Last week Teresa and I took ourselves to the Fine Arts Work Center for the first of this winter’s “Fellows Fridays” — showcases of work by the 20 artists and writers who compose this year’s cohort of fellows. We put our faces up close to the tiny objects in Jeff Gibbons’s whimsical and worried sculptures (reporter Elias Duncan’s words) and laughed at the irony and weird twists in readings by essayist Lindsay Miles and fiction writer Avigayl Sharp.
It was a night out that transported us back to an earlier time in our lives.
We had bought a house in Wellfleet in 1996 that was known locally as “the It-il-do.” We’d leave behind worries about our jobs and errands for our ancient landlady in Cambridge and drive out every weekend to work on the place and spend time with my sister Harriet, a professor at Framingham State, and her partner Bob Morse, a former high school English teacher who had become an oysterman and jack of all trades.
Driving out here on Friday nights during those first winters, we would round the Orleans rotary and feel the darkness close in. There were no cars on the road and few lights in the houses. We wondered if we had made a mistake to imagine ourselves in this place. We would work all day tearing out mildewed carpet and rotted shingles, do some scraping and painting, and then settle ourselves in front of the wood stove to listen to Scott Penn on WOMR, occasionally calling in a request for a song we wanted him to play on “Lush Life.”
Little by little, we caught other glimpses of the culture embedded in this winter landscape. Bob would rise early to run at Lecount Hollow, take us oystering at Powers Landing, and read out loud from Thoreau.
Harriet adored the Fine Arts Work Center, where she took poetry, memoir, and fiction classes with Paul Lisicky and Grace Paley. “There’s a reading tonight — let’s go,” she would say. We would pull into the lot on Pearl Street, open the door of the Stanley Kunitz Common Room, and enter another world, buzzing with light, poetry, striking characters, and startling ideas.
The readings and art shows of the faculty and fellows at FAWC anchored us to Provincetown, our cultural capital in the Outer Cape wilds. Being there on Friday reminded us that we would choose it again as a lodestar for our hopes for a sense of place.
The work that FAWC does is astounding, and not just for the way it launches artists into some faraway esoteric realm. The fellows’ importance to this community is also real. FAWC brings brilliant young artists from around the world to a town where many struggle to make a life in the cold season. The fellows come to love this place that nurtures them, and some stay on, adding to our hard-won sense of community.
Spending time in that incubator is an experience we are lucky to have. We are left wishing for more of it.
