While in residence at VCCA, Vincent Pidone built an automatic drawing machine that he hopes to program to draw using animation software. Normally, with stop motion animation, you would make drawings and then photograph those drawings individually putting them together to form an animation. It ’ s a laborious process when you consider that Vincent ’ s animations are composed of 300-400 individual drawings on file cards to yield about thirty seconds of animation. That ’ s why Vincent is attempting to get the animation software to do the drawing for him. Ideally, he will end up with a short animated film and a stack of physical drawings that are essentially one-offs. “I ’ m basically grabbing the tail and wagging the dog instead of doing it the way it ’ s typically done,” says Vincent. “What I ’ m doing is very challenging. If it were easy, someone else would have done it by now. This is why I need a few weeks to work on this stuff.” The VCCA residency funded by the NEA for milit...

I have the great fortune to be a Fellow at the  VCCA  for twelve days at the beginning of November. This is only 14 miles from Randolph College, my alma mater, but I’ve never been to the VCCA. So, I’m particularly happy to be back in Virginia, surrounded by amazing autumn foliage, expressly for dedicated writing time. Perhaps it is because I laid the foundations of my writing career in this very setting – the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains – but it is both familiar and sweet to be sitting out in the morning sunlight with my laptop (fortunately, not the same laptop,) breathing fresh mountain air and the smells of dry, sun-baked grass. The colors here astonish me. I’ve just come from Bath, that oat-biscuit-coloured city of seamless beauty. But to drive through fall leaves in every color of the spice cupboard – paprika, saffron, cumin, turmeric, nutmeg, cinnamon – brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges – makes me feel at home. Even the birds are bright: wh...

VCCA offers an opportunity for VCCA Fellows to work in the beautiful village of Auvillar in Southwest France at its Moulin à Nef Studio Center.  This residency program provides a private studio, a private bedroom and one meal each week for four Fellows at a time.   VCCA Fellow and poet Susan Gubernat was in residence in Auvillar  just last month. Of her residency, she says, "I had a wonderful experience at Moulin à Nef–not only were the serenity and many beauties of this lovely little village conducive to the solitary work of poetry, but also, whenever I needed to come up for air, so to speak, there was such a sustaining community both of VCCA staff and fellows and of the villagers of Auvillar themselves. It's a magic place." In 2017, residencies of any length of time are available from April 10 - May 10; from June 14 - June 21; and from July 10 - December 15. Apply for this wonderful international opportunity.  The application deadline is December 1.