I’m home from Ox-Bow, and I’ve been waiting to write until I could find the words. While I was there, I chose to live the experience rather than translate it. This is the first of three letters about that week.

The drive was about three hours from Fort Wayne. The leaves were just starting to turn and the weather was perfect. When I pulled in, I fell in love right away.

Ox-Bow is tucked into the woods on a peninsula in western Michigan, beside a quiet lagoon. That lagoon was once a bend in the Kalamazoo River, the oxbow the school is named for, until the river was rerouted to run straight into Lake Michigan.

I thought about that a lot while I was there.

The school itself was founded in 1910 by two Chicago art teachers, and since 1914 it has lived in the same old inn and its cabins among the trees. I stayed in a room in the Inn, and my studio was in a cabin shared by four artists. This was Ox-Bow’s first Slow Season residency, quieter than usual, with five other artists and me. We spent our days on our own work and gathered for meals in the evenings.

Then I sat down in my studio, everything set up around me and just looked at it. I felt it right away: the need to be productive. To make something. To justify being there.

Just before I left home, my laser cutter broke. I’d only been able to make a few panels before the trip. At first that felt like a problem. Now I think it was the universe telling me I didn’t need to make hundreds of panels that week. Maybe it was telling me to slow down.

There was almost no cell signal on the property either, and the Wi-Fi was spotty. For the first day or so, I felt on edge, cut off from the world I knew. By the end, I was grateful. Without the constant pull of the next notification, I started paying attention to where I actually was.

The next morning I talked with my coach, and she left me with a question :

If I let go of the idea that being productive means making something to sell, how else could I define productive?

I carried that question down to the dock by the lagoon and sat with it for a long time.

I’ll share what I found there in my next letter.

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Have a wonderful day,
Nancy Fritz
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This activity is made possible in part by the Indiana Arts Commission, which receives support from the State of Indiana. ​ ​