Dominic Smith

Apart from my three years in graduate school and a brief, subsequent fellowship, I have always written on the margins of a day job. I have worked as a technical writer, a marketing writer, an editor. I have taught creative writing at a handful of universities. In many ways, when I think of my writing life, I see an open laptop and my cat curled beside me on a lounge chair in the predawn hours. It’s the one piece of furniture in the house that always suggests work to me and it carries a kind of magnetic field. Guests seldom choose to sit in it, as if they know that the chair has been implicated in many hours of labor and that human lives—albeit imagined ones—have been unraveled from that seat cushion.

Writing, for me, is the most concentrated form of attention that I know. It demands emotion and intellect, holistic patternmaking and zooming in. It wants to use both sides of the brain. When awards or fellowships happen along, it’s a reminder that there are sentences and ideas, emotions and images, that accumulate when a person sits alone for long enough and types out words. That is no small wonder to me.

More than anything else, a fellowship from the NEA brings me into contact with the thousands of creative writing fellows who have gone before me, who have configured their lives to allow time to put words on the page. Nobody asks us for the work, of course. We’re driven to it and sometimes driven away from it. But this fellowship means that I am able to take some time to research a new book, to think and plot as a new novel takes shape. Time is the most essential gift for any writer and I’m beyond grateful to have a little more of it with this fellowship.