and actress, Ma is currently raising money for a new short film titled A Piece of Shit. She’s also writing a feature film script and a novel. In her FAWC artist statement, Ma says that the artistic process is about “discovering the true connection between the self and the world.”

    Ian Page is interested in continuity. How does continuity reject change yet embrace progress? His sculptures, installations, and videos confront things that stay. In his artist statement, Page specifically mentions candy bars: “Why don’t they go away?”

    Zeinab Shahidi Marnani was born in Isfahan, Iran and now lives in Tehran and New York. Her work includes the disciplines of video installation, painting, and collage and explores the idea of vision and perspective. Shahidi Marnani is a returning fellow from 2023-24.

    Edd Ravn is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. According to his artist statement, his practice includes “growing bacteria, painting with rainwater, recording soundscapes, and designing public furniture to co-create animate objects that question perception, connection, and change.”

    Born in Xi’an, China, Cherrie Yu now lives in the U.S. Her work involves choreography, moving images, writing, and installation, with a particular focus on how embodied knowledge is kept and then passed on.

    Based in Caracas, Venezuela, Carlos Zerpa is an artist, creative producer, educator, and social entrepreneur. His work addresses social issues in South America and the Caribbean through storytelling. Zerpa’s scriptwriting, design, animation, and street art is “rooted in cooperation and solidarity,” according to his artist statement.

    Exhibitions of work by the visual arts fellows will be on display periodically from February through April at FAWC’s “Fellow Fridays.” Brief profiles of this year’s 10 writing fellows will appear in next week’s Independent.

     

    FACILITIES

    An Artist Under the Radar in Plain View

    Tending space for the fellows at FAWC, Jerome Greene revels in the newness of it all

    By

    Jerome Greene paints what he sees. “I paint from my life,” he says. And although he grew up in Connecticut, studied in North Dakota, and toured New England as a roadie, that life — or at least the life he’s painted — is very much a Provincetown one. His studio here is filled with harborscapes, townscapes, landscapes, seascapes, and boats, along with a few nude figurative works.

    Jerome Greene in his studio. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    Greene gets close to his subjects. He worked on Keith Rose’s fishing boat for one day to better understand what it’s like out at sea. “Hardest day of work I ever had,” he said about that day more than a decade ago. He’s both under the radar and in plain view — at the Old Colony Tap painting bands or working plein air on Provincetown’s harbor beaches.

    Greene shows his work at Egeli Gallery, not far from his apartment on Brewster Street. He’s also the facilities director at the Fine Arts Work Center.

    Sitting in a swivel chair in his studio, Greene explains some anomalies. On one wall, there’s a drawing featuring skulls piled on top of a green eye with a blue lid. “That’s going to be a tattoo for my nephew,” Greene says. There’s also a still life of Eastham turnips. He painted it 15 years ago, he says, to commemorate his hatred for turnips. More than 10 years ago, in his job interview at FAWC, Bob Bailey, who was then the work center’s facilities manager and chief engineer, asked Greene if there was anything he couldn’t do. “I can’t eat turnips,” was his reply.

    Greene painted Harry’s when he worked at the now-shuttered blues bar. The painting is in his studio. (Photo by Pat Kearns)

    Greene grew up around art. His father was a commercial artist and teacher — he painted in the same basement office where he graded papers, Greene says. “I’d sit on the stairs watching him, and he’d say, ‘Come down here, kid — what’s wrong with this painting?’ ” His father taught him to consider composition, color harmony, and perspective. “All those things are ingrained in me because they were part of my youth.”

    His father’s painting of a sugar shack hung in the house in New Britain, Conn. where he grew up. Now it hangs in Greene’s studio alongside his father’s batiks and his own work, mostly oils.

    It took him a while to be able to put his dad’s lessons into practice. At Pulaski High School, Greene was one of only two kids who were serious about art. But they were better known for tagging walls and messing up property. Greene is still grateful to the teacher who redirected the two boys’ attention with a mural project.

    Isolated Pier, oil and linen on board. (Photo courtesy Egeli Gallery)

    He followed a brother who had moved to North Dakota and landed at Bismarck State College, where he studied to become an art teacher, but he didn’t stick with that plan. Instead, after graduating in 1985 he took a job as a roadie, touring New England with the James Montgomery Band. That’s how he fell in love at a bar in Bourne and moved to Hyannis.

    Greene worked as a contractor and as a doorman at Harry’s, the beloved blues bar in Hyannis that closed for good in 2010. Instead of paying attention to his doorman duties, Greene says, he began to draw, sketching the scene. A painting from one of his Harry’s sketches now hangs in his studio, the figures in motion lit by a glowing bar sign.

    “Enough with the watercolors and acrylics,” Loretta Feeney told Greene in 1996. “If you want to be a serious artist, you need to start painting with oil.” He did.

    Provincetown Shore features Greene’s thick strokes of deep teal oil paint on the harbor. It’s an overcast day and the crimson of the American flag and rust red of a chimney play off the green stained pier. Navy and white stripes of an awning figure in the middle of the work. Houses lined up on the distant shore are rendered impressionistically.

    Provincetown Shore by Jerome Greene. (Photo courtesy Egeli Gallery)

    For a while, Greene’s art and craft skills came together in a job at a framing studio, one that refocused him on his painting. He tried running his own gallery, Jerome Greene Fine Arts, in Dennis, but in 2007 the recession was looming and business was slow. He closed up shop and headed to Provincetown, where he moved into a studio space he’d been renting for years.

    It was 2012 when Greene started working part-time as a building and grounds associate at FAWC. Now, as facilities director, he manages the center’s 30 apartments and 20 studios.

    The summer is wild, says Greene. The studios, which are occupied by the writers and artists who come to town to teach the more than 60 workshops offered at FAWC during the season, turn over every week. Then in August come the returning residencies — short-term stays for past fellows and faculty.

    A week ago, Greene says, he kicked on the heat at FAWC. Come fall, it’s his job, with help from Joe Fish and Nathaniel Doane, to make sure the place is ready for the arrival of the center’s fellows. He wants things right: “It’s one of the best and most prestigious fellowships in the world,” he says. It’s been going since 1968.

    “I have worked my whole life to be irresponsible,” says Greene. “And what do they do? They put me in the most responsible job at FAWC.”

    Somehow, Greene still makes time to paint. He is there for open figure painting sessions at Paul Schulenburg’s studio in Eastham — he helped start the group 20 years ago.

    “I love my job,” Greene says. It’s cyclical and different every year, shaped by the interests that the visiting artists and writers bring with them. “I love the newness of everything,” he says. The  10 visual artists and 10 writers who are this year’s fellows arrived on Oct. 1.

    POSSIBILITIES OF PAINT

    The Slipperiness of Realism

    A group exhibition of work by former FAWC fellows adds sparks of magic to the mundane

    By

    “Anything is possible” is written at the top of a painting by Sam Messer currently on view in “Edge Conditions,” a group exhibition of work by former visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center. The phrase appears on a sheet of paper arising from a typewriter. In an exhibition that features representational art, the phrase challenges the viewer to reconsider the visual possibilities inherent in artwork that claims to depict real things, such as the typewriter in Messer’s painting or the two figures sitting listlessly on a dock in a painting by Matt Bollinger, the show’s curator.

    The work in “Edge Conditions,” an exhibition now at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, often straddles the line between realism and abstraction. (Photos by Abraham Storer)

    The show’s title is a term in urban design that describes the junction where contrasting elements meet. Bollinger relates the concept to his experience of walking from a parking lot to a dune shack and traversing asphalt, sand, and several distinct ecosystems.

    “The works in this exhibition exist in edge conditions, junctions of contrasting elements, ideas, materials, and images,” he writes. “Some draw attention to the contrast between elements, leaving their seams visible… Others hide their joints under the illusion of continuity.”

    In Messer’s painting, the typewriter sits on a desk and dominates the composition in the manner of a portrait. Ostensibly, this is a painting of a typewriter. But Messer’s painting, like many similar ones he has painted, is not really about the typewriter. Rather, the object becomes an armature to explore the material possibilities of paint.

    In Anything Is Possible, Messer renders the white body of the typewriter by slathering butter-colored paint onto the canvas with the decadent flourish of a baker icing a cake. For its keys, he squirts out dollops of paint straight from the tube. They lie on a surface that looks like an orange fish skin, created with an oily varnish. It’s fun to observe how he renders the delicate mechanical innards of the typewriter with his heavy-handed touch.

    Anything Is Possible by Sam Messer.

    In his exhibition statement, Bollinger writes about how the parts of each painting become more than their sum. In Messer’s case, the painterly components of the work far outstrip any interest in the typewriter as an object.

    Herman Aguirre pushes the material possibilities of paint even further in a pair of meaty paintings in which he builds three-dimensional forms with globs of oil paint and oil skins. It’s unclear what these amorphous forms are supposed to represent. But there are discernable images in their midst, like flowers and a portrait, and the shadows they cast render them as physical objects, not just abstract forms on a canvas.

    Enfrente by Herman Aguirre.

    As in Messer’s paintings, representation takes second place to material play in Ezra Johnson’s depictions of stacks of sketchbooks. While Johnson works with much thinner paint, his loose gestures and casual approach to drawing locate these paintings in a territory that straddles both geometric abstraction and representation.

    Johnson’s concern with abstraction extends to his use of color, where he juxtaposes a primarily blue palette with sparse reds. Circular marks denoting the edge of a spiral-bound notebook, along with a children’s drawing on one surface, shift the image back to representation. But as viewers, we’re left on unstable ground, always oscillating between understanding the work as abstract one moment and realistic the next.

    For the artists in the show who work more solidly within the camp of representation, the edge conditions — or fissures between reality and artifice — are revealed through close looking. From a distance, works by Ellen Akimoto and Phil Whitman appear as legible pictures of everyday scenes.

    Houseplant 2 by Ellen Akimoto.

    Akimoto paints from a perspective of looking down at a houseplant. What appears as a photographic likeness of the serpentine plant unravels when one notices the ghost of a form in the background of the painting. Is it another leaf or a discarded idea? Likewise, the pot is only legible through its shape and shadow. Its surface is unrendered; it’s a wash of paint, a notation of color. Here, painting offers an opportunity to experience the passage of time and the process of something coming into being.

    Whitman paints what appear to be commonplace scenes of a red barn and children playing in a park. In Noli Me Tangere: Kensington Playground, he works with egg tempera on panel to capture the variety of color and texture in the scene. His fastidious, obsessive marks render the space with a hyperrealism that far surpasses casual observation. The marks create a reality unto themselves, dancing across the surface of the panel in all manner of movement. They sway and overlap each other in a grassy hillside; when depicting gravel, they’re measured and uniform. The picture recalls the strangeness of looking at something too closely or under a microscope.

    Noli Me Tangere: Kensington Playground by Phil Whitman.

    In his other painting in the show, Cerridwen, Whitman pays close attention to overlooked details like vines growing out of a gutter and the variation in color among shingles on the roof of a barn. Two abstract forms hang on the barn doors. They could be images, like Midwestern barn quilts, attached to the surface of the doors. But they could just as likely be abstract aberrations from the artist’s imagination.

    The slipperiness of realism surfaces in many of the other works in the exhibition, including James Stanley’s tender portrait of his daughter. The tight rendering of her face and strands of hair gives way to a background painted in lush swirls of purple paint. Anne Clare Rogers’s sculpture Weathervane depicts a leg made of paper and human hair. The hairs protrude from the surface of the sculpture with a creepy, lifelike accuracy. But the illusion falls apart upon close inspection: what appears as skin is paper, and the leg tapers off before a foot is rendered. There’s more at play here than mere illusionism.

    Dreaming Child by James Stanley.

    Whereas realism can often be perceived as stodgy or academic, reality becomes a fertile territory for creative possibility in “Edge Conditions.” In the process, the show reorients us to our reality, making us see the world anew — or, at least, through the eyes of someone else.

    Bollinger’s painting of two figures smoking and drinking Slurpees by a lake could easily have been a banal and unglamorous image of suburban ennui. But he elevates the scene through a dramatic, almost ecstatic use of color. “Anything is possible” guides Bollinger’s formal decisions, adding a spark of magic to the mundane.

    ‘Edge Conditions’

    The event: An exhibition of work by former fellows of the Fine Arts Work Center
    The time: Through Aug. 23 in Provincetown; Sept. 6-8 in New York City
    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown; The Armory Show, 429 11th Ave., New York City
    The cost: Free (Provincetown); $57 (Armory Show general admission)

    SPIRALS

    A Poet’s Prose

    Lindsay Miles is using her FAWC fellowship to write outside her comfort zone

    By

    Lindsay Miles, one of this winter’s Fine Arts Work Center fellows, doesn’t feel comfortable calling herself a writer. “I think I’ll be 80 and I’ll still be unsure of the titles that I should use for myself,” she says. A refusal to be pigeonholed and an awareness of the way that labels can consign and circumscribe is evident in Miles’s current book-length essay project, which refuses to sit neatly in a singular literary genre.

    Fine Arts Work Center fellow Lindsay Miles has pivoted from poems to essays during her time in Provincetown. (Photo courtesy Lindsay Miles)

    Though Miles began as a poet and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Edeltraut (Anstruther Press, 2022) and A Period of Non-Enforcement (The Operating System, 2019), she wanted to use the FAWC fellowship to challenge herself to write prose.

    “I wanted a little bit of a buffer around the language because I feel like a poem is just so condensed and distilled,” she says. “I was craving a bit more expansiveness. Prose has the ability to give you that.”

    Miles describes her essays as written in the style of a “poet’s prose.” It’s heavily image-driven, lyrical, and generally non-narrative, progressing from images to personal stories to history to philosophical ruminations. Miles says she gleans inspiration from the writers Anne Boyer, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Renee Gladman — all of whom work at the edge of numerous genres including poetry, critical theory, and creative nonfiction.

    Miles’s project revolves around the theme of self-pity. She says numerous threads spring from that: gender, alcohol, grief, bugs, spirals (both metaphorical and literal), and more. Miles says there wasn’t a particular moment she decided to tackle the subject of self-pity. Instead, she has long been fascinated by its complexity.

    “It’s both a feeling and a judgment of a feeling,” she says. She adds that self-pity is loaded with religious and gender-based implications.

    For Miles, who is based in Toronto, the quiet of a Provincetown winter has allowed her to focus more deeply on this ambitious project. “I’m coming from a city of three million,” she says. “But in Provincetown, there’s no honking, there’s no person screaming outside your window.” The environment has also worked its way into her writing. She says that she’s used the geology of the land and beaches here as inspirations. The recurring theme of spirals in her essays — both physical ones in the environment and emotional ones within us — comes from living on land that literally spirals. “Place is always a part of the writing,” she says. “Provincetown is there in the work.”

    Miles says she’s been following a daily routine during the seven-month fellowship. She’s a morning writer. She wakes before eight and immediately heads to her books and the blank page, alternating between reading and writing till noon. The afternoon consists of more reading; anything that gets done in the evening is a bonus. To Miles, reading isn’t a distraction from writing but a central element of the process. It replenishes her language and keeps her inspired. “I very much agree with a lot of writers who say reading is writing,” she says.

    Miles says she is grateful for the opportunity to write and read uninterrupted, without the time-bound obligations of a job or commitments back home. In addition, the other fellows, the FAWC staff, and the local community have all made her feel less lonely than she initially worried she would be, moving from a big city to quiet, wintry Cape Cod. The main challenge of living in Provincetown? “I really miss fast food,” she says. “I miss it so much. I dream about McDonald’s cheeseburgers.”

    Her venture into prose is both daunting and exciting. “Like any creative project that’s at its beginning, it’s a bit unwieldy at this moment,” she says. Yet she is excited to share what she has been working on thus far. There will be an opportunity for that when Miles reads from her work as part of the first fellow showcase of the season this Friday, Feb. 9 at FAWC from 5 to 8 p.m. Fiction fellow Avigayl Sharp will also give a reading of her work, and visual arts fellow Jeff Gibbons (profiled in the Feb. 1 edition of the Independent) will show and discuss his multimedia works.

    Miles is looking forward to continuing work on her essays and says she’s not going take any of the time for granted. “Being here has been a kind of dream,” she says. “It’s so rare to get this length of time to just pour into your creative projects.”

    TRAGIC LITTLE SOBS

    The Internal Contradictions of Avigayl Sharp

    A FAWC fiction fellow navigates between the real and the absurd

    By

    A wave of doubt rolls through fiction writer Avigayl Sharp moments before she meets the page. “Writing is scary for me because I go in with absolutely nothing,” she says. “I start working on a story — I’m working on a novel right now — and I go in just with nothing. I have no idea how something is going to come out of nothing!”

    Fine Arts Work Center fiction fellow Avigayl Sharp. “I don’t have a plot,” she says. “It’s totally dark, and then slowly I can see one step ahead.” (Photo by Pat Kearns)

    Sharp’s fiction is absurd yet entirely believable. Her narrators seem to be in line to the bathroom without actually having to go. The stakes are high — even on a seemingly normal day.

    “My work deals in a line between the real and the absurd,” she says. “There’s tragicomedy, and an interest in contradictions.”

    Sharp is working on her book as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The novel follows a woman who, under mysterious circumstances, takes a job as a temporary replacement for an English teacher at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town. Elements of the woman’s past come back in oblique ways.

    She becomes preoccupied with the life of one of her students, while parts of her own adolescence start to emerge. She compulsively reveals stories from her past to her students as well as people she meets.

    Sharp says she did not think the novel would be set in a small town on the coast until she arrived in Provincetown.

    “I didn’t want to write about New York,” she says. “I wanted to write about a surreal, nonexistent place, a place not quite in reality.”

    She is interested in characters who, haunted by their pasts, are failing to grow up. They are often confused as to whether they are the victim or the aggressor.

    “This perpetual haunting of the past ends up being projected onto real children,” Sharp says. “There are parts of people that are very young and very monstrous.”

    She tends to write about women who are “behaving badly,” she says. “One’s past lives on in bizarre ways — we enact things later in life.”

    Sharp’s stories are about the lives of tragic characters who are rife with internal contradictions. Her narrators struggle with self-control. They are bored people who have no sense of their own authority. They are wildly anxious — popping Xanax and eating roast beef. Their parents have had it with them. They are too smart for their own good and failing miserably at life.

    Her writing takes a contemporary and absurdist approach to the 19th-century Russian literary concept of the superfluous man. Except that her characters are women — talented and capable but struggling to fit into social norms.

    Sharp grew up in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood, “those brick development townhouses — an arid, historyless part of Chicago,” she says. She had a solitary childhood. “I was this Jewish kid at a Catholic elementary school in downtown Chicago. I wasn’t taught by nuns, but there was Mass.” She recalls folding her arms across her chest to convey the message that she was not to receive the blessed sacrament.

    “We didn’t have any family in the city,” she says. “I was quite lonely growing up, so I ended up reading a lot.” When she was little, her dad read The Count of Monte Cristo aloud to the family.

    “I was also reading Twilight — eating that up.” She read fantasy novels like Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. “That was huge for me as a child,” she says.

    “I think I wrote in the way creative, lonely kids write,” Sharp says. “I was reading Russian literature early.” Her mother had her reading Anna Karenina when she was 11.

    Sharp’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors who returned from the camps to Vilnius in Soviet Lithuania. Her mother came to the U.S. to study classical music at Juilliard in the 1970s. Growing up, Sharp studied violin and piano. She sang seriously and loved choir.

    “Do not be a musician,” her parents told her. “It will not be a secure life.” She decided to be a writer.

    Sharp says her older sister is a jujitsu instructor and fact-checker who has worked for The New Yorker.

    Sharp has a B.A. in English from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. At Wesleyan, she studied with Salvatore Scabona, Brando Skyhorse, and Tiffany Yanique. She cites Sally Bachner’s The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962-2007 as having an outsize influence on her literary thinking. “I took every class with her,” she says.

    Her thesis adviser at Michener was Elizabeth McCracken. Covid hit during Sharp’s final semester and work on her M.F.A. went remote. Sharp moved back to New York, and she finished the degree from her friend’s converted office in Brooklyn.

    Last year Sharp won the Disquiet Literary Prize for her short story “Animals After Dark,” which was published in Granta. The story centers on Ms. Stern, “an adult woman without a savings account, high on Adderall, status-obsessed, getting fat from a diet of jelly donuts and pre-packaged cold cuts,” writes Sharp. Ms. Stern finds herself in a series of minor social disasters.

    “The narrator is super bright, but it doesn’t seem to be helping her,” says Gerard Breitenbeck, a jurist for the Disquiet competition. “The world that she’s in is absurd, but her reactions don’t seem like she’s crazy. Everything is askew.”

    Sharp’s prose keeps up a fast pace, stopping and starting each time Ms. Stern changes her mind, leading to laughs and tragic little sobs.

    Her writing requires a lot of “revving up,” she says. “I really start with a voice — I’m trying to find the texture of a voice that feels real and alive. I’m looking for something that feels like it’s touching something real.” The process requires waiting. It can take Sharp a long time, but once she hears the music of a voice and the way the voice is shaped, other pieces start to follow.

    “I don’t have plot — I don’t have those things in advance,” she says. “It’s totally dark, and then slowly I can see one step ahead.”

    Her practice requires faith: “You have to believe you’re going to see it all in the end even if you can’t see it while you’re working.”

    Sharp works six days a week. She writes in the morning after putting her phone into a white lockbox on her bookshelf. She sets a timer on the lockbox and works for four hours. “I can’t stop telling people about the lockbox,” she says.

    She pays for an app to block the internet on her laptop. “I have no self-control,” she says. “It’s amazing the gadgets you purchase to stop you from using your gadgets.”

    Sharp doesn’t always spend the entire four hours writing. She might sit at her desk or walk a mile along the beach to Truro, depending on the tide. In the afternoons, she reads and makes soup.

    “I’ve loved being here because I have this pure time,” she says. “The days sort of bleed into each other, and it’s like you’re almost never not in the work in a certain way. I love it.”

    She says she writes a paragraph and looks at it for eight days. “I like slowly moving forward, then backward — then forward or backward,” she says. “Making adjustments — sometimes I have a negative word count for days, which is sad.

    “I try to go all the way in my writing,” she says. “In my real life, I’m a very fearful person — I’m a coward. I want people to like me. I think in my work — it’s the place where I have to not be afraid. It’s the place I look truth in the eye, even if it’s terrible.”

    Her stories feel deeply personal and alive. But “none of this actually happened,” she says before disappearing down Pearl Street.

    ARTISTS AND WRITERS

    New Kids on the Block

    20 fellows arrive at the Fine Arts Work Center

    By

    On Pearl Street in Provincetown, the Fine Arts Work Center’s new fellows are settling into their apartments and studios. For now, the spaces are all but empty. The white, unadorned walls of the studios are the blank canvases on which the visual art fellows will create new projects over the next seven months. A writer’s dining room table, empty except for an orchid and a bunch of bananas, is the waiting surface on which all sorts of lives will be imagined.

    “It’s wonderful when the fellows finally arrive, and we show them to their studios and apartments, and they realize these beautiful, light-filled spaces are theirs for the next seven months,” says Sharon Polli, FAWC’S executive director.

    FAWC awards 20 fellowships each year: 10 to writers and 10 to visual artists. Each gets an apartment, a $1,250 monthly stipend, and an entire winter to work on whatever they want, with no obligations.

    Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, a multidisciplinary artist from Tehran, in her studio.

    Zeinab Shahidi Marnani works in the corner of her studio, taking in the room’s grand blankness, contemplating all the big things to come. Marnani, who came to Provincetown from Tehran, is a multidisciplinary artist. She holds an M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale School of Art, is a documentary filmmaker, and is currently focused on collage.

    “I appreciate being by myself; there’s no pressure,” she says, carefree but focused. “You have the time and space to work.” Her only concern going into the residency is that she will create something so large that it can’t be moved: “What if I can’t take it home?”

    Tinja Ruusuvuori listens for radio waves with a kite. (Photos by Elias Duncan)

    This is Tinja Ruusuvuori’s second year here. Every year, FAWC reserves four spots for returning fellows who get a special perk: choosing their own studio space. “I really wanted to hang something long, so I chose this one,” she says, looking up at the high ceilings in her studio, imagining the artwork she might create and then put up there.

    The airy space is a fitting environment for a documentarian who observes and takes in everyday occurrences other people might ignore. Outside her studio, Ruusuvuori, listening for radio waves with a kite, notices a chrysalis hanging between the wooden spokes on a nearby fence. “I think it’s going to be a monarch,” she says.

    Ruusuvuori says she hopes to start a radio station in the studio this winter: “People can come share whatever they want and experiment.”

    David Hutcheson returns for a second year after an initial fellowship in 2017.

    David Hutcheson’s apartment, one of the few that aren’t on FAWC’s Pearl Street campus, overlooks Provincetown Harbor. Hutcheson is a poet and returning fellow. He was last here in 2017, when he met his girlfriend, the poet H.R. Webster; this year, she remained in Hudson, N.Y. with their dogs.

    “I didn’t write for four years, and I’ve just come back to it at the beginning of this year,” says Hutcheson. “I’m pretty hungry. I know what I want to work on, and I’m excited to get to it.”

    Miguel Braceli plans to engage Provincetown’s landscape in a “community-based project” this spring.

    It’s Miguel Braceli’s first time in Provincetown. “It’s like a fairytale town,” he says.

    Braceli makes “public art projects,” ephemeral installations displayed out in the open, that often engage the bodies and movements of human beings as part of their design. For Braceli, the FAWC fellowship is “a good opportunity to understand a new place and to create a specific project about that place.” He plans to engage Provincetown’s landscape in a “community-based project” this spring.

    As for day-to-day life, Braceli is excited to have a studio close to where he’s living. “This is an opportunity to be focused only on my work,” he says.

    Molly Anders plans to complete a short story collection.

    “Sorry for the floors,” says Molly Anders, standing in her otherwise pristine apartment, the largest one on FAWC’s campus. “My partner is bringing a vacuum next week.”

    Although the apartment comes with a designated office space, Anders has set up her writing station in the living room, currently empty except for a few pieces of furniture and, of course, her thoughts. She’s already knee-deep in a short story collection that’s been eight years in the making. “Every time I add a story, another one falls out,” she says.

    For Anders, the time and space that the fellowship provides to write isn’t a luxury but a necessity. The Kentucky native says the opportunity offers her a break from working as a journalist in England. “FAWC has always been the crème de la crème of residencies,” she says, “mostly because of the amount of time you’re given to create.”

    Fellows (left to right) Grace Chao, Jack Eley, Avigayl Sharp, and Adeniyi Ademoroti walk on Pearl Street, their new home for seven months.

    In the Stanley Kunitz Common Room, other fellows — mostly the younger ones — gather for an optional viewing of Mischa Richter’s documentary I Am a Town. The film, a contemplation of Provincetown’s legacy as a sanctuary for immigrants, queers, and artists, serves as a solid introduction. After the film, they’re excited — realizing they’re about to play some part in Provincetown’s storied history.

    “It was cool to watch what it means to be here,” says Canadian writer Lindsay Miles, a mix of awe and apprehension in her voice. “I’m scared this is going to go by really fast.”

    Beside her, Agnes Walden, a painter from New York, reflects on her new surroundings. “It’s perfect,” she says. “I feel like I’m walking on a movie set.”

    Chicago writer Avigayl Sharp is still in disbelief. “I’m waiting for the ball to drop a little,” she admits. “It’s not normal to get paid to make art.”

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