Dorland: Where a Thousand Poems Waited to be Born By Penelope
Moffet My first residency at Dorland, a retreat for writers, visual artists and composers near Temecula, California was in October-November 1983. I was twenty-eight years old and both eager and afraid to be alone working on a novel in Composer's Cottage, a small, sun-licked cabin set the farthest out from the colony's central oak grove. I labored on the novel, sentence by painful sentence, and I began to be surprised by poems -- poems that came from glimpses of lizards doing push-ups on my brick-lined front porch, the flashes of blue under their chins, the flash of blue out the kitchen window as my laundry flapped in the afternoon breeze, the silence broken by the raucous calls of ravens. I spent a lot of time on the trails that weave through the three hundred-acre nature preserve, new field guides in hand, learning to identify plants and birds. Ellen Babcock Dorland was still alive then, ninety-five years old, half-blind and nearly deaf but very present. I encountered her only a few times. A retired concert pianist and music teacher, she was more than a little indignant that a writer was in Composer's with the baby grand piano intended for real composers to play. I blew my chance at afternoon tea with her when I asked if I could interview her. Only later did I learn that she was highly phobic about having her words or image recorded. As it happened, my first month at Dorland was her last month of relative good health, for in early November a gastrointestinal emergency landed her in a hospital and soon she was moved to a nursing home, from which she never returned. On that first stay, I fell completely in love with the Dorland ethos: the silence, the landscape, the sense that I would never be interrupted in my work. There were no telephones in the cottages, and the rule was that no one would come to your door uninvited. All communication happened through notes placed in the mailroom boxes, or through chance encounters in the grove or on the trails. In those early days, there was no electricity at all. Kerosene and propane lit our nights and fueled our appliances. (In later years, limited solar power was provided to a few cottages.) The arrangement encouraged residents to work alone, yet camaraderie flourished; some of my closest friends are people I met at the colony over the years. The Dorland atmosphere drew me back again and again, for stays of a few days to several months. My longest stretch was nine months in 1992-93, when I worked for Dorland part-time while writing poems. The arts community's roots go back to the 1930s, when Ellen and Robert Dorland moved to the property for the sake of Robert's health. They built several cabins, and artist friends and music students came for visits. Eventually the Dorlands and Pasadena resident Barbara Horton arranged a gift-sale of the property to the Nature Conservancy so that the land might be preserved in its natural condition forever. Part of the deal was that the Dorlands could live out their lives on the property and a more formal artists' colony could be established. In the late 1970s teams of volunteers improved the existing cabins and built new ones, and Dorland hosted its first official resident, poet David Trinidad, in 1979. Since then, about four hundred writers, artists and composers have stayed at Dorland, many of them more than once. Writers who have been residents include May Swenson, Alice Sebold, Jean Valentine, Kathryn Chetkovich, Tony Eprile and a host of lesser-knowns. My last visit to Dorland was late February of this year -- not the best month to return to the nineteenth century, as I wrote in one of the poems of that stay. The temperature was Arctic and the woodstove was situated far from the table at which I worked in Horton's Cottage. Being at the table required wearing two layers of clothing, a heavy parka, double socks, boots, even mittens. It rained a lot. One day it hailed a little, icy pellets striking the window in front of me. Every now and then I had to walk over to the other side of the cabin to unfreeze myself in front of the stove. At night I closed off the drafty studio and read by kerosene lamp in the easy chair by the fire. I was very happy, and sometimes I was very lonely. I spoke to almost no one. I read other people's poetry, I daydreamed, I made six new poems in ten days. In between rain showers I went for long walks. There were memories everywhere: the time Bay Area performance artist Patricia Bulitt danced for me on a ridge near Bee Canyon; walks and talks with painter Gilah Yelin Hirsch and playwright Elisabeth Des Marais, whom I met on my first Dorland stay and who became dear friends; potluck gatherings in the adobe and the Kitchen House, at which residents' works-in-progress were sometimes shared; a roaring fire in the woodstove and an assemblage of vibrant personalities in Thompson's Studio for a Thanksgiving feast one year. I was surrounded by memories, but I was also very quiet. I soaked up the peace and silence. It was one of my best Dorland times. When fire came to Dorland this spring, it burned down all ten of its painstakingly hand-made structures. Three pianos and a great deal of dark wood furniture decorated with menacing gargoyles vanished, along with a lot of thrift-store finds. A great many paintings burned, including six-months' worth of drawings and oils by my friend Jane Culp, who had just left for New York, leaving her crated art to be shipped later. Many books burned. Among them were most of the remaining copies of my poetry collection, Keeping Still, published in a limited edition by Dorland in 1995. No one was hurt. A mandatory evacuation had sent all the humans and the two Dorland dogs to safety before the flames came near. Fire has threatened Dorland before. In December 1992 the original Lake Cottage burned down in an accident with flammable fuel. That cabin was redesigned and rebuilt. Then in 2000 a wildfire raced through part of the Dorland property and came close to the buildings. On both occasions the heroic efforts of firefighters stopped the flames. This time, however, Dorland could not be saved. It's hard to comprehend that those cabins and their contents no longer exist. Dorland has been such a powerful presence in my life. It changed the direction of my writing. In a way it changed the structure of my brain. At Dorland I first began to carefully observe the plants and creatures of my habitat. Dorland forced me to slow down, to learn to let ideas develop and unfold at their natural pace, to get quiet enough to allow the emergence of poems and, sometimes, stories. (That novel I worked on during my first stay never made it past a highly problematical first draft.) Dorland has been my teacher and my friend. Its loss is a death in my family. I'm not alone in my mourning. Karen Parrott, Dorland's Executive Director, has been inundated with inquiries and offers of help from past residents and supporters. In Dorland's 25 years of operation, artists came to it from around the world, although the majority were Southern Californians. Many were apprehensive about life and work in such a rugged outpost, where each individual was largely forced to rely upon inner resources. A few fled the environs upon first seeing just how rustic the setting was. Most stayed and flourished, finding that something in the quirky, inconvenient, unstructured nature of life at the colony liberated their imaginations. Dorland did have a good policy of fire insurance, and its Board of Directors has declared its intention to rebuild. A lot of intense work -- fundraising, networking, design -- lies ahead. No doubt a new cluster of buildings, equally odd and beautiful, will rise from the ashes someday. A friend who has never been to Dorland but has always liked the idea of it sent me an email soon after the fire. "What you need to remember," John Olson wrote, "is that this is not the first time [the Dorland land] has burned and that all that has happened is that it has changed and been renewed in a way. If it was my special spot, I would be on the way there right now. I would stand amid the ashes and put to pen all that I was feeling, seeing, smelling, and remembering about my times there. I think you should do that. Then in a year I'd go back and see it being renewed by God's hands and once again write about it. This is probably your one chance to witness the renewal that has taken place there for millions of years." For safety reasons, Parrott has been discouraging individual pilgrimages to the land, but a few weeks after the fire she allowed me to visit. The smell of smoke, of ash, was still strong, and hillsides were thickly coated with white. Some cottages had burnt entirely down to the ground, while at others masonry walls remained upright but fissures hinted they might collapse at any moment. A scorched teapot and a coffee mug rested on the small brick wall that lines Composer's porch, in front of the blackened concrete blocks and the vacant doorway. Scrubjays flitted through an oak grove denuded of undergrowth, and pink and yellow lilies were still blooming in the pond Mrs. Dorland called "Lake Ticanu." I know that the cottages I loved died a natural death, one that comes eventually to every structure built in the outlands of wild California. I know that next spring the wildflowers will offer their most spectacular display yet on slopes that are now fire-scorched and barren. I know that death and renewal and death is the natural cycle. By midsummer, green was already sprouting at the base of the manzanitas and on the branches of the oak trees, and the reeds by Jade Lake -- sheered off by flames -- were once again seven feet tall. But this does little to diffuse the sadness in my bones as I try to understand that my refuge has vanished. That now there is emptiness where once there were rooms that welcomed creative minds. Where once a thousand poems hovered, waiting to be born.
The writer: Penelope Moffet is a Southern California poet, essayist and short fiction writer whose work has been published in The Missouri Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Sun, Green Fuse, The Devil's Millhopper and many other publications. She is the author of Keeping Still, a book of poems. Dorland Mountain Arts Colony: Tax-deductible donations to assist with the rebuilding of the artists' community can be sent to Dorland, P.O. Box 6, Temecula, CA 92593. For more information, visit www.ez2.net/dorland.
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