This commentary is by Colin McKaig, a retired Vermont schoolteacher, poet and freelance writer.
There is a town in Vermont where people go to cultivate their stories. Some are written, but many are painted or carved from iron and wood. Two of the most stunning that I saw were made from clay. In this time of divisive challenge, creating art is more important than ever.
The Vermont Studio Center, an internationally recognized institution in Johnson, gave me and 29 other Vermont artists space and time to tell our stories. Each May, the VSC opens its doors to Vermont artists and writers, a gift meant to curate, celebrate and advance Vermont’s rich and deep creative legacy.
I was elated to be granted a residency in 2024. Writers and visual artists submit our work and, when accepted, are given an entire week to work. No cooking. No day job. No appointments and meetings. Just poets and writers, painters, printmakers and sculptors, all of us given studio space in beautiful buildings at a place where time stands still.
The VSC was founded in 1984 by three artist friends, sitting just around the corner from the renowned Johnson Woolen Mills, over a bridge spanning the Gihon River near its tumbling confluence with the Lamoille.
Most of the year, the VSC welcomes artists from around the world to come and create in the spirit of Pax Cultura: peace through culture. As their website states, this “is not just an ideal, but a foundational value, shaping a community where art fosters healing and connection.” And this is exactly what I felt, from the moment I stepped out of my car to the moment I left seven days later.
We were a group of 30. Eleven writers, the rest visual artists of all stripes: metalsmiths, painters, ceramicists and woodworkers. We were a spirited bunch, all driven to create, yes, but eager to leave everything else behind and share those many elements that drive the creative life.
The accommodations were lovely, simple and welcoming. Old houses that have been transformed into single suites, with wooden floors and bright light.
The magic happened in our studios, those rooms, large and small, housed in a scattering of campus buildings. Mine was in Maverick and included a quiet room with a large wooden desk, an oversize corkboard, a bookshelf, a comfortable reading chair and a floor lamp. All of this overlooked the river that babbled by.
If our lodging and studio spaces were the spokes, then the hub of this wheel was the Red Mill, home to the dining hall, a small gallery and, upstairs, the administrative offices. It’s in remarkable shape, though it was still reeling a bit from extensive 2023 flooding.
Breakfast was rarely communal, and I often sat alone or with one or two others as we drank coffee and sketched out the day. Lunches and dinners, however, brought all of us together around long wooden tables, and the buzz was palpable. Folks entered the room riding a creative high, just enough of a smile to let you know that the work was on, that art was being created, that inspiration had been tapped like a spring maple. Our conversations were freewheeling and associative. We talked about process and product. We talked about new ideas. We talked about influences, the long shadows of those who came before us and whose work is instrumental to our own. It was always an hour of joy.
I left Vermont Week with an amazing sense of community, making friends with strangers with whom I shared passion and a need to create. I felt peaceful, at ease, the tensions of the time released into the world, absorbed by ink and paper, pixels and documents, feeding off my work and my visits to the other studios.
I wrote several new poems, polished a few others, and mostly worked on my manuscript, an upcoming book about an American abstract expressionist painter.
A year later, in 2025, I came full circle. The VSC came calling. Would I be interested, they asked, in being a reader for the upcoming cohort of writers whose applications were arriving shortly? I jumped at the opportunity and was accepted into a new but anonymous group: that of a judge. I was assigned to read memoirs, a wildly diverse collection as varied as the anonymous writers behind them. Lifelong experience as a teacher told me to go slow, take it easy and space the readings out, savoring each and giving all their due.
Being a reader closed the loop. It gave me a chance to give back to a Vermont institution that, in just one week, had given so much to me.
Each person we see every day has a story, their story. The cashier at the co-op, a delicate gold ring in her nose; the municipal worker who checks the wastewater system each morning like clockwork; my former student who will require special love and support into adulthood. How much richer we would be if we knew them all.
