Notes on Opera Camp
This dying art form feels suspiciously alive, Timothée.
Hello from Portland! I’m here leading a short story workshop for the newly re-incarnated McCormack Writing Center (formerly the Tin House Summer Workshop.) Part Two of the reading guide for Dog Days will go out next week. (We meet to discuss the book on August 9th.) For now, here’s a little report on how I spent the first part of July.
If you put a dozen artists in the same room for long enough, one of the first things we’ll do is identify a common enemy. It happens almost automatically, as if the collective unconscious of the group is on a heat-seeking mission to complain, to bond through those complaints. These enemies need not be particular people, as the most sincerely and universally reviled enemies tend to be abstract: the customs, history, institutions, or current trends of any given arts ecosystem.
The group of artists I spent 9 days with at a libretto residency at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence easily found a couple common enemies, but for as much joy as we found in complaint, we found even more in the workshop itself. Some days we spoke seemingly nonstop from 10am to 7pm, breaking for lunch and occasional coffees and sometimes meeting up later at the festival bar to keep talking. As someone who has been writing books and therefore thinking mostly alone for the last, oh, 15 years, I was amazed at how much energy we generated as a group. (Most of us were exhausted by the end.)
When the invitation arrived earlier this year to participate in this workshop, however, I assumed that my background as a fiction writer would render me the outsider of the group. (I’m obliged to mention I’m adapting my novel, Pew, for a libretto with composer Wang Lu and dramaturg David Levin. If this sounds appealing to anyone commissioning or producing contemporary opera, please do get in touch.)
This expectation that I’d be an outsider was not a particularly negative one— as I’m well aware and at ease with the many advantages of being on the periphery of a group— but as we each presented our work-in-progress, I felt even more at home than I do among a room of prose writers. What’s more, I was surprised to discover that one of our common enemies (of the abstract sort) was all too familiar.