Testimonials & Past Writers in Residence

“Above all, life at the homestead shaped and perhaps solidified my sense about my place in the world: a recognition of smallness that I think is enormously helpful to writing and interactions with others. My experiments at the homestead laid the foundation for all that’s come since. I don’t know that I would be a writer, now, otherwise, and I am grateful.”

“By the time I left the residency, I had gained a renewed confidence in my work and in myself. No other experience, aside from love and motherhood, has ever changed my life so drastically or so wonderfully.”

“It may have been the spectacle of the mass migration of newts into the pond and their fascinating proclivities therein, or the great horned owl we saw gliding across the meadow with a ground squirrel in its talons, or the mountain lion we heard screaming in the night. Whatever it was, being there somehow made all the difference.”

“Dutch Henry will visit you in your dreams like a ghost.  It will stay with you in your wakefulness, too, and before long you will realize that not only did this place inform your writing, it informed your character and who you are.  I am a changed person because of Dutch Henry.  Change is hard.  If you don’t like change, this is not for you.”

“I think of my time at the Rogue as one of the greatest gifts of my life. Few other experiences have altered my thinking and my creative processes like my days at Dutch Henry. Those seven and a half months rewired my brain and inspired my work in ways that I am always thinking about and trying to get back to - though I know nothing else will ever compare.”

“Dutch Henry is more than a place to write. Dutch Henry is a state of mind.  The time I spent in the Oregon wilderness will not soon be forgotten, but what makes this residency so valuable is that once you’ve been there you never really leave.  When I want to return, I close my eyes and pretend I am sitting on the deck looking out on the orchard and the surrounding conifers and madrones… I write like I wrote when I had no other agenda but to refill the hummingbird feeders and pick up the apples that had fallen to the ground the night before… And I write with the understanding that what I am doing is supremely important work.”

“I believe I better understand now how to hear, and how each voice is only part of what is being spoken during a conversation that is ageless and multi-dimensional. My listening now is more concerned with hearing the necessary inexactitudes of resonance and possibility.”

“I hope this residency, this life-changing, transformative experience, will always continue. What the Boyden brothers have done has been nothing less than foundational in the life of my family, and in the current direction of my writing.”

“There’s an initiation all residents go through in their own way and with their own heart.  It involves a willingness to engage with solitude and nature and the work of words and hands.  Making kindling. Planting a garden.  Writing a poem.  These tasks are not dissimilar.  In an ideal life every gesture could be crafted.  At Dutch Henry I became a better writer, no doubt.  But I also became a better cook, stargazer, fisherman.  And I became more comfortable in the company of myself and others..”

“For me, living and writing in a remote wilderness, alone save the wide-world outside my door—the world of stars, sun and moon; deer and cougar; bats and spotted owls; yellow jackets; newts; water ouzels and ospreys; bears—all opened a “doorway into the mythical.”  But the doorway itself, its existence, which spiritual teachers like to say is available to any of us at any time and at any place, was nothing compared to the act of stepping through.”

“My time at the Dutch Henry Homestead is why I won the Pulitzer Prize. It really is that simple. The six and a half months I spent caretaking the land out at DHH showed me the way back to a softness I’d been seeking for decades, and allowed me to find the thread of my family’s story in a way that would have never been possible without a literal expanse of space and silence. This residency is a gift I will spend the rest of my life unwrapping.”