The writing he encountered in his new role of online editor, coach, and consultant (that marvelously malleable word) made the least of his Ripley students seem like Hemingway. Again and again he urged his new correspondents to check their spelling, keep track of their characters’ names, and give at least a tiny bit of thought to what basic ideas their work should convey, before they typed those thrilling words: THE END. Some of them listened. Others seemed somehow to believe that the act of hiring a professional writer magically rendered their own writing “professional.” What surprised him most, however, was that his new clients, far more than even the least gifted of his Ripley students, seemed to regard publication not as the magical portal it had always represented to him and to every other writer he admired (and envied), but as a purely transactional act. Once, in an early email exchange with an elderly woman in Florida who hoped to complete a second tranche of her memoir, he had politely complimented her on the recent publication of part one (The Windy River: My Childhood in Pennsylvania). That author, to her credit, had bluntly declined his flattery. “Oh please,” she’d responded, “anybody can publish a book. You just write a check.”
It was, he had to admit, a version of anybody can be a writer that even he could get behind.
In some ways, things were actually a whole lot nicer on this side of the divide. There were still astounding egos to contend with, of course, and there were still huge distances between the perceived and actual qualities of the stories and novels and memoirs (and, even though he certainly didn’t seek it out, poetry) his clients emailed him. But the honest, direct exchange of filthy lucre for services, and the clarity of the relationships between Jake and the people who came to his website (some of them even referred by clients he’d already “helped”) was, after so many years of false camaraderie … downright refreshing.
Even with semi-regular consulting work alongside his new Ripley responsibilities, however, Jake couldn’t make things work in New York anymore. When one client, a Buffalo-based writer of short stories, mentioned that she’d recently returned from a “residency” at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, Jake jotted down the unfamiliar name, and after the video call ended he found the website and read up on what had to be a fairly new idea: a subsidy artists’ colony doing apparently good business in a place he’d never heard of, an upstate village called Sharon Springs.
He himself, of course, was a veteran of the traditional artists’ colonies, which existed to offer succor and respite to serious artists. Back in his own halcyon period just after The Invention of Wonder was published he’d received a named fellowship to Yaddo, and flown out to Wyoming to spend a couple of productive weeks at the Ucross Center. He’d done Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, too, and also Ragdale, and if Ragdale had marked the end of his lucky streak a year after Reverberations was published, then at least he could (and did!) list those august institutions on his résumé and on his website for their sheer writerly luster. At none of these places had Jake ever been asked for a dime of his own money, however, so he had to read deep into the Adlon website before he understood what new entity this place represented: a self-sponsored artists’ retreat, at which the celebrated environment of a Yaddo or a MacDowell was made available, not just to the elite or traditionally advantaged person of letters, but to anyone in need of it. Or at least, anyone in need of it with a thousand dollars per week to spend.
