I’ve never been someone who requires just the right setting, but after spending the last few years writing short fiction in stolen scraps of time, I needed to be immersed for at least a few days to get started in earnest on a new novel. Arcosanti is an architectural and ecological experiment out in the Arizona desert where 50-70 people live at any given time, and construct a city based on the designs of Paolo Soleri. I’ve been fascinated with Arcosanti since childhood, and I thought it might be the just the right place to reconnect with my childhood sense of imagination, the faraway stuff that made me want to write in the first place. Arcosanti maintains guest quarters for as little as $35 a night, there are no distractions (unless stars count), and the café serves up three meals a day, cafeteria style, so a writer can go days without cooking, driving, or being tempted by a television. It’s the perfect place to create a mini-residency and forget that the rest of the planet even exists.
