I’m sat in my studio at the MacDowell artists’ residency, deep in a forest in New Hampshire. It’s the buildup to dusk and the descent into winter and beyond the window, almost every tree has been unleaved—all except for the golden poplar, who has a little more to give. 

Last night was the first night I slept here. All the artist studios in the forest have beds in them, but some of these are classed as “daybeds,” in which case you are given a second key to a dorm room to pass the nights in. My dorm room is on a second floor, away from the forest, close to the road and lonely. Every time I arrive back there, I immediately miss my studio: the rattling smoker’s exhalations of its plumbing, the records on the walls of all the fellows since 1945 who spent weeks in this room dreaming about their art, the inhabitants of the forest that I’ve observed through my window—deer, bobcats, snakes, chipmunks, squirrels, so many kinds of bird. I slept more deeply last night than I have since I got here. Today I’ve found it easier to write: part of a proposal for another book, and this piece you are reading now. 

MacDowell is the third artists’ residency I’ve been on. To my mind they are invaluable: the chance to dive deep into your work by cleaving yourself from all the commitments and distractions that make up your real life. I started writing my second book this time last year at a residency on the coast in Catalonia. All day I would sit in a studio like this, looking out through a window at a very blue sea as I transcribed interviews with young Christians. After a while, the sincere, whole-souled conversations I was having with the other writers started affecting my work. They made me more porous, more able to appreciate the beliefs of others. 

This time I am here to read my way from my last book into my next one. To my left, I have Anne Carson’s Decreation, for an essay it contains about mystics who perform their relationships to God through autobiographical writing. To my right, I have Mysticism by Simon Critchley, and the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Anchorites like Julian lived their whole lives in a single room that no other person was allowed to enter. I don’t think I could do that, or would want to. It’s now 40 minutes until dinner, when I can return to the process of being gradually reformed by the thinking of other artists—writers and filmmakers, choreographers and composers from all over the world—right here in the forest with me.