Time away

The monthly travel boondoggle for supporters. This edition: what it's like to attend an artist retreat in Eastern Europe. (The boars are real.)

Remember to lock the gate

“Everyone should be lucky enough to have a chance to do this, to just be alone with themselves.”

A sculptor said that to me the other day over breakfast, and I nodded, she was right—though it took me a couple days to get there.

I’m spending four weeks in Eastern Europe, in the Balkans. Several months ago, out of the blue, I was invited to an artist retreat here. The hosts ask I don’t name it, don’t post about it on social media—the retreat is invite-only, conducted twice a year, wherein they invite a small group to their property, located on a hillside above a village of around a hundred people.

The cohort for the month is five total. Besides the sculptor, there’s a Hollywood screenwriter, a New York City playwright, a composer from Belgrade who makes atonal work. We’ve been here so far a week; all of us are confused how we got so lucky. A lot of the conversation over dinner—our meals are prepared for us and left out on a dining table—is about the uncanny privilege of it all, also the way it stokes self-doubt, a concern we’re all frauds. How and why the fuck did we wind up here?

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