My Week in Poughkeepsie
- Sarah Sturm
- Apr 24
- 17 min read
On the artist's solitude, finding one's way, and self-help culture
In rural Virginia, where I grew up, most winters usually passed without snow. The woods in the colder months were just tangled deadness, which left my backyard in a state of vague sadness. It stretched out beyond my father’s garden and into about an acre of trees. The exposure of the landscape was turned down to this dejected, bluish saturation.
But every couple years, we’d get these incredible blizzards. I considered them like winter’s natural lamp, where the trees and grass in my backyard would burst with this soft, thick snow. There was this one particular crack through the woods I’d always investigate the morning after a rare storm. I remember peering at dead maple branches and feeling awe at how the snow naturally balanced itself on each thin twig. I felt invisible walking through those woods, like the snow had blanketed me too and I was the brush and dogwoods underneath. It felt oppressive, packed on to me, and so I could only succumb to it. There was even one winter where the snow came down so heavily that our giant, back-lawn pear tree never grew another fruit again.
The week I came to Poughkeepsie there was a similarly oppressive snowstorm. I had driven up there for a last minute dog sitting gig for two very cute, strong Pitbulls. The trip was on the tail-end of a long bout of zero-writing. All my creativity seemed to have gone into hibernation for the fall and winter. I had one particular long poem I had started back in March which I intentionally had stepped away from in an attempt to gain some emotional distance from the words. My hope was that this distance would allow my thoughts to naturally organize and eventually, I would experience a sudden onset of inspiration to finish it.
The first couple days in Poughkeepsie were snow-free. I hadn’t bothered checking the weather app and had no idea snow was incoming. I hadn’t brought any real winter coats, and it was definitely cold, but I found ways to deal with it. I made small talk with baristas. I almost thrifted this large, thick leather jacket I found in a local shop, but I decided to skip it to save money. When I’d take the dogs out for their miles-long walks, I couldn’t wear headphones since I had to pay close attention in case a stray squirrel or possum caught their eye. So I made sure to keep a brisk speed. My arms were usually folded into me, holding tight to their leashes and bracing myself against the cool, upstate air.
On the third day, I woke to a heavy snow and it occurred to me that I felt alone. I began listening to lots of music to fill all the dead space in the house, which simultaneously softened and heightened the intensity of the loneliness. I felt especially drawn to Bon Iver’s debut album For Emma, Forever Ago. I had known the big song from that album, Skinny Love, but hadn’t listened to Bon Iver much beyond that. Slowly, I found myself obsessed. I started researching the lore behind the album. The story goes that Justin Vernon banished himself to his father’s cabin in the woods one winter, coming off of a series of misfortunes including a long bout of illness, getting kicked out of his band, and a breakup.
I found myself experiencing a sort of kinship with the album. Flume and For Emma particularly resonated with me, and with the snow now blanketing my dog walks, I’d think about the lyrics, feeling that same sort of snowed-in oppression I felt back in childhood. A wonder came back on those morning walks, a sort of creative resurgence. I began to feel that urge again, the obsessive pull to get something, anything down on the page.
The day I finally started writing again, I got dragged. I believe this was the fourth day. I was walking the dogs in the morning, thinking about the snow and how pretty it all looked. In my peripheral vision I saw a deer running from the road into the woods. Suddenly, I was knocked off my feet. Refusing to let go of the leashes in fear of losing these dogs, I was dragged about ten or twenty feet across someone’s lawn. I can’t remember exactly how long the whole thing lasted, but I recall being dragged on my ass at first, and then somehow ending up on my stomach, screaming my head off the whole time.
I can’t help but feel like there’s a metaphor in there for what the creative process feels like or what writers must do to make ends meet. But something about the music and the loneliness and the dragging through the snow had culminated in returning to my long poem with renewed intensity. I finished the walk with dignity, went back to the house, and began to write.
Before the trip, I wasn’t totally sure what I needed to finish the poem. I knew time was part of it, but I wasn’t sure what exactly would end this creative dry-spell. In the months before the trip, I was very out in the world with little time to think. I was running around New York at top speed, working and meeting new people and thinking very little. This time felt like a kind of searching in itself, but I had a lot to distract me from putting my restlessness into anything creative. At the time, I hadn’t thought much about my solitude as a writer.
I’m not talking about the kind of hyper-individualized solitude that’s promoted in the online self-help industry, i.e. cutting ties and/or setting strict boundaries with your friends and family. But I think there is something to be said for the artists’ solitude. Bell Hooks was a major advocate for artistic solitude, which she describes in her essay “Women Artists: The Creative Process” as “the awesome task of just lingering, spending uninterrupted time with my thoughts, dreams, and intense yearnings, often the kind that, like unrequited love, go unfulfilled” (125). She took pleasure in her solitude, as she would “find [herself] writing, spinning words together…so as not to lose or forget the insights, the sharp moments of clarity that came during this quiet time” (125). Hooks specifically speaks to the importance of solitude for women artists, who are often not privileged the same kind of alone-time that male artists are valorized for. Ironically, it was the story of a man’s isolation from society and successive creative outpouring that struck a chord with me on the trip. There was something so provocative in Vernon’s story, forsaking his life for a whole winter in the name of finding himself, the brazen selfishness of it. For me, being snowed-in in that house was the closest equivalent to Vernon’s experience I could get.
I should note that my accidental1 side-career as a pet-sitter has been a gold mine for killing several birds with one stone. There’s the obvious point that I’m only able to do these gigs because I’m paid to do it, and it has given me the privilege of free time in comfortable, beautiful homes, often hundreds of miles from where I live. Hooks aptly points to the “luxury of time,” a rarity in today’s productivity-driven culture, as “solitary space, [a place] where dreams and visions enter and sometimes a place where nothing happens” (126). She goes on to add that “[time] is as necessary to active work as water is to growing things. We have yet to create a culture so utterly transformed by feminist practice that it would be common sense that the nurturance of brilliance or the creation of a sustained body of work fundamentally requires such undisturbed hours” (126). Had I not fallen into pet-sitting, I wouldn’t have had the time nor the money to go on these sorts of trips where the one thing I’m responsible for, outside of myself, is feeding, walking, and cuddling dogs (which, if I’m watching cats, is really just feeding and cuddling) and getting paid to do it. When I come back to my regular life, I am inundated with responsibilities that require me to turn off my thinking-creative-brain and tap into my robot-worker brain. Pet-sitting helps me make time for my writing, which is really just time to get back in touch with myself.
In many ways, the Poughkeepsie trip morphed into both an artistic awakening and a real reckoning with identity. I hated how the snow forced me to slow down on the morning walks. Or maybe I didn’t hate it, but I certainly feared it. I felt isolated and craved distractions from the discomfort of sitting in a big house, alone (besides the dogs), stuck in the snowy woodsiness of upstate NY. For me, solitude was blended with an uncomfortable loneliness. In Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, she describes loneliness as “solitude with a problem” (28). The implication of attributing loneliness as, indeed, a problem, is that it asks for a solution.
Recently, I’ve been hanging out in studio painting sessions with my friend who’s being painted by a professional artist. Notably, this artist’s creative method requires the opposite of solitude — he only paints portraits with a real-life person in front of him; never a photo. In painting from a real person, this puts a sort of life force behind the painting. With a real life subject, the colors, lighting, and micro-expressions are palpable in a way that can’t be mimicked in painting from a photo. Of course, this is a different art form from writing. But the artist still had to figure out what worked best for his painting style. Beyond the technical benefits of having a real life subject, he simply enjoys working with real people and learning about their life while painting them.
There are several schools of thought on the subject of solitude and art. While Hooks certainly embraced the notion of solitude as an integral aspect of her artistic method, artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat made art that intentionally worked in tandem with community. Basquiat’s art was not motivated by the critics. It was both a reflection of and a contribution to the culture. This kind of community-motivated art was not reserved for just the painters. In larger cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston wrote work that was in direct conversation with broader cultural and political movements.
All of this talk about artistic method is really a canopy for the broader question: how can one find their identity as an artist? Is there a specific formula to it? How individualized is it, really? The idea of a solitary life feels like a seductive, near-romantic path for the artist, especially in a culture in which community is becoming increasingly difficult to find. So should artists succumb to a solitary life in the name of convenient artistic exploration?
Community has often been elusive for me. I have friends in many places, but I’ve found it difficult to maintain a real cohesiveness with groups of people. There have been periods of my life where community felt within reach, where I’d find myself frequently and consistently in contact with clusters of friends who all knew each other and helped everything make sense. Then life would take over, people would move away or I would move away, and I’d be brought back to a general sense of aloneness. Admittedly, in times when I’ve been especially lost in the depths of social withdrawal, I have found myself skeptical of community. Not of how important it is — that’s obvious to me — but of how attainable it is for the average person, who has little time for fostering community because of the way our individualized, capitalist culture is currently set up. I have wondered if I should just accept a more solitary life in the name of self-preservation; this is not a rare experience.
The loneliness epidemic of the past few years has been well-documented, and much of it has been attributed to social media and tech. Ironically, social media these days is ripe with quotes, infographics, and reels that provide quick, bite-sized tips on how people can overcome their loneliness or any other question of identity, lostness, love, etc. These solutions are nearly always productivity based. In these solutions, the problem being answered is not the issue of depression, loneliness, etc. In fact, these things aren’t necessarily a problem worth addressing as long as you’re making it to work on time, answering emails, and being a productive member of society. Not “productive” in “society” in the way that artist-activists are, like materially trying to improve the conditions of the average person. Instead, these solutions are about productivity that feeds the capitalist machine.
Much of this advice bases itself on the work of other artists and thinkers who’ve stretched out and explored these ideas on a deeper level. But they take those ideas and whittle them down to their most clean, consumable form; lists of clear and concise rules one can follow that will lead to an undeniably happy life; simply do pilates, have a morning routine, eat “clean,” spend time with your friends but not too much time with your friends, purchase this beauty product, etc. While perhaps some of this advice can be useful for pulling someone out of a long bout of lostness, such rules are antithetical to a life thoroughly experienced, well-explored. And really, I’m not even sure that someone who’s lost should necessarily follow these kinds of rules. Perhaps structure in one’s personal life can be temporarily helpful, but what happens when your entire sense of self gets caught up in this pursuit of consumerist perfection? Ultimately, these suggestions remove all the nuance and meticulousness that make for a truly resonant message. They are meant to be temporary band-aids — not solutions to any sort of deeper pain.
Admittedly, there have been times where I learned a quick mindset tip or an out-of-context quote on social media that made me feel, for a moment, like “Oh, well that explains it all. If I just do random miscellaneous mindset shift or morning ritual, I’ll have my shit together.” I’d be lying if I said that daily walks haven’t tangibly improved how I feel day-to-day or that that one quote about grief on every other IG pop-psychology infographic hasn’t ever made me feel a little better, for a moment, while going through loss. But what does the ritualistic nature of these suggestions suggest about healing? Can my interior life truly be “fixed,” stagnant forever, by a mixture of physical movement, mindset shifts, and consumerism? Do we all just need to read more bite-sized chunks of stock-advice to lead happy, fulfilled lives?
It’s easy to fall into the sweet, coddling hands of the bite-sized self-help-self-care genre. In a substack essay titled in defense of pretension by Ayan Artan, she points out how much this sort of “[convenience] has stolen from us.” Artan notes:
it isn’t important to just read and learn, it’s important to stretch beyond our comfort. seek out that which is hard. what happened to curiosity?…a lot has been made- rightly-about the fact that we are all starting to look alike. we buy the same makeup and skincare, we dress the same, we use the same filters and get the same fillers. i’d argue that our interior lives are just as unoriginal. even the critics who are meant to recommend and guide cultural discourse seem to all be engaging with the same five pieces of work come award season.
Artan’s point speaks to the incredible value one finds in the process of searching rather than being fed solutions by the algorithm. The trouble with much self-help advice, is that it skips over any soul-feeding and jumps right to the solution — a solution that lacks nuance and acknowledgement of external factors such as class and capitalism. Instead, it focuses on the individual, despite living in a society in which mental health issues are rising at genuinely concerning rates. Even under the best of circumstances, for the average person it is nearly impossible to maintain calming practices in a balanced way. The practice of balance itself seems to always require giving something up. In placing the blame of the pain on the individual, it claims the seductive, impossible promise of self-actualization through buying the product, doing the morning walk, etc.
None of this advice is about feeding one’s soul; it’s about holding one’s attention, and therefore gaining capital. The self-care industry’s doctrine seems to follow the same kind of argumentation as trickle-down economics. If capital can trickle down from the 1% to the rest of us, then the logic follows that productivity works in a similar way. If we all just follow the rules of self-care, consume the right quotes, maintain the right habits, it will trickle down into our ability to perform in other facets of our life — primarily, our jobs. If we do better at our jobs, we’ll receive the privilege of a comfortable life, right?
For myself, the kind of media that has given me the most “self-help” - that has given me some solace in times of emotional pain, cleared out the confusion in my brain and brought me peace, or maybe not peace but introduced new, more exciting questions, was always some form of expansive art - whether it be a film or a novel or creative nonfiction piece. These have been the things to feed my soul in ways that no quick-fix, self-help advice could. These stories had nothing to do with productivity — in fact, they encouraged me to slow down and to face the emotional ebbs and flows.
And yet, while these novels and films have certainly been major components of my sense of identity, I’m not sure I can say that they alone have saved me or created my identity as a writer. Rather, it is the culmination of my experiences with others and my friends who have helped make sense of my artistic neurosis. It has been sharing bad and great writing with each other, rambling on about three sentences in a single stanza. In writing this essay, I had to talk with several friends before I could even figure out what it was about. Just now, I took a brief break to say hi to an old coworker who sat next to me at the coffee shop. I rarely write anything that makes sense without going to a space where I’m co-existing with other people. Like everything else in life, art is best shared.
If you don’t already have community, the process of finding community can be hard work that, indeed, requires searching. But I believe it is work worth doing. When it comes to art specifically, social media’s dissemination of these well-meaning quotes and tips often just end up skirting around the real work required to make something truly invigorating, something that gives that real artists-high when you’ve come up with something you didn’t even consciously realize. This is not just fulfilling for the artists, but also for the consumers of that art, who are also the artists of their own lives.
I am not saying every single problem requires a long, difficult path to enlightenment. In fact, it’s a feature of great art and great friends that they both have the effect of whittling pain down to a more tolerable size. This calming effect is not necessarily achieved through the advice itself; rather, it is the effect of feeling seen and understood through the art, through the friend. The recognition of the pain itself begets healing.
So where does all of this leave the artist’s solitude? It’s difficult to say. The problem with solitude as one’s main outlet for creative inspiration is that it has a sort of self-cannibalizing effect where one’s work can only be rooted in one’s own neurosis; thus, the sadness begets more sadness. This is not to say this kind of art shouldn’t exist, but I wonder how far it can actually go. Emily Dickinson, who was notoriously reclusive for much of her life, said of pain: “it has no future - but itself.” I mourn the seasons I’ve missed of myself lost in my own pain. I admire how Hooks found real joy in her solitude, though I believe it takes time and searching to arrive at such satisfaction. I do still believe there is value in one’s solitude, whether or not that solitude has a problem, which can be explored without wallowing in it. Rather than holding the aloneness at arm’s length, one can find ways to make use of it2. Or if not use it, just allow it to work its way through you like snow hitting warm skin.
Personally, I am drawn to the idea of finding one’s way when it comes to identity, solitude, and community. I was first introduced to this idea in Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint:
Caring and shame share a tight bond (which is why art openings and book parties are so often fulcrums for self-loathing, or why an author is likely to feel shattered by a prominent bad review, and so on). Given the paralyzing power of shame - and, conversely, the perils of being invulnerable to it - one has to find one’s way. If one is so vulnerable to what others say or think in a world drunk on scapegoating, virtue signaling, and public humiliation that one cowers, overcompromises, or petrifies, that’s a problem. If one becomes a reactionary asshole whose art (and life) would likely be a lot better were one capable of taking in, even on occasion, the sage feedback of others, that’s a problem. If one cultivates a habit of self-righteously disparaging or ganging up on others in the name of justice or the reparative, that’s a problem. One has to find one’s way.
While Nelson was particularly focused on the balance of compromise and receiving criticism as an artist, her words apply to various facets of life; what works for one may not work for the other; one man’s trash is another’s treasure; beauty is in the eye of the beholder; et al. But Nelson’s suggestion feels almost provocative here in the sense that she embraces the lack of a real answer. Whether or not the art is made to be consumed by the critics, her point resists a specific reactionary politic about the kind of art one creates and instead embraces the inherent vulnerability to releasing one’s art to interpretation, regardless of the consumer. If one wants to create art that feels authentic to their identity, or the artistic identity they want to present to the world, one must find one’s way. There are no clear cut lines, boxes, or frameworks that one’s work must fit into - regardless of how personal or impersonal that work may be to the artist.
Nelson’s point also speaks to how, in the same way that one’s opinion on my art is subjective, the process by which I create that art also comes down to what works for me. There isn’t any clear formula I could follow that would make everything confusing about life, my art, and my position in the world come into clearness. I simply have to decide for myself what does and doesn’t make sense. This decision can only be made through searching for answers.
I could try to sum up my solitude in Poughkeepsie as the primary inspiration for returning back to my writing. But this wouldn’t necessarily be accurate. In my various traveling pet-sitting gigs, when I’m in towns I’ve never visited or would never have a reason to visit otherwise, I’ve often found myself searching for others. In fact, I’ve made a hobby out of talking to strangers. My first day in Poughkeepsie I spent nearly thirty minutes talking to an enthusiastic bookshop clerk. She told me about how she was wrapping a gift for her son’s upcoming birthday and how she wraps in the same way her mother did. The day after it snowed, I went back to that thrift shop looking for the big leather jacket I hadn’t bought. It was still there, so I took that as a sign and bought it. The woman who sold it to me said many people had tried the jacket on before me, but I was the first person it actually fit right, so it must have been waiting for me. She then told me about how she overcame addiction and turned to a life of antique thrifting instead.
These offbeat conversations didn’t save me from my loneliness or culminate in finding any real, lasting community, but at least they made me feel tethered to the world again for a little while. When these conversations were over, I’d usually immediately put my headphones back on and return to Bon Iver’s album. This created an almost constant stream of someone, or something, speaking to me. I don’t know if I can say it was just the solitude that made me write. And I can’t sum it up to Bon Iver or the shopkeepers or getting dragged by the dogs.
Whatever it was that sparked my creative resurgence, it happened. I did find the snow brought me back to the memory of those rare snowy winters in my Virginia childhood, where I also felt alone and confused but somehow invigorated while exploring those woods. I’m not sure I will ever find answers to all my uncertainty. A part of me is not even sure if loneliness is a problem I’m interested in solving. Either way, I’ll keep on searching.
I want to thank my very smart friend Evan Dekens, who provided some helpful insight and resources that helped me complete this essay. His poetry collection is coming out next month and you should all check it out.
Endnotes
1 Read on how I accidentally became a pet-sitter in my substack piece notes on a pet-sitting and grieving summer
2 In the words of Jemima Kirke, I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much - if you really can’t stop thinking about yourself too much, at the very least try to make some art out of it.
Citations
Artan, Ayan. “in defense of pretension.” rent free, 2025.
Chen, Brian X. “How Tech Created a ‘Recipe For Loneliness.’” NY Times, 2024.
Dearo, Guilherme. “Endless Suffering: Emily Dickinson About Pain.” Guilherme Dearo, 2021.
Dickinson, Emily "Pain - Has an Element of Blank - " The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Back Bay Books, Little, Brown & Co., 1997.
Fisher, Mark. “Why Mental Health is a Political Issue.” The Guardian, 2012.
Hooks, Bell. “Women Artists: The Creative Process.” Art on My Mind. The New Press, 1995.
King, Essie. "Basquiat and Identity Politics: Challenging Conventional Narratives." My Art Broker,
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009.
Nelson, Maggie. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. Graywolf Press, 2021.
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