Five Points, Vol. 15 No. 3

Fall 2013

From Lydia Davis, “I suppose obsession is something many or most of us are prone to at least from time to time.”

Sample Content

John Skoyles
A Stay at Yaddo

When I called Stanley Kunitz to thank him for recommending me to Yaddo, he warned me about the ghosts that had driven him away after a single night. A tapping noise on his bedroom window had kept him awake. When he switched on the lamp, it stopped. When he turned the light off, the ticking began again, and with such intensity he thought the glass would break. He was sure he was being haunted by one of the two Trask children who had contracted diphtheria from their mother whose family founded the art colony and who died in the room in which he now slept. He left the next morning.

In late August, I drove through Yaddo’s tall iron gates and into the four hundred acre estate. I was without a job, and glad for the residency.

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