Dreaming Big with the Artist Residency

I love a heart to heart with a friend about art, money, hospitality, big dreams, day jobs, the Inn’s Artist Residency, and more. I love it especially so when it’s with a pal like Ashley Rubell for a publication like Narratively!

This came out in the spring, but seemed fun to put it up here today since last night I welcomed our last cohort of Artists for the year!

Any artist will tell you there’s no one way, no linear approach to doing the things we dream of doing. Accepting that might be the truest act of creative freedom we can give ourselves as artists. Casey Scieszka, owner of the Spruceton Inn, a minimalist motel (“bed and bar”) tucked away in the Catskill Mountains that’s known for its annual artist residency, is an artist herself — a writer, to be exact. So when she set out to open a reimagined B&B, one that could in turn offer other artists the time and space to get away and work on their craft at no cost, many of those closest to her worried that she was giving up on her own artistic pursuits. But Casey was merely out to take a more creative approach to her ambitions.

Leaving the city for a quiet, rural landscape isn’t what typically comes to mind when thinking of ways to expand your creative network. But after traveling abroad with her now-husband for many years, Casey returned to Brooklyn (where she was born and raised) and quickly knew it wasn’t the right location for what she was looking to do. The Catskills, being one of the most accessible escapes for city dwellers — Casey included — eventually came to mind and when she saw an old motel-style bed and breakfast once previously owned by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relatives and ripe for renovation, everything fell into place.

In the 10 years since Casey has opened up the Spruceton Inn with her husband, author and illustrator Steven Weinberg, their artist residency has attracted many notable creative professionals such as Stephanie Danler, Carmen Maria Machado, Sari Botton, Ariel Aberg-Riger and many others. As a dear friend of mine, I often joke with Casey and say, “Who knew you would end up with so many talented, admirable writers and artists shuffling through your own backyard?!” But as it turns out, she’s always known. Read on to learn about how Casey built generosity into her business model and ended up producing space for her own creative work to flourish.

Ashley: Tell me about the first time you had an immersive experience with a group of artists, and whether that was a part of what inspired you to start an artist residency.

Casey: I went to pretty artsy schools all throughout my education in different places, so I had the opportunity to be in creative writing classes early on. Workshops were my first experience, which funnily enough, as much as I did like those, it was not at all what I wanted to do with the residency. What I was more interested in was what happens when you get out of your daily life experiences and you open up your mind and artistic eye differently.

Ashley: When did you first have the idea to open up an artist residency? Was that always a part of your original business plan with the inn?

Casey: When I was looking to open up the inn 10 years ago, I had a yellow legal pad of ideas of things I wanted to do. And on that first page, from day one, was always an artist residency. It was always a part of my vision.

Ashley: As an artist yourself, how has opening the inn given you more or less space to write?

Casey: I wanted to separate my financial well-being from my art. When Steven and I were living in Morocco, doing the hustle of freelance writing and graphic design, there was this abandoned riad (traditional boutique “hotel”) next door to where we were living. Every night when I was falling asleep, I would imagine buying it, renovating it and living there half the year and then having it be a hotel the other half, or an artist residency. When we got back to the states, that’s when I got out the legal pad and started dreaming and realizing that I wanted [to open the hotel]. It wasn’t an abandoning of art, although I really appreciate that Steven, my parents, my friends, people who had known me as an artist were all very concerned. They would ask, not even delicately, “You’re not giving up, right?” But this was actually my way of making realistic space for my art in a way that I thought would make me feel good long-term: financially, emotionally, all of it.

It was then funny to move upstate and not have many people know about the artist side of me. I was only known for hospitality [as the owner of the inn]. But that other part, the artist, has always been chugging along… Running the artist residency is a huge part of it. Talking with other artists and having our backyard full of artists has been so inspiring. It keeps us in an art-making and art-appreciating frame of mind when otherwise daily life and business concerns are always threatening to take over. For instance, I might be going downstairs to fold laundry and catch sight through my window of someone heading to the barn with an armful of paintbrushes and it stops me in my tracks and makes me think, “Eff the laundry, I’m going to have another go at that scene that still isn’t sitting quite right.” And I’m so grateful for that!

Having an inn where we can host this artist residency has been a gift to others, but Steven and I totally benefit from it, too. We get to be inspired by having artists around, we get to be inspired talking with them when they’re here. We stay in touch long after they’re gone and we get to enjoy the final product of their labor, a.k.a. all of their art!

Ashley: Did you kick off the residency right away? And what types of artists do you accommodate?

Casey: We did it right away, yes. We host writers and 2D artists because A, that’s what Steven and I feel most qualified to judge, and B, that’s what’s most straightforward for someone to be working on in a little motel room. As much as I love large-scale sculpture, that’s just not gonna happen in one of our rooms!

I decided that we would do it in the winter. Every penny counted and I didn’t want to take away from high-season weekends. But I looked at this 10-room motel strip in the backyard and was like, this is a latent resource that’s just there. I thought, “What if we gave away one of the rooms one at a time all throughout the winter?” which was the slightly sleepier season.

One part of the residency’s design from day one was that it would always be just a week long. Part of this is practicality on our end, but the other big part is that as dreamy as a month-long residency sounds, most people can’t be gone that long from their other jobs or pets or loved ones. Although I will say, I love how there’s a variety of residencies popping up now that are family-friendly!

Ashley: You and I chatted a couple years ago for a story in Tidal Magazine, mainly about how the pandemic has shifted the way you operate your business. You used to be open year-round, and the residency took place all winter long. Now you’re only open half the year. Can you tell us about how that shift also affected the way you operate the artist residency?

Casey: After the pandemic, my main goal became a question of how much can I operate by myself? So we shifted to be open weekends only from Memorial Day through October. But that cut out the winter months when we normally ran the residency, and I wasn’t willing to give that up. At that point, everyone was so desperate for community, so we figured we would just try it for one year with a new model where, after we close for the regular season, we would have three small groups of six people coming one week at a time during the month of November, and see how that worked. And we loved it. We just did our third year of this version. It’s still small enough that you don’t feel like you’re at some giant party with a million people. And the base of the residency has never changed in that it’s a week long and we expect nothing of you.

We also changed the application process. We used to have a 5,000-word submission and many more questions, like, “Why do you want this residency?” But most everyone needs it for the same reason, to get away from daily life. The more applications we got, we just had to make it shorter because it takes too much time [to read them all]. So now we’ve made it super-duper short, refining which questions we ask.

And we used to not have Wi-Fi in the rooms. For the first six years, you had to come to the bar to get Wi-Fi. When we reopened, we put Wi-Fi in all the rooms because we were still doing social distancing.

Ashley: How is the space set up in the current iteration, and how do you and Steven step in as hosts and facilitators to make this a conducive experience for such a wide range of artists?

Casey: Because we had moved up to the Catskills from Brooklyn, my thought was to create a space where you could get away and isolate. You need to get your butt in the chair and not have any distractions. Each artist has their own solo room on eight acres of space.

November is one of those super back-and-forth months where it can be 30 degrees or 60 degrees in the sun, so people make use of the outside [when it’s conducive] and we have all the picnic tables, and then we also have the barn, which serves as a little local library for the neighborhood, as well. We leave one large table with a bunch of chairs in there and there’s the big old door that opens up to a view of the mountains. The patio is concrete so it warms in the sun, and that is the unspoken communal area. And we host a bonfire on the second night where folks can have some sips and people get to know each other a little bit.

From there, each group really forms their own type of bond. I remember one of the first years, one group had a show-and-tell type of performance at the end, in the barn. Some groups get super tight and we can hear them chattering from the house, like, “family dinner in 10!” and with other people, it has a more lovely monkish feeling, where it’s very quiet and then you just see people every once in a while in passing and whispering to each other. It’s always different. But the solitude piece is still easily accessible and is still inherently an important part of the experience.

Ashley: And, for the record, this is a free artist residency.

Casey: Yes, people come up for free. That was the other thing I really wanted to do with this, always, from day one — make it so it was never going to cost people anything, not even an application fee.

Ashley: That’s such a rarity with artist residencies. How is this financially sustainable for you?

Casey: Being open half of the year and then giving away rooms for a month, it costs us more than it ever has to do this. But I stand by really wanting that to be my gift to the art world, and one of the many ways I want to support the arts. In the same way, we give away half of our bar profits to social and climate justice groups. It feels like too much money to be giving away, but that’s also the level of discomfort that I want because we can literally afford to do it. It’s worth it.

Ashley: This acceptance of needing another business to float your creative pursuits is really interesting to me. As a writer who talks to so many other writers, I feel like we’ve all come to learn, you kind of need to keep that other job. And it sounds like you learned that early on in your journey, too.

Casey: I think it scared people that this other part was not going to have anything to do with writing. But running the inn made it such that I had these 10 years to work on various manuscripts and then finally, with space and time, I was able to abandon books that just weren’t working and stick with the one that was.

Ashley: How many applicants do you typically get for the residency? How much has that grown since you started?

Casey: I remember being surprised by how many we got the first year. I’m sure we got at least over 50, if not 100. And then it’s just grown exponentially. It depends, too, on who of the previous artists really pushed [the application announcement] in their network that year. I think last year we had about 400 people apply. At this point we’ve had 96 artists stay with us over 10 seasons.

Ashley: Your application opens up every August, which I know is a super busy season for you. I recall last year you were hosting a wedding at the inn, had just gotten back from your own travels and to top things off, you had also finished the manuscript for your first novel, The Fountain! Plus, you keep your two kids home in the summer… How on earth do you and Steven make the time to sift through 400 applications during such a busy season?

Casey: Like many people, we’re kind of like, the more on our plate, the more we actually get done, you know? We’re just operating at high-season speed. Steven and I read them separately. He likes to read the applications as they roll in one at a time and he keeps a mental list of people he’s excited about. And I prefer to just go whole hog in two days. Then we basically come together with a short list each to see which applicants overlap, and then Steven and I jockey for others. Once we’re looking over our lists together, we can say, “Remember this person?” and then we’ll start talking about their work more, and the more we talk about it together, the more we’re like, “That’s a really interesting project.” Some applicants are very well established and have lots of opportunities to go to other artist residencies. And maybe what they thought they were going to be working on [at the time of applying] was a little too open-ended compared to someone else where it’s like, this would be the big break for them.

When grouping our residents, we do try to balance folks from different crafts if only because as helpful and fun as it can be to talk shop and shmooze about your industry and do the whole who-do-you-know-who-I-also-know thing, that can sometimes feel stressful, like extra pressure. People start comparing themselves, or get caught up in bemoaning the money-making aspect of their art. It’s much more exciting for us to be passively facilitating fireside conversations about general artistic process, inspiration and craft. Especially across different mediums. Sure, on the surface, a very serious photographer might not have a lot in common with a wacky children’s book author, but more often than not, they actually have loads to talk about because at the end of the day, they’re both artists.

Ashley: Is there any other advice you’d impart to someone interested in starting or running an artist residency?

Casey: It’s really inspiring and overwhelming to process so many people’s artistic dreams. Figure out a way to go through applications that won’t drain you. And always keep in mind what the goal of your particular program is. Do you want to create a community between applicants? Sponsor time for emerging artists? Let that be your guiding star when you design the program, and fall back on it when you start to inevitably get lost in all the talent within the applications!