I would say that every year or two, I get to a point in Austin where I itch to leave. My routine starts to feel stagnant. The hustle of happy hours selling natural wine to strangers becomes arduous.
My familiar haunts start feeling a little too familiar. My routine a little too, well, routine.
The other day I finished preparing a mop bucket as I closed the restaurant where I work three days a week. As my coworker walked by, I exclaimed, “One day I’ll mop my last floor, Zoe!”
Without missing a beat, she responded, “I mean, one day you’ll do your last everything.”
Damn. Zoe says some real shit sometimes.
I mopped the floor with a gratitude for being alive, but the fire to leave the city was also still very much there.
I’m typing this from an immovable airport cafe table in Denver. They say there are lizard people who live under this airport. It feels more interesting to believe they do—but in a silly way, not in a Q-Anon conspiratorial way, you know?
To my right is the largest American flag I’ve ever seen in my life, ominously lit and hanging silently above the thousands of travellers shuffling and scurrying to wherever’s next.
For me, where’s next is Billings, Montana.
A few months ago, I was selling my books at an art book fair at the Dallas Contemporary. A stranger approached me and started speaking Mongolian—he was clearly not Mongolian. As we both quickly reached the limit of our language knowledge, we switched to English.
His name was Todd Forsgren. It turned out he had lived in Mongolia on a Fulbright in 2008, the same grant I received to live in Mongolia in 2015. He was photographing gardening and farming projects throughout the country.
Todd was also a vendor at the fair, and I eventually made it to his table to take a look at his work. After flipping through several of his beautiful publications, he started telling me about an artist residency he runs in Billings, where he lives and works as a professor.
It felt like a moment of serendipity. I had been craving the creative space a residency offers as I finish the project I’ve been working on in Mongolia, and here was this Mongolian-speaking man telling me to apply to the one he runs.
So here I am. Seated underneath this gargantuan American flag en route to Billings to spend two weeks focused on writing my next book.
While I certainly won’t finish the book, my goal is to emerge from the residency with three chapters drafted, a better idea of how I want to sequence the images in the book, and a table of contents that will serve as an outline for the project.
If you’ve been thinking about buying a print or one of the books I’ve already finished, now would be a great time to order one, as I take a couple of incredible weeks to focus on finishing this next book.
I’ll ship any orders as soon as I get back to Austin. If you live in Austin, send me an email (dimitri260@gmail.com), message me on Instagram, or text me so you don’t have to pay for shipping.