Jentel Artist Residency

In Spring of 2019 I journeyed to the wilderness of Wyoming, 20 miles southeast of Sheridan, to spend a month alone with three other artists and two writers.

First impressions at Jentel Artist Residency:

When I stepped out after supper, the night shocked with ribald loudness, so much more startling than day still, stuttering with bird calls, creaking, squealing things, trees groaning in wind-bent chorus. A creek mumbles incessantly over the carcass of a fawn. Dried pellets of deer shit crackle underfoot, or smush and smear like delicate buttons of excrement under the pointed toes of my city thin shoes. This terrain doesn’t tolerate thin soles, with their faux patent leather slipper uppers scuffing against rude and sharp volcanic rock, a rock that juts and protrudes like stoney burls from the surface of the earth. Rock turns vermillion powder, painting everything it touches red. In my ruby slippers, tiptoe past a graveyard of bones splayed out in decoration, morbid mandalas littering the death-feverish terrain. Sun-blistered femurs of cow and skulls of deer with their slender come-hither grinning jaws. In daylight they shatter in the sun, undermoon they simmer a cool blue bone white that leaps from the shadows. I fear rattlesnakes slithering into the art studios if the door is left cracked.

The studio unfolds white wall possibility. I’m a worker bee rearranging furniture. My tasks seem laid out pretty simple, linear. My wrists ache. This is a strange life cut out for myself.