Frank Corcoran

1990 it was. Yes.
I was a Fellow at the Virginia Centre for Creative Artists
VCCA at lovely Sweet Briar. I remember their generosity, this exploding jungle, the light in the crippling July heat.
The week before I drove across from Milwaukee to the Blue Ridge Mountains ( as I made a car-stop on a hot, hot road, my son, Andreas, leaped across a nest of rattlesnakes beside us and lived to tell the tale… ) , Joe the Cook’s brother had fallen into the water from his flat fishing boat in a dark corner ( dense trees ) of the lake; he’d drowned under, well, mysterious circumstances. – Don’t ask the police anything , was my fellow Fellows’ advice.
Well, every morning Joe welcomed the big black snake – from the big black tree in the Fellows’ Park – for breakfast at the kitchen-door. Every morning it then slowly wallowed back to its
tree to digest it . Aghast, I watched ( – I have kept a photograph of us both ). Later in the even greater heat I’d swim in the impenetrable lake, fearful of all giant, biting tortoises which would plop down suddenly from the trees and making a great noise…
It was advisable to keep a sharp eye out for all the Virginia flora and fauna.
Most of the Fellows were well-known New York painters. A few poets wrote in the great temperatures. My friend, Eddie Clift, great professor of photography, composed high-quality
pictures. I composed high tones.
One evening we put on ( for ourselves ) a concertante version of my gestating opera, “GILGAMESH ” , which was all about death-in-life and life-in-death.
I have never, never forgotten Sweetbriar, VCCA.