[ephemeral]

Delightful article, divine experience.

Well, well, well... There is joy and grace in this world, after all!
ephemeral

When (Writing) in Rome...
A prestigious prize that includes a year-long residency at the American Academy in Rome works its magic on a young fiction writer
By Peter Bognanni

The letter that got my writing life back on track arrived in a skinny envelope. Too skinny, in fact. My first thought upon holding it was that it felt like a rejection letter. I’m convinced that every writer knows this weight instinctively. It is the precise weight of despair. My wife, who brought in the mail, gave me a sad smile from the doorway. “Well,” she said, “it was fun to dream.” What we were dreaming about was the Rome Prize, a yearlong fellowship awarded by the American Academy in Rome. I had been placed on the shortlist a few months before.

“It was fun,” I said. Then I opened the letter. “We are pleased to inform you...” I’m told I let out a small animal-like yelp at this point; yet what sticks with me is not my joy, which was very real, but how quickly my insecurity showed up to the party.

You see, at the time, I was in a sort of slump (by which I mean a free-falling doubt spiral). My first book, The House of Tomorrow, had received good reviews and won a couple awards, but it had not taken the literary world by storm the way I secretly dreamed it might. In the time since its publication, I’d started no less than three novels, all of which flamed out.

Each day I could feel myself becoming more and more of a cliché. I second-guessed my instincts. I caught myself thinking about the market (which, it should be noted, I know nothing about). I became a certifiable expert in creative self-sabotage.

Then, one afternoon, some people I didn’t know decided to send me to Rome for a year. There was no catch. I would go to Italy. I would write. I’m still not sure how it happened. I don’t know who nominated me or why, but among all the brilliant young writers, I was chosen. I only know that it came at exactly the right time. Soon after I arrived in the Eternal City, something began to shift.

It started with the academy itself, a beautifully restored century-old building on the Janiculum Hill, complete with fountains and landscaped gardens. The little office I was given looked out over a sloped lawn with shaggy olive trees in the distance. If I cannot find peace in this setting, I told myself, then I am probably incapable of finding peace. It was quiet. It was breezy. It was a place wholly outside the bounds of my anxiety. So, I began to write—about death.

That’s right. I showed up in Rome with some notes for a novel about a funeral planner, inspired by an article about the pioneers of the modern death movement—those bold souls creating man-made reefs from human remains and blasting ashes into space. And as I began to explore my new city, I found plenty of inspiration. Rome is, after all, a city of tombs, crypts, and catacombs. There are a lot of dead people hanging around there. Churches sit atop the bodies of saints. Inside a crypt on the Via Veneto, pelvic bones of martyrs have been transformed into angels’ wings. There is even a museum dedicated to purgatory, a place I could easily imagine myself in at the time.

In the next 11 months, I managed to find my rhythm again. I read nothing about book deals and market trends. And instead of lying around in the fetal position, I did what I was sent to do. I read and I wrote. I had enlivening grappa-fueled conversations with fellow artists and scholars. I went for long, meandering walks, stopping occasionally at the Protestant cemetery to check on Keats, or going into a church to plunk coins into those magic machines that light the frescoes.

And when I came home, I had the first draft of a novel. I have no idea what will happen to it when it leaves my hands, but I feel calmer about this uncertainty than I have in years. Every once in awhile, the writing life tosses you a miraculous sign of reassurance, right when you need one. Sometimes you open a skinny envelope and find everything you need.

Peter Bognanni's novel The House of Tomorrow won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction at the L.A. Times Book Awards in 2010.