“While my time at the Caetani Centre was a solitary residency, I was never lonely; everything from the art on the walls and refrigerator, to the reminders of Sveva Caetani’s life in both the residency suite and the first-floor museum, to the friendly support of the Centre staff, connected me with the larger community of writers and artists, past and present.

This sense of artistic communion was a large part of what made this time a much-needed reset, a chance to allow my creative self to flourish in a beautiful, serene, and nurturing environment. It was productive, too: during my residency, I made some important structural progress on my novel, worked on revisions to the first draft, submitted a shorter children’s story to a publisher, and wrote an unexpected poem.”