Page 27 - 2019 EMERGING WRITERS FELLOWSHIP ANTHOLOGY1

A LETTER FROM THE OYSTER

To begin with I considered it a win to merely apply for a fellowship. I thought myself
audacious for attempting to claim a space. Two years before Esalen, I had considered a

different fellowship, one that required two recommendations. I approached a writer with
whom I had taken a workshop, whose work I respected, who had previously been

encouraging—only to be turned down because he thought my writing “lacked depth.” It

had taken me two years to recover from that disappointment and push myself into a place
I wasn’t convinced I belonged—as a writer.

But in the weeks prior to Esalen I fell into a depression so thick I could find neither myself

nor my muse, so deep I feared I might never again surface. After five years of generating
material for a memoir—about my experience as a raped boy seeking his manhood—I felt

spent, out of juice, and out of time. As the shuttle wound its way from Monterey to Big
Sur—to my first ever fellowship, at Esalen—I suffered from a mind turning in on itself,

convincing me I was an impostor resting on the laurels of a version of myself that no
longer existed. I labeled myself a fraud. That day on my way to Esalen, those around me

bantered with ease as I stared out the window, in my head with the echoes of all of these

things, determined to find my way through.

This is who I was when I arrived.

When the oyster is out of balance, they can be reluctant, withdrawn, and may
clam up.

The first thing that struck me about the Esalen

campus was its postcard perfection: cottony
clouds hovering just above rolling green hills,

a lush lawn at the precipice of the ocean. As a
lover of the natural world, the land whispered

to me, promised a peace that I needed. As I
walked up to the room where I would be

staying, a lizard greeted me at the threshold, a
serendipitous symbol of regeneration.

I opened the door to find two Fellows—Fred and Maysam—looking back at me, and

something about their spirits set me ease. Maysam, who is all smiles and bubbly energy,
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