Throughout March, the Mount and Western Massachusetts’ Straw Dog Writers Guild are hosting nine emerging writers at the cultural center and museum. It’s an opportunity to develop work over weeklong residencies at the country estate that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Age of Innocence” designed, built, and lived in from 1902 to 1911.
“I'm working in her, what's called her boudoir, which, she did a lot of business writing in this room, and took meetings and stuff," Martha Pham told WAMC. "And another writer is in her bedroom where she wrote from her bed, which is kind of like, oh, this is a place that worked really well for a really accomplished writer, and you kind of want to step into that energy a little bit and kind of channel it.”
Pham of Quincy, Massachusetts is one of the writers currently at the Mount. She’s working on what she describes as her first major undertaking: a novel.
“It takes place primarily in the early 60s in Vietnam during the war," Pham said. "And it talks about these people who were in the government prior to the 1963 coup. And I wanted to work on a novel that wasn't explicitly a very masculine war novel, and to focus more instead on the domestic side of things that isn't always talked about these kinds of stories.”
Pham, whose time at the Mount ends this weekend, is drawing on her own family’s experiences for the book.
“There were a lot of stories about things that they had to give up when the coup happened and they had to relocate, things that were out of their control," she said. "And then there were also just stories about moments where things like that weren't happening, and they were still going out with their friends and having fun, that kind of thing, too. And the tension and the gap between the things that they weren't telling was what I was interested in. So, I often asked, what my grandmother was doing at that time? And the answer would typically be, she was taking care of the kids. And she had nine kids. So, that's what the answer would be, but I was interested in the things that she might have been listening in on or was interested in, and people just weren't really noticing that, because they just assumed that she was looking after the kids, but she was there for all of it. So it's kind of just imagining into that, that space.”
That theme of family life disrupted by conflict factors heavily in the work of a writer who’ll take her turn at the residency next week.
“A lot of my poems fall into two categories: One is like, poems about family and family history and legacy, which are a bit more intense," Cat Wei told WAMC. "And my parents grew up during the Cultural Revolution under Mao. So, like, it's a lot. But there's also a lot I don't know. So, some of it is speculative.”
Wei is coming to Lenox from New York City.
“The other theme is like a totally different direction, which I like to call my hot girl summer poems, which are just more about being present, and it's about the erotic and liberation and freedom and just community and connection and joy,” Wei said.
As she prepares for the residency, inheritance, lineage, and history are on Wei’s mind.
“Who are these people that I came from?" she asked. "My whole extended family is in China, and it's just me, my sister, and my parents who are here. So, we're sort of this island onto ourself. But there's this whole past, right, that I'm trying to access.”
She wants to spin creativity out of snippets of family lore.
“What did it mean that my mom was like, oh, yeah, your grandmother was adopted, this nice family took her in because there were too many children," Wei said. "It's like, oh, whoa, what?”
Despite the weightiness of the work she intends to do, Wei is stoked to do it in Lenox.
“I have so many, just this graveyard of drafts that kind of get abandoned, and sometimes it's good to come back and see what you can revive out of old notes," she told WAMC. "So, I think it will just be a good time to play and dive deeply in a quieter environment. I hear it's really beautiful up there. Everybody says it's just like a really gorgeous space. So, I just am also excited to be in nature, I guess, and get away from New York City a little bit. Sometimes it's a little crazy here, you know?”
