Beside still waters: memories of the Paden Institute and Retreat for writers of Color

I am a writer-in-residence at the Paden Institute and Retreat for Writers of Color in Essex, New York. It is dusk, and as I sit on a green wooden bench, facing the vast expanse of water that is Lake Champlain in the North Country, I reflect on all that I have accomplished during my short sojourn here. The sun slowly sets, enveloping the lake in pitch-black darkness, the Green Mountains directly in front of me and the North Adirondack Mountains to the right. I know that I will be immersed in this blackness until the bright stars of the northern night begin to appear in the sky.

The Paden Institute, founded in 1997 by Alice Green and Charles Touhey, affords writers of color an opportunity to work on their writing in a small cottage, situated on their property on the bank of Lake Champlain. Green [no relation to Brenda Greene] is director of the Center for Law and Justice in Albany and Charles Touhey is a developer and adjunct professor in the Africana Studies Department at the State University of Albany.

Green grew up in Witherbee, New York, part of what is known as the North Country. She left to attend college in Albany where she met her husband, who had also grown up in the North Country. Upon her parents' death, she and her husband returned to the family home to rehabilitate it. They also decided to establish the Paden Institute on their property in Essex County. In reflecting on why she decided to create the Institute, Green shares her experiences growing up in Witherbee, after her parents came to the small, poor, iron-mining town.

"My parents migrated from the South with their six young children. An anomaly, we represented one of only two black families in the town.

"Racism loomed large, heavily defining our financial, social and cultural lives," she recalls. "The town itself, along with the mountainous terrain, separated us from the rest of the world. Hidden from us were black people, black history and black culture. Missing from our lives were all the great black writers who could have opened our eyes, our minds, and our world."

This void left its mark. When she returned to the Adirondacks later on in life, Green put into action a plan that would help to address the marginalization, alienation and silencing that she felt as a black person growing up in an environment where she never saw herself represented.

"After returning to the Adirondacks more than two decades later, free of the emotional pain that had colored my earlier view of this land, I was able to witness its astounding beauty and tranquility with new, more educated eyes and mind," she says. "My overriding thought was to share this magnificent part of the world with other brothers and sisters of color. In doing so, it was my hope that they would be inspired and encouraged to write and share their work and knowledge with others."

A Writer's Haven

"In 1997, my husband and I opened a cottage on our Essex County property to writers of color," she recalls. "While seeking to attract people of color to the Adirondacks, our primary goal was to provide an opportunity and environment for writers who wished to 'get away' to seriously pursue their writing projects. This gave birth to the Paden Institute and Retreat for Writers of Color, which has provided residence to more than ten writers over the past seven years."

The Paden Institute and Retreat is one of New York's best-kept secrets for writers. Situated near the cottage is a big house referred to as Content. Stories abound that this Revolutionary-era house, with its false ceilings, was a stop on the Underground Railroad. There is also evidence that a tunnel led from the house to the Lake Champlain. Content is also the home where the writer Rudyard Kipling spent his summers.

I stayed at the Paden Institute and Retreat for four weeks in August 2001. I had taken a sabbatical that year; and as the time approached for me to return to my position at Medgar Evers College, I lamented that I was mentally drained and exhausted, having taken on the fulfilling yet challenging task of restructuring the oldest independent black bookseller in Brooklyn, Nkiru Books, into an educational and cultural center and completing the proposals to create a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College. Hence, my plate was very full. And as the time approached for me to return to the college, my friend and colleague Elizabeth Nunez suggested that I apply to the Paden Institute. I quickly applied and was accepted.

At Paden, I had a chance to write, read and relax in solitude. I was able to retreat into my own inner sanctuary, to reach into the depths of my soul and to begin the journey of remembering those experiences that had brought me to a place in my life where I felt compelled to share my life, experiences and observations on life in America as an African American gift child, woman, wife, mother and academician with others. While at Paden, I created a first draft of a memoir on personal and professional life. Since my sojourn, I have revised this memoir several times, for as many of us know, "life" walks in while we are in the midst of our remembering, and it impacts our stories in ways we have not envisioned. I have not yet published it.

Other writers also have enjoyed the sanctity of Paden. Carolyn Butts, founder and editor of the literary journal African Voices stayed there for a week in 2003.

"It was a week of spiritual restoration for me where I had an opportunity to return to my personal writings," Butts says. "I'm a very internal person who gets bombarded with the time and pace set by the world, so the Paden Institute allowed me to enjoy nature's time. The natural setting and history of the cottage as a stop on the Underground Railroad inspired some of my poems and journal writings. It was a rite of passage for me as an artist to do nothing but write and breathe."

The Luxury of Solitude

J. L. Torres, poet and professor of English at Plattsburgh State University, also stayed at the Paden Institute in 2003. "A time to reflect, to focus on the particulars of his or her craft is absolutely essential for any writer," Torres says. "The luxury of solitude is not often available to anyone in our increasingly maddening-paced world. Those writers, like myself, who opt for academe--as a way to pay the bills--while striving to write the Great American Novel or the next Leaves, are overburdened with the minutiae of administrative tasks often not related to teaching, which in itself, as any good teacher knows, extracts more than a pound of flesh and soul.

"My time at the Paden cottage primarily allowed me the important pleasure to slow down, to contemplate the stillness of things around me--so crucial for any writer, particularly, I believe, a poet. As I detoxed from the hectic life I lead, I was able to face my laptop with vigor and a mind free, however fleeting, to concentrate on writing ... I left there renewed and willing to confront the mundane for the sake of my art."

Since its inception, the Paden Institute has hosted writers such as Yusef Salaam, who completed the manuscript for a play while there; Elizabeth Nunez, professor of English and novelist, who completed the manuscript for her novel Discretion (One World/Ballantine, February 2002); Frankie Y. Bailey, professor of criminal justice at Albany State University, mystery writer and author of Old Murders (Silver Dagger Mysteries, March 2003); and Wesley Brown, novelist and professor of English who wrote Darktown Strutters (University of Massachusetts, September 2000).

The Paden Institute and Retreat also partners with the North Country Institute and Retreat for Writers of Color to provide an option for writing residents to use the cottage to work on their writing in a secluded environment.

For more information on the Paden Institute visit the Web site at www.web.plattsburgh.edu/offices/academic/writersofcolor/padeninstitute.php or contact Charles Touhey at 518-438-3521.

Brenda M. Greene is a professor of English at Medgar Evers College.

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