Today we’re sharing a guest essay from Thirty Cabins editorial assistant Emma Riskin. Emma is a poet exploring intimacy and transformation. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
– Josh
The other day I started researching artist residencies again. I dream that a residency might endow me with the gift of focus. I’m too easily distracted by incoming messages, clutter, and the various pulls of responsibility. Each residency offers a similar affordance: a break from routine, the opportunity to explore without distraction. I want space to create; I want time for uninhibited living!
A quick internet search illustrates the abundance of artists who have sought apartness as a quality of space; famously, David Thoreau, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, and Roald Dahl each worked from cabins or cabin-like structures.
It got me thinking: whether you’re working within an artistic practice or not, the desire to step out of habit and occupy other versions of self—one more focused, fluid, uninhibited (ahem)—is a particular allure of the getaway. What has become mundane transforms into an invigorating possibility for exploration.
In his essay “Art as Device,” Victor Shklovsky discusses the path from novelty to automated behavior. Presence disappears as the self recognizes something as predictable. “Automization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife and the fear of war,” writes Shklovsky. When we meet something as unfamiliar again, through an experience that disrupts our perception, alertness returns. There’s a pleasure to disruption, in a renewed sight. This newness energizes my desire for getaways: cabins, camping, residencies.
The other week, we published Rachel Khong’s story (read it here). Something I love about Rachel’s story (and the Thirty Cabins collection as a whole) is how it’s stoking a mini fixation with cabins as places of discovery and transformation. I notice an effect throughout the stories: when characters arrive at their cabins, something novel happens: they encounter phenomena that feel supernatural, re-embody the past, and uncover what was long hidden. Away from home, enveloped by slower time and less to do, characters find novelty in their company and surroundings. Whether it’s time spent lingering with creative work, among an unfamiliar perspective, or an unsettling space, I’m curious about the ways life is made new, again and again.
Enjoy the entire collection of stories by preordering your copy of Thirty Cabins today!
