Genre: Creative Nonfiction

Vermont Studio Center

March/April 2025

The Vermont Studio Center offers two-, three-, and four-week residencies year-round to poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and translators in Johnson, Vermont, a village located in the heart of the northern Green Mountains. Residents are provided with time and space to write, as well as readings, craft talks, and one-on-one manuscript consultations with invited visiting writers. Residents receive a private room, a private studio, and meals. The cost of the residency is $2,700 for a two-week stay, $3,825 for a three-week stay, and $4,950 for a four-week stay.

Type: 
RESIDENCY
Ignore Event Date Field?: 
yes
Event Date: 
May 23, 2025
Rolling Admissions: 
no
Application Deadline: 
March 31, 2025
Financial Aid?: 
yes
Financial Aid Application Deadline: 
March 31, 2025
Free Admission: 
no
Contact Information: 

Vermont Studio Center, 80 Pearl Street, P.O. Box 613, Johnson, VT 05656. (802) 635-2727.

Contact City: 
Johnson
Contact State: 
VT
Contact Zip / Postal Code: 
05656
Country: 
US
Add Image: 
A large red building with a gray roof next to a river.
Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Translation

Describe the Lake

The Time Is Now
5.22.25

In her latest book, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin, 2025), poet Heather Christle explores her past and her relationship with her mother through the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Christle reflects on the difficult, and sometimes painful, writing process for the book in an essay published on Literary Hub: “There’s a line from a Tony Tost poem I often think about: ‘I don’t know how to talk about my biological father, so I’m going to describe the lake.’ I had so many lakes. I began the process of draining them.” Spend some time jotting down a wide-ranging list of inspiring works of art, geographical locations, and cultural touchstones that are of interest to you. Then, begin an essay by describing something from your list that is seemingly disconnected from a difficult subject matter from your life, and inch your way toward it.

Michael Luo: Strangers in the Land

Caption: 

In this event at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco, Michael Luo talks about how a series of tweets reacting to a hate crime he experienced led to an exploration of early nineteenth-century Chinese immigration, which began the process for his debut book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, 2025). “In order to understand this kind of present, you have to go back,” Luo says.

Genre: 
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Michael Luo
Strangers in the Land
Doubleday
Chinese Historical Society of America Museum
conversation
Isaac Chotiner
2025

Imani Perry: Black in Blues

Caption: 

In this DC Public Library event, Imani Perry speaks with Clint Smith about the recurrence of the color blue in her life and how it sparked an aesthetic examination of the color’s place in African and Black history for her book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025).

Genre: 
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Imani Perry
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
Ecco
Clint Smith
DC Public Library
2025

Four Seasons

The Time Is Now
5.15.25

Four Seasons is a new comedy drama miniseries based on the 1981 film of the same name with an ensemble cast of middle-aged characters who are lifelong friends. Over the course of one year, the three couples take four group vacations together and reflect on the dynamics of their relationships, and in particular, the evolving circumstances after one couple’s divorce. Choose a significant relationship in your life and compose a four-part personal essay that relays an anecdote for each season of one year. You might turn back to old journals, photographs, e-mail messages, or planners for ideas and choose incidents not necessarily filled with drama, but that might reveal illuminating details about your bond with this person. Consider incorporating seasonal details to supplement the atmosphere of each section and add a sense of the passing of time through those twelve months.

Household Habits

The Time Is Now
5.8.25

When asked how he fills his days, in a 2019 Paris Review interview by Patrick Cottrell, author Jesse Ball talks about a household rule of not speaking in the morning and waiting until lunchtime to interact. “That leaves the morning for thinking,” says Ball. Write a personal essay about a routine or rule you have created to accommodate coexisting with another person, whether a parent, child, romantic partner, or roommate. How did you negotiate a compromise for your individual priorities? Were there any unexpected outcomes to the arrangement? Consider how the balance played out between what you sacrificed and what was gained with the cohabitation.

Vauhini Vara: Searches

Caption: 

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author Vauhini Vara talks about the current discourse of artificial intelligence and the ChatGPT conversation that led to writing her essay collection, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, 2025).

Genre: 
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Vauhini Vara
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
Pantheon
Fiction/Non/Fiction
Whitney Terrell
V. V. Ganeshananthan
Literary Hub
podcast
essay collection
2025

Baek Se-hee and Anton Hur

Caption: 

For this Straits Times video, Korean author Baek Se-hee and translator Anton Hur reflect on the global success and universal resonance of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) and discuss the current state of mental health in East Asian countries in their first joint interview.

Genre: 
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Baek Se-hee
Anton Hur
I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
memoir
Bloomsbury Publishing
Straits Times
interview
2025

From a Distance

The Time Is Now
5.1.25

In a New Yorker interview about her short story “Marseille,” Ayşegül Savaş comments on a realization she made when putting together her story collection Long Distance, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in July: “Even though friendships are very important to my own life, I would still place marriage, or parents, or children at the center of my preoccupations. Then why do I write so much about friends?” Take a look through some of your past writing and try to locate any patterns of concerns that recur throughout different pieces, thus revealing your thematic priorities. Write an essay that muses on why these are primary concerns for you to explore creatively. How do your subjects influence your writing form and vice versa? Have themes evolved or shifted in big or small ways over the years?

Last Dreams

The Time Is Now
4.24.25

In the introduction to his translation of Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz’s I Found Myself…the Last Dreams, forthcoming in June from New Directions, Hisham Matar writes: “It is clear that Mahfouz, the professed realist, admired dreams, coveted their agile and wandering narratives, their convincing and often unsettling psychological and emotional power, and, perhaps most of all, their economy: how, in an instant, a world is evoked that is—no matter how unlikely or strange—convincingly compelling.” Matar goes on to describe the book’s short vignettes in which Mahfouz recorded his dreams in the last decade of his life. “Almost each starts with ‘I saw myself’ or ‘I found myself.’ And isn’t that the case, that we find or see ourselves in dreams…?” Try your hand at recording your own dreams for a stretch of time, perhaps beginning each entry with “I found myself…” Experiment with arranging them in an order that makes sense to you, through any type of thematic, narrative, or dream logic.

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