Dream Residency

At the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, I will embrace all the wild parts of my identity like the ocean, the seafood, the writing life. I will live in a residence I imagine half Goddard dorms and half the cabin from Abe’s Woman in the Dunes. I imagine the color palette of the front cover of Atlantis, the shining seashells and deep gold of the salt marshes that I turn to at my most homesick.

I will go shopping in the quaint New England sea town shops to buy a) seashells that didn’t come from this coastline; b) kitsch depicting sea animals, especially whales, to trigger my boyfriend; c) quasi-mystical items that I don’t know how to use; d) dried herbs and plants that evoke the scents of the northern ocean. When I feel whimsical, I’ll build sandcastles only to stomp in them before the tide comes in. I’ll form an irrational attachment to the tiniest untouched seashell I find or a rock with a smooth section that I can stroke with my thumb over and over. The sound of windchimes will vibrate in my bones, and when I write the poems will match their pitch.









Maria S. Picone has an MFA from Goddard College. She’s interested in cultural issues, identity, and memory. As a Korean adoptee in an Italian American family and a New Englander, her obsessions with noodles, seafood, and the ocean are hardly her fault. Her fiction appears in Monday Night Lit, talking about strawberries all of the time, and Progenitor Art and Literary Journal. www.mariapicone.com

See more of Maria's work in 8.3 and 8.3 again