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MY: And so I think that when I published Desert Run I finally applied to Yaddo, which was a artist colony and they have musicians -- composers, supposedly Aaron Copland composed his symphonies there, and musicians', artists' and writers' retreat where you go. And I spent, I took a half year sabbatical, and I spent about four months there and I put together, I had all the writings from Desert Run so I kind of put those together. The problem with Desert Run was it starts out with a desert scene, you know, in California. I used to take students. My friend, biology friend and I used to take students out to the desert to teach an interdisciplinary course to biologists and to artists. And the thing that I began to notice was that at Cypress, the buildings start going up and the science building is there, and the art building is there, and the humanities building is there, and none of these students really communicate with each other. They become this very single-minded people. And so Flo and I -- she was my neighbor so we used to carpool together, and for years we'd be carpooling back and forth talking about our problems with our students and so forth. So we kind of hatched this idea of taking the biology students and the poets, my poets and her biology majors out into the desert, and put them together and talk about the humanistic condition, connection between science and art. And my husband was writing a book on science and art at that time, and so that was very helpful in getting, writing my Desert Run. And as I said, the problem was that I went to Yaddo which is way up there in Saratoga Springs. It was in April and it rained every day and these ferns were growing, I mean, growing five feet high, there were mosquitoes around, I mean the whole environment was tropical. I mean wet and damp. [Laughs] And I'm sitting in there trying to imagine Desert Run. [Laughs] Sand dunes, you know, and trying to... fortunately I had taken some slides. I was trying to put, when I do the lectures to students, Flo and I had taken a bunch of pictures with a 16-mm camera, and we had made some slides and I was lecturing about, and reading my desert poems before they were published and I had pictures of the desert. And so I went into town in Saratoga Springs to pick up, they had a little instrument rental place, so I picked up a slide projector and I brought it back and I just sat there and watched, looked at these slides of the desert and then I just... I think that was 1984, I had just bought my first computer. It was called the Atari Writer? It was like a toy, and I had gotten kind of used to it after a few months, it was just wonderful, you know, you could make your corrections and move text around which you can't do even in an electric typewriter. And so, of course, I couldn't take that with me because remember how -- I don't know if you remember how big computers used to be. It was no way portable to anywhere. And so I called up my husband and I said, "I can't write anything up here because I don't have my computer." [Laughs] I've had it for all of like two months, and he said, "Well, Shakespeare didn't have a computer, and how many plays did he write?" [Laughs] So I'm going, "Well, thanks, thanks a lot. And the reason why I'm not producing anything up here is because the whole place is... I can't write my Desert Run." I was just whining and complaining.

But I kind of, it was wonderful being in this retreat and not having the telephone ring. In the morning the cooks make you each a breakfast, they make your lunch and they put it in this little, like a factory lunchbox type, with a thermos bottle on top. You take it into your studio and you're in there for eight hours. You eat your lunch and then you finally come out, and it took a little while, I just had too much time, you know? [Laughs] I mean, nobody was interrupting me and there was no refrigerator. I mean, you do all kind of things to keep from writing and it was just totally distracting because there was no distraction. And so it took me, it's a good thing I was there for four months or so, because the first few weeks I was just... and then I got to the dinner table and everybody's writing about all this stuff they were writing and I thought, there must be something wrong with me. I'm not writing anything. [Laughs] I didn't dare tell anybody. I did find one woman who was kind of, was getting the same feeling. She had just come in from, she was from San Francisco -- Odette was roaming around in the forest one day and she finally came to my cabin because my studio cabin was way deep inside the forest, in the woods. And she was walking around and she saw my cabin and she came in and she said, "I know we're not supposed to visit each other" -- you know, that was one of the things against the rules, they discourage, no writers getting together and gabbing because, of course, you can't get anything done. That was why the, telephoning was forbidden during the day and so she said, "I know we're not supposed to visit but just wondered how you're doing." She said, "I really -- I don't know what to do, I just can't get started." And I said, "Oh my God, I'm having the same problem." So we sat down and kind of commiserated which was helpful.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.