The Barn is only one of the dozens of artists colonies in the United States, of course, but it is unique in that its three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning founder is alive and well and actively involved in choosing his eponymous fellows every spring. (Albee, who hand-picks the visual artists, leaves the vetting of the writers to others, but he makes sure to read all the selected writers’ submitted work.) It’s unique for the founder’s presence each summer, too. “The first day I arrived,” says Hershon, “I went up to my room and, while I was unpacking, looked out the window and saw Edward Albee delivering our mail.” Albee does so nearly every day of the summer, after stopping by the foundation’s post office box in town. In part, this is the playwright’s way of making sure everyone is working (“I get to snoop,” he says). But author Aaron Hamburger, who spent a month at the Barn in 2002 working on the novel Faith for Beginners, which was published by Random House in 2005, believes that it’s much more than that. “I hadn’t had a lot of outward validation so far in my career,” he says, so his month in Montauk “was a real psychological boost.” Since the place is so small and personal rather than big and institutional, stopping by every day is Albee’s way of engaging each summer’s writers and artists at that level—not hawkishly watching over their shoulders, but supportively checking in. “He was really generous,” Hamburger says. But also, he adds, “It’s just cool to have Edward Albee be your mailman.”
“The interesting thing about taking a lot of young people,” Albee says, “is that so many people start out brilliantly, and then their careers just sort of fade away. So we’ve ended up with a lot of people who were wonderful at the very beginning, and then didn’t go on and prove themselves. That happens. But it’s worth taking the young people, hoping that they will progress properly.” And many writers and visual artists, in the Barn’s four decades, have gone on to successful careers. Sculptor Mia Westerlund Roosen was an Albee fellow in 1976; librettist James Lapine, in 1979; painter Sean Scully, in 1982. Novelist Carole Maso was there in 1985, a year before the first of her six novels, Ghost Dance, was published by North Point Press. Playwright Christopher Durang was an Albee fellow in 1972, when he was still a graduate student at Yale Drama School.
The late Spalding Gray stayed at the Barn twice, first in 1982, then again in 1986. He worked on his novel, Impossible Vacation (Knopf, 1992), during his second stay in Montauk. Fiction writer A.M. Homes was also an Albee fellow twice, the first time in 1988, a year before her first book, the novel Jack (Macmillan), came out; her second residency was in 1994. Carolyn Ferrell was at the Barn three years before her first book, Don’t Erase Me (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), was published; Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, nine years before Random Family (Scribner, 2003); Suki Kim, four years before The Interpreter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). Short story writer and monologuist Barry Yourgrau was at the Barn in 1985. “I worked terrifically,” he says of his stay. Yourgrau wrote most of his short story collection Wearing Dad’s Head (Peregrine Smith Books, 1987) while he was there. “It’s a very emotional book, and I spent a lot of sessions with tears running down my face,” he says. “Fits of laughter, too. I guess when you’re ready to write, you’re just ready to write.”
The Barn might not be the right setting for every creative person to get work done, but for those for whom it is right, it inspires not just the creative work itself, but enthusiasm and fond memories as well. “It was that kind of relaxed, slightly surreal, time-out-of-time experience,” recalls Hershon. “We were all cheek to jowl, but no high-schoolish hassles and preoccupations,” says Yourgrau. “I loved the beach nearby. I loved the evening bike rides back through the leafy, spooky shadows.” Hamburger appreciated the freedom to cover the walls of his study and bedroom with “maps, posters, bits of advertising, all manner of stuff from Jerusalem,” which he used for research on his novel. He says the place felt “like a summer camp for artists, out at the end of the world.”
Maxine Swann, author of the novel Serious Girls (Picador, 2003), was an Albee fellow in 2003; she was beginning work on a new novel, and found much inspiration in various books she discovered in the barn, which she remembers gratefully. “I think those places are like little utopias,” she says of artists colonies. The Barn wasn’t her first residency experience—she’d been at Yaddo previously—but she appreciates the respective virtues of both places. “The Barn was different,” she says, “in the sense that I think we felt that, having been granted the setting, we were creating our own utopia.” She adds, “The tattered, beach-house setting of the Barn is inspiring, in that you really feel that this is a place where the work being done matters first and foremost.”
And ultimately, of course, that is what’s paramount—more important than rubbing shoulders with a famous mailman. “Well, someone’s got to bring the mail, and that’s fun,” Albee says. “But for the most part, I think they should be there to do their work, and interact with each other.” Hamburger tells a story from his month in Montauk of a day when he and the other fellows were all piled into one of their cars, driving somewhere in town. They were swapping anecdotes about their conversations with their famous host. “We were all telling stories—Edward Albee this, Edward Albee that. Finally, one of the artists who was there that month, this young sculptor from Japan, asked the rest of us, ‘Who’s Edward Albee?’ He’d been there two weeks,” Hamburger says. “He had no idea.”
Thomas Hopkins, a recent graduate of NYU’s creative writing program, was an Albee fellow in June 2005. He lives in Brooklyn.
