It seems like I just got home from Wyoming. Time flies in festivity city. We’ve been socializing non-stop for a month. We used up all our going-out clothes. And drank enough to last us into February. And now all of a sudden, I’m off again! Next Monday I board a Greyhound bound for Saratoga Springs, New York, where I’ll spend six weeks at a writing residency at Yaddo: http://yaddo.org/
Yaddo is America’s oldest artists’ community, but most Canadians have never heard of it, so here’s a bit of history: Saratoga Springs is a small Victorian city nestled in the Adirondack Mountains, about half way between Montréal and New York City. There was a decisive civil war battle there in 1777. Politicians and robber barons – from Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson and Washington Irving to the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Rockefellers, and J. P. Morgan, et al. – have graced Saratoga’s mineral spring spas. With the influx of the wealthy social elite, horseracing developed. Naturally. The first thoroughbred crossed the finish line at the Saratoga racetrack in 1863. The financier Spencer Trask and his poet wife Katrina founded Yaddo on their 400-acre Saratoga Springs estate in 1900. The property had previously housed a farm, gristmill, and tavern operated by Jacobus Barhyte, a Revolutionary War veteran. Many well-known writers of the 1830s and 1840s dined at Barhyte’s tavern, among them Edgar Allen Poe, who is said to have written at least part of “The Raven” on a visit there. Spencer Trask died in a train wreck in 1909 and Katrina Trask died in 1922. Yaddo has been operating in its present form since 1926. In the 1930’s natives began to complain about the influx of gamblers, gangsters, bookies, pimps and prostitutes. I’m sure there’s no connection. John Cheever once wrote that the “forty or so acres on which the principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community and perhaps the world.”
On the other hand, my friend Camilo De Las Flores had this to say upon his arrival at Yaddo two years ago: “Yaddo is really an easy going and welcoming sort of place. There is what appears to be a huge castle that they promote in the brochures, but it really is only what it appears to be a medium size mansion. I initially thought it was a practical joke to get in such a prestigious historical place. I was hoping to see a lot of old mummified aristocrats with powered wigs and monocles, but instead found a bunch of young and vibrant kids and a couple of moms hanging out and having a good time. You do get really remarkable people like, Harvard Professors and guys in their mid thirties with Guggenheim and other such fellowships and CV’s the size of my head. There was a very young but very talented writer who was a high school dropout, but who was certainly endowed with great talent. I really think that that is what they are looking for.”
“the castle they promote in the brochures”
. . . . .