My go-to Dominican restaurant… in part because I can see it from my house.

It’s tough to convince yourself to leave the house during a Chicago winter—and why bother? I’ve got all I need right here. I’m a huge believer that community is more important to artists now than ever before, but there’s no reason you can’t engage with that community via email while curled up in a blanket burrito.

Yesterday, I was workshopping a colleague’s creative writing piece that focused on this colleague’s hermit-like lifestyle on the 14th floor of a Chicago high-rise. Her writing made the downtown apartment sound like a watchtower out of a fairy tale, and she saw the people moving below as sparks of electricity in a circuitboard of streets. Cities are perfect enablers of the hermit lifestyle; while they may seem crowded and busy on the surface, there’s something soothing in the anonymity and accessibility of city life.

Right now, I live across the street from a restaurant and next door to a convenience store. Add in online shopping and delivery, and I could probably survive for the foreseeable future without ever leaving my block. I’ve always grown up in the suburbs, where getting to anything nonresidential required, at minimum, a 10- to 15-minute drive. I remember seeing movies set in New York and Chicago and imagining how great it must be to walk out of the house and into a store. I can tell you now, folks, that it. Is. Amazing.

I think that holing up for awhile can benefit people in creative fields; after all, isn’t that what an artist residency is? The opportunity to focus on work for a period of uninterrupted time? Now that graduation is looming closer, I’ve begun applying to artist residencies every now and then, hoping that one of them will be a way to get on my feet right after school. So many of the residencies I choose to apply for seem somewhat isolationist, such as the “23 Days at Sea” Artist Residency, in which artists are sent on cargo freighters from Vancouver to Shanghai.

A shot of a cargo dock, from the “23 Days at Sea Artist Residency” Kickstarter.

While on board, artists are encouraged to gather notes, sketches, photographs, and other research that will allow for the creation of a new body of work based on their experiences at sea. I seem to be undergoing the Chicago version of that process in pursuit of my thesis this semester. Treating the wintertime as a residency may not make it any more fun when I do have to face the weather, but it certainly makes me more productive.