I’m currently at VCCA (The Virginia Center for Creative Arts) in Amherst, Virginia, working on my second novel and a couple of short stories. The idea of a residency is to allow writers (and other artists) to take a break from their everyday responsibilities and focus on their creative work for a concentrated period of time. This works extremely well, except for the wireless internet. The other day when I was not getting anywhere on my novel I realized I was wasting a lot of time online. Then I decided, since I wasn’t getting anything done anyway, I would create a wiki for writing residencies.
A wiki (like wikipedia) is a crowdsourced information repository–a website that can be edited by anyone. If you’ve ever been to a residency, please add your .02 to the listings there. There’s also a discussion page for each residency program, in case you want to start an argument.