During his month as a writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, in 2022, Chris Spaide’s favorite place to spend time was the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s office. Merrill, who died in 1995, had designed the cozy nook so it was easy to move from working on his latest poem at one of two desks to playing Solitaire or reading on the burnt orange daybed. And, in a playful nod to childhood fantasy, the whole room was tucked away behind a secret door masquerading as a bookcase, its own hidden world. A critic and poet in his own right, Spaide spent some days writing at one of the desks. But mostly he contemplated the contents of the room itself, looking through Merrill’s prodigious postcard and record collections or lounging on the daybed.
The James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. (Credit: Rise Media)
When he wasn’t in the office, Spaide pored over the rest of the eccentrically decorated apartment, seeking crumbs of understanding. A self-professed “true nerd” of Merrill’s work, who has taught a six-part course on the topic, Spaide took this endeavor seriously. In the kitchen he browsed the cookbooks and admired Merrill’s madeleine pan (“he was a great fan of Proust”). Examining the board games, Spaide found old scorekeeping notes stashed in the Scrabble set. And he made it a project to flip through every single one of Merrill’s books during his stay, looking for scribbles. “I really went in to do fieldwork, to live in his house and life,” Spaide says. Some days he spent sixteen hours straight exploring the apartment.
This kind of deep immersion into a literary hero’s everyday world is possible only for participants of a particular kind of program, one that has become increasingly popular in recent years: the writer’s residency at a famous author’s house. At some of these residencies, writers cook, sleep, and work in the historic location. In others (like the Merrill House) they stay nearby but are given remarkable access to the home. Regardless, these programs offer both the luxury of space and time to write and the chance to have a close-up encounter with a writer they’ve long admired—sometimes so close it can feel a little uncomfortable.
Many of these residencies bolster attendees’ work in the same ways more standard programs do. They offer much-needed financial support for struggling writers, organize small cohorts that become close friends, and provide key opportunities for cross-pollination among fellows. Residencies at Millay Arts, run out of the classic Sears-kit barn that Edna St. Vincent Millay erected with her husband next to their home in upstate New York in 1926, have been nurturing artists and writers for a half century. Because the residency is open to writers across genres and artists across disciplines, visiting fiction writers are often moved to write poetry, and playwrights are inspired to pen essays. “You feel this presence of fifty years of other people putting their creative work in; you feel the energy,” says Calliope Nicholas, the Millay Arts codirector and manager of residency programs. The program also features the services of an on-site chef who does the grocery shopping and prepares communal dinners.
At the residency offered by the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, writers stay on the town square in tiny Piggott, Arkansas, where Ernest Hemingway often visited the family of his then wife, Pauline, beginning in the late 1920s. In one program highlight, participants are invited to write in the studio where the author worked on A Farewell to Arms (1929). They also receive a $1,000 stipend and teach a workshop for local writers during their stay. Adam Long, executive director of Arkansas State University’s heritage sites, says many visiting professors find the workshop to be a refreshing escape from the insularity of MFA culture, especially since participants tend to focus on memoir or Southern-style family storytelling over literary fiction. Still, some people struggle with the isolation of staying in an unknown small town and the practicalities of rural life. With their needs in mind, Long has assembled a set of survival tips and advice he tries to give fellows as they arrive. Lesson one: Forget at your peril that Arkansas restaurants still close on Sundays.
Other challenges associated with this type of residency are less mundane, involving the quirks of working in historic homes. Residents at Hemingway-Pfeiffer must schedule time in advance to work in Hemingway’s office, for example, “as opposed to if we were on an academic campus and I could give them a key,” Long says. There they work at a nonarchival desk within the author’s studio, to avoid damaging the historic item. And they are permitted to bring only water inside—a challenge for the many perennially caffeinated writers who visit.
Elsewhere, residents at the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, a museum devoted to the writer in her childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, must contend with occasional tours and events in their space. Nonfiction writer Jennifer Hope Choi, who completed a residency there in 2017, remembers finding it unsettling to wake up to strangers in the yard or rummaging through the fridge. “I wasn’t quite sure who would show up, if they’d have access to the house,” she says.
To many fellows these complications are a small price to pay for the chance to uncover some deeper truth about beloved writers—to sit where they sat, touch what they touched. “When you’re walking through the property, you can imagine how it looked through her eyes when she was around,” says Nicholas about Millay. That sense of place, built through the prosaic detritus of an author’s life, can inspire feelings of deep connection, Long adds. That’s what brings tourists to the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, he says, “and I think that’s also why writers want to come. Place helps us to connect with stories.”
For program participants in Piggott, that might mean working in Hemingway’s studio, surrounded by his personal effects. (Long’s favorite is the unopened box of clay pigeons addressed to the author.) It also might mean exploring the area, which Hemingway loved for its nature and quiet. For residents at Millay Arts, it might mean wandering in the author’s gardens, which are otherwise closed to the public; imagining her hosting wild parties on the property (no clothes allowed in the pool); or visiting the family gravesite where her ashes were scattered. For Spaide at Merrill House, it meant an unprecedented opportunity to dig for morsels of insight into the writer and his work. Having previously authored an academic article about Merrill’s relationship to Asia, Spaide found it enlightening to sift through the books and souvenirs Merrill had brought home from his travels there. He especially loved stumbling on an accordion-folded Japanese notebook inscribed with his poem “The Summer People.”
Similarly, when writer and archivist Jenn Shapland spent a month at the McCullers Center as she researched the author’s unfinished biographies—a sort of unofficial residency—she sat at Carson McCullers’s desk, soaked in the upstairs tub, and watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the (slipcovered) couch where the author wrote the 1961 novel Clock Without Hands. Spending time among the ordinary trappings of McCullers’s life, she says, “I was able to see Carson as just a person and see myself trying to inhabit her life and understand her. And perhaps most importantly, my time in the house showed me the limits of my ability to know her.”
Shapland found living in a functioning museum to be “unsettlingly material,” somehow simultaneously uncanny and homey. But for some writers that mix of material intimacy and otherworldliness can be thoroughly discomfiting. Though she was deeply grateful for the time, space, and support the residency provided, “when you’re surrounded by a deceased person’s belongings, it’s not exactly joyful,” Choi says. She found the house’s main exhibit room, which features photos of McCullers, along with her glasses, cane, and tea set, “incredibly creepy” and avoided it when she could. “Generally speaking, living there alone was very scary,” she says. She acknowledges that the feeling was compounded by the project she was there to research, which focused on a Georgia serial killer. But Choi has heard other former fellows express feelings of unease as well, including whispers about encounters with ghosts.
Even Spaide, with his exploratory zeal, felt that chill. Some early fellows stayed directly in Merrill’s apartment, rather than in the current designated lodgings at his partner’s next door. “I was never tempted because I would have been too spooked out,” Spaide says. (Still, that didn’t stop him from using the home’s resident Ouija board; Merrill was a famous enthusiast.) Beyond supernatural concerns, Spaide also sought not to cross the subtle line he saw between enthusiastic visitor and something more invasive. Peeking at Scrabble scores and inside books felt like friendly inquiry; sleeping in Merrill’s bed felt, somehow, very different. “I wanted to be a good guest; I didn’t want to do anything I wouldn’t do with a generous host,” Spaide says.
At Millay Arts, the writers tend to take any inherent spookiness in gleeful stride. Sure, the metal fruit baskets that hang in the kitchen might occasionally move when there’s no breeze. But that doesn’t stop residents from watching scary movies together or conducting midnight rituals by the family gravesite, imbibing Millay’s favorite liquor, Nicholas says. “Millay loved gin, so they’ll do gin libations and start feeding each other ghost stories, and it starts to build up from there.”
Though she didn’t take issue with the eerier aspects of staying in the historic home surrounded by the belongings of a long-dead family, Shapland did find the experience remarkable. “The rest of the house, apart from the kitchen, was museum territory, and it was hard to distinguish what was house from what was museum,” she says. “I ended up getting a lot out of this liminality.” That experience eventually played an important role in her genre-bending book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House, 2020).
In many cases, that strange magic of the in-between, combined with the intimacy of submerging so fully in an artist’s material life, seems to affect residents in unexpected ways. Writers frequently report newfound clarity and insight, as well as productivity that takes surprising forms.
At Hemingway-Pfeiffer, residents “seem surprised a lot of times by how rewarding that workshop is,” Long says. At Millay Arts, Nicholas finds it “fun to watch people coming in who have a set objective of what they want to accomplish from their time here, but they end up having paradigm shifts.”
And despite Choi’s discomfort with her surroundings at the McCullers Center, her experience there figures significantly in The Wanderer’s Curse, forthcoming in 2025 from W. W. Norton. Before she arrived a friend advised her to be gentle with herself and flexible about the idea of how working there might look. “Reading is something; sitting there is something,” the friend told her, adding, “What comes from it all might not be what you expect.”
Seven years later, the little details and offhand observations Choi began writing down in an attempt to record the textures of her experience at the house—one favorite example is the industrial carpet mailers that arrived addressed to “Mr. Carston McCuller”—have taken on greater weight. With enough hindsight those notes became an essential resource, a contemporaneous reflection of what “ended up being incredibly crucial and actually a significant turning point in my life,” she says.
Spaide similarly struggled with productivity anxiety before his stay at the Merrill House. But once he arrived, it became clear that the exploration of Merrill’s belongings was the work—that “sifting through his board game collection and looking at his fancy wooden dominoes gave me important information,” he says. With that approach in mind, watching sunrises or sunsets through the apartment windows as Merrill once did, finding unexpected annotations in his books, and daydreaming at his desk behind that remarkable hinged bookcase became just as worthwhile as sketching out new poems or essays. “It was incredibly productive and enlightening, and I hope to never forget what I learned there,” he adds, “and I hardly wrote anything.”
Alissa Greenberg is an independent journalist based in Boston and Berkeley, California, who reports at the intersection of science, history, and culture. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Smithsonian, National Geographic, and elsewhere. If she could be a resident at any author’s home, she would choose that of Nellie Bly.
Thumbnail credit: Fred Fussell