A gift of time in California

One of the team who invented the contraceptive pill, Carl Djerassi established an artist's retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains in memory of his daughter. Éilís Ní Dhuibhnehas been working on her novel there this summer

I’VE SPENT part of this summer at an artists’ colony in California. The house where I lived was a wooden bungalow, sheltered by twisted pine trees where bobcats have their den. My room was plain and comfortable, with a desk and easy chair, and a wide bed covered by a blue patchwork quilt. A small balcony faces east to the rising sun, and in the late morning I sat there and read. Green humming birds, like large insects, stood in the air near my head, making their sound which is more like a whirr than a hum. Picture book rabbits nibbled at the grass in the garden – among the agapanthus, the shasta daisies and nasturtiums. Beyond the garden the Santa Cruz mountains rolled in golden waves to the coast of the Pacific. The hills are covered with burnished hay, but here and there dark green patches spread, cool as oases in the Sahara. They are the forest: redwoods, the tallest trees on earth; California pines, oaks and arbutus, which here are called the madrone.

At night the coyotes barked and the bobcats screamed, white owls hooted, and it is said that mountain lions roam in the hills. But no one has seen one for a long time. During the day, we saw only rabbits, and hummingbirds, and snakes stretched on the path in the sun. Bluejays and the redtailed hawk.

In the mornings, I wrote, sitting by the window. I worked on a novel, doggedly, “without faith or despair, hoping that sometime the work will find itself”, although my experience tells me that with novels this does not always happen. In the afternoons I walked in the hills or in the woods, and in the evenings I read or wrote something that was not my novel, but a thing that might surprise me. Then I ate dinner and socialised with the seven artists who shared the place with me: a novelist, a poet, a composer, a choreographer, a painter, a sculptor, and a film maker/photographer (who took the photos illustrating this).

This is the Djerassi Resident Artists’ Program. Djerassi is a vast ranch about 40 miles from San Francisco and twenty from Palo Alto, but it feels as if it is a thousand miles from any town. Carl Djerassi was one of the team that invented the contraceptive pill 50 years ago, in 1960, and in 1979 he established this retreat on his ranch in memory of his daughter Pamela, who was an artist and died by her own hand at that time. The ranch manager’s wooden lodge became the Writers’ House, and a large new building, the Artists’ Barn, containing big studios for painters, dancers and composers, was built nearby. The place is no longer a family foundation, but is run by a trust, reliant on donations, and directed by Dennis O’Leary and six or seven staff.

The Djerassi routine will be familiar to anyone who has been a resident at our own beautiful Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig. Residents work alone in their rooms or studios during the day, and gather in the kitchen at seven o’clock for dinner – in Djerassi, cooked by the cheerful chef, Dan (I wrote down his recipes, as one does, in the hope of becoming a more creative cook back home). Sometimes in the evenings people chat, watch videos, give readings or presentations, or read in the library, well stocked with literature and light reading and magazines, and especially biography, since Carl Djerassi’s wife, Diane Middlebook, was a biographer and poet.

DJERASSI IS ONE OF MANY artists’ residences scattered all over the United States. The habit of “doing a residency” is much more established here than in Ireland. Most seem to operate on the same system: artists apply – competition for places is stiff. Successful applicants are accommodated and looked after, free of charge, for specified periods, mostly of about a fortnight or a month. A residency is looked upon as a privilege and an affirmation, as well as an opportunity to work.

Djerassi has had an exchange programme with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for several years; every two years, an Irish writer is nominated by Annaghmakerrig to enjoy the Djerassi residency, and vice versa. Dr Pat Donlon, director of Annaghmakerrig, kindly offered me the opportunity to take it up this year – probably guessing, with an instinct she seems to have for what writers need, that it would be good for me.

What are the benefits of the residency experience? The most obvious is what the Djerassi brochure calls “the gift of time”. A five- week stay allows total immersion in a project; you can “get something finished” if you put your mind to it. But more important is the opportunity for thinking and for paying attention to the work.

At a personal as well as an artistic level, the freedom from day-to-day distractions, responsibilites, chores, worries, is deeply liberating. I feel as I have seldom felt since childhood. As my sister said, before I came, “Hmm. It sounds a bit like going to the Gaeltacht”. It was a bit like that – the same total immersion in a new environment, the same cutting of the bonds which fetter one to the mundane. The residency, its combination of tranquility and stimulation, silence and conversation, allows one to discover, or rediscover, the self, and perhaps the point of writing.

And this discovery in a place where there is friendship, companionship – the social side, one of the perks of the artists’ life which is often underestimated. One might well “get more work done” alone in a cottage in the country. But being alone in a cottage is not everyone’s cup of tea. The plumbing breaks down, and you feel frightened during the night when house spirits start to grumble. The Residency concept seems to acknowledge that artists like to work in peace and quiet for long stretches, but then want to eat dinner with friends, and enjoy, in the summer evenings, conversation with like-minded people, and with people who are of a different mind entirely.