To the outsider’s eye, the day at MacDowell appears to be quite regimented: the breakfast bell, the dinner bell, the surreptitious yet punctual arrival of one’s lunch basket. Yet if life at MacDowell is ostensibly shaped around meals (the comradely quiet of breakfast, the solitary lunch, the often animated dinner), the days themselves, the hours around and between those meals, have a weird exhilarating elasticity. And time can, and does, stop at MacDowell: One morning in April of 1986, a small group of us sat at the breakfast table eating oranges and toast while huge clumps of spring snow fell outside, and we all swore it was 8:40 for about 20 minutes.

I never knew how many hours 24 were until I spent them at MacDowell. It’s a lot of time, especially when you let go of doing certain things at specific intervals — waking, sleeping, bathing, going to work, returning from work. Once when I was sleeping in one of those nice bedrooms on the top floor of Pan’s Cottage I was awoken at 3 a.m. — my neighbor was drawing a (very large) bath. It made perfect sense to me, and I have always liked the feeling of everyone at MacDowell creating their own days, people stumbling into breakfast after a long night’s work, while others, well-rested, set out. It’s what gives the place its constantly thrumming creative energy.

One of the greatest luxuries an artist can have is a day in which nothing has to be done. No one to see, nowhere to go, just the gorgeousness of all those unsubscribed minutes and hours, occurring to be used as one most passionately wants. In real life such days are rare, but at MacDowell we are given that extraordinary gift every day

Novelist Peter Cameron, author of this piece, has visited The MacDowell Colony many times since his first residency in 1984. His recent books include Andorra and The City of your Final Destination, which was recently optioned by Merchant-Ivory Productions. He has been a MacDowell board member since 1995. This essay was originally submitted for the Alliance newsletter.