The Shape of Time
AT THE beginning of September 2020 I drove south from my home in Minneapolis to a small town in the Mississippi River valley where I was scheduled to start a monthlong writing residency.
It had been a difficult summer marked by the murder of George Floyd near where we live; the pandemic hitting the six-month mark, which already felt like a lifetime; and the burning of our city. Our days had been colored by strangeness and sorrow. Our nights had been filled with smoke and fear. When I arrived in the town of Red Wing, Minnesota, the trees were still full of green leaves and it was quiet.
The residency was located at the Anderson Center at Tower View, and it was the third time I’d been there to work: The first time was in 2006, the second in 2011, and now again, nearly a decade later.
The artists’ and writers’ rooms at the Anderson Center are in a house built by A. P. Anderson, the
