The FUNNY Part

How SHARING a story of LOSS at a FAMOUS (and possibly haunted) writers' RETREAT taught SLOANE CROSLEY that JOY, like GRIEF, has many DIMENSIONS

- Sloane Crosley

Let's start with the lucky part. I spent last August at the legendary writers' retreat Yaddo, a 55-room stone mansion perched on a hill in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo is notorious enough in the publishing world to teeter on cliché. For starters, it's haunted. Should you arrive somehow failing to have absorbed the stories about the Trask family, which once lived there-Spencer Trask, a financier, purchased the house in the late 19th century; his wife, Katrina Trask, then contracted diphtheria and gave it to their children when she kissed them goodbye; and a mysterious fire burned down the original structure-a trove of spooky evidence clues you in. There are plenty of cordoned-off rooms, piled high with old portraits of little girls with spiders crawling over their unblinking eyes. The presence of the dead dovetails nicely with Yaddo's other reputation as a kind of sleepaway camp for artists.

There are lunch pails. Snacks. Wooded paths. Campers who take it too seriously. Campers who don't take it seriously enough. As someone who spent eight summers of her childhood at an actual sleepaway camp, I can confirm yet another commonality: bats.

A bat, unlike its less talented cousin, the mouse, will seek out the coolest environment possible. It flies low, close to the heads of humans whose only desire is to go unmolested by goth vermin. The bat is Yaddo's mascot. If books could retain the sounds of where they were written, you might hear high-pitched squeaks in the margins of some of your favorite novels.