#glen workshop

My life seems to have rhythms built into it that center around places: there are some locations I return to at the same time year after year, for vacations or conferences -- homes of friends or beautiful cities that are strikingly different from my own.

Today I'm in South Hadley, Massachusetts, at the campus of Mt. Holyoke College for Glen Workshop East. This is, I think, my seventh (!) Glen Workshop, and I'm here as sort of volunteer staff, helping my friend Tyler (who's the program director) and the other Image staff ensure things run smoothly and driving speakers around. The Glen has turned into the biggest homecoming of my year -- like you might feel at the holidays -- and a centering experience around which the rest of my year rotates.

I was last here at Glen East two years ago, as an attendee that time, and I'm remembering that week today. It was the middle of a sort of lost summer for me, after a year of graduate school that had stretched me in a thousand different directions and shown me how little I knew. It was also a year with terrible work crises left and right, and a summer where we started to wonder if we were going to be in New York long term after all.

I spent the week mostly playing a piano and walking quietly around campus, thinking a lot, and talking to people who'd finished the same graduate program before me and assured me that no, I could do it, it would be fine. I remember feeling very pliable and strange when I left, and during the year that followed, we upended our lives a couple dozen times. But we made it out. And I finished school. And we stayed and put down roots. And life has gone on, and gone on well.