When I first moved to New York, I often wondered why so many writers dream of typing their way to success in Gotham. Sure, there are plenty of coffee shops and it’s probably easier to network your way into penning an article for Harper’s at cocktail parties in Manhattan than it would be in Missoula, but with so much activity 24/7 and a cost of living that just never seems to give a sucker a break, isn’t the place also just a tease? You can chat up an editor from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but you’re so busy copyediting for one place and freelancing for three more and meeting friends for drinks and plays and shows that you realize with horror that you don’t have a single new idea to pitch.
Or maybe it was just a personal thing, arriving in New York as I did from the hills of Appalachia. Perhaps I just romanticize the drama of the extremes because the suburbs, where I came of angst-y age, were what really filled me with existential dread?
But then today I saw some deep-seated suspicions writ large: How the city hurts your brain.
Truth is, artists need nature! Well, maybe not this much nature, but all the same. And here I thought I needed to escape the urban landscape just because of an ever-increasing desire to smack rude strangers in the subway. But this week’s science tells us that there’s more to those artist colonies in the woods than just the quaint fireplaces and the really good food. We need to see open space in order fill it with our creativity. Or is that just one way to spin this study? Assuming most artist types don’t have the luxury of a country home and a pied-Ã -terre in the city, where should the aspiring put down roots?
(Personally, I vote for the space that requires the absolutely smallest time investment in cleaning it.)
Hi Molly,
I’m baited by this post and can’t help but respond, since my life makes me an excellent lab rat for this thesis. I happen to agree with the article: rural life is healthier. But that being said, some people– and my beloved, die-hard New Yorker father was one of them– are truly, “if you’ve seen one tree, ya seen ’em all!” types, and truly thrive in cities. It depends on the individual.
I grew up a hard-core city kid in Manhattan. Lived there until I was 21. Loved it. Ventured west to Los Angeles, living for ten years in the uninspired, urban suburbia of the San Fernando Valley, and then moving to more rural digs, living the next 14 years in the mountains and at the beach in Malibu. Sometime during this period I had a residency in a fabulous cabin at the oh-so-wooded MacDowell Colony, minus all the ice Alex Gardner experienced; heck, it was just September.
By the time I returned, I realized that I was far happier and more open-thinking and open-hearing when I was in a beautiful natural environment largely devoid of human stresses and vibrations. Serendipitously, by then the internet and all its webbed glory had made my little music career a global one, whereby it simply didn’t matter where I lived as long as I just kept scribbling black dots and getting them out into the world. I realized that I could earn income regardless of my address, and that I could retain a lot more of that income were I to leave the city. It dawned on me that I could live in my very own artist colony of my very own making if I so chose. No application process necessary.
Around that same time, I absolutely reached my limit with L.A.’s freeway traffic, L.A.’s droughts, and L.A.’s over- and often unhappy- population. After 24 years dodging crazed drivers and rabid wildfires, I was ready to move. And so I did: up to a remote, bridge-less island in Washington State that many people have never heard of, that floats just to the left of America and just to the north and right of Canada’s southern tip.
I am surrounded by woods and sea, and the 7,000 other people who live here appear remarkably intelligent and sane. My monthly expenses are half of what they had been. I have never been happier, I have never been more productive, and my little career has never been busier. In fact, business became more than twice as busy after I left Los Angeles.
Why? My own belief is that when we rid ourselves of something stressful in our life, we create space for a lot of good things to enter. And as the article discussed, we no longer need to use so much of our brain power to tune things out, before tuning them IN. As you wrote, Molly, I think a lot of us need to see open space in order to fill it with our creativity. And with our sanity and joy!
Hi Molly! Normally I would lean towards country mouse, for all of the reasons you cite, but after that little adventure I do admit to being inordinately glad to be back in a city….I guess one really can get too much of anything!