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WHEN I ARRIVED at my very first artists’ residency, perched on a mountaintop in Northern California, I faced an expanse of fog meandering across rolling hills, redwood groves, and the Pacific Ocean in the distance. This hard-fought gift of time was preceded by several months of planning: arranging my work schedule to take a month off, declining the invitation to a best friend’s wedding, and managing the big, fat weight of both the impostor syndrome and self-doubt I toted with me every time I sat down to write. These spots were coveted, awarded after a lengthy application process. I wanted to feel deserving, but I felt like an intruder within these 600 acres of private hiking trails dotted with past residents’ sculptures. Where would I start? I was overwhelmed, so I took a nap.

I brought things I thought would keep me grounded and remind me of the Dominican Republic and New York, where I come from: a jewel (in my eyes), a shell, and rose quartz. At 5 years old, thinking I’d found a rare jewel at a flea market in New York City, I pleaded with my grandmother until she paid a single coin. The shell — from a Costa Rican beach where I went surfing my first and only time — was brought to remind me of my bravery … or stupidity? (I can barely swim.) And the rose quartz is from a Reiki practitioner who told me I must resist all judgment — most of all from myself.

Instead of writing, I hiked deep into the redwood forest, followed bunnies and deer on their peripatetic paths, deciphered natural sounds this city girl didn’t recognize, and scanned the ocean for whales, even though I was far from shore. Then I wrote, and wrote, while remembering that my grandmother had never learned to read; that the oversized, counterfeit jewel of a glass cube she bought me now held down the marked-up pages for my novel in progress. When my family immigrated to the U.S. for a better life, they forged a new path for me. Innovation can come from dreaming. My first language is Spanish, I write in English, and I dream in both.

But there is the matter of my process: spitting everything up on the page very quickly and then moving it around until I make something. Even this short essay was cobbled together from a 3,000-word document, scribblings on Post-its, the backs of envelopes from several days’ mail, a dog grooming receipt, voice memos on my phone, and one word written in Sharpie on a brown paper bag from take-out Indian that simply said “Saturn!” This is all manageable for a short essay, but maddening and tear inducing if we’re talking about a novel.

After several residencies, I can say that I am always changed by the end of each. I tend to the parts of my life and art that I don’t have the time to tend to in the outside world. Listening, watching, taking the world in, unfiltered by the quotidian. Residencies give me time to integrate how I’ve grown as an artist, to meet how I’ve changed as an older, hopefully wiser person.

At my last residency, I picked out a poetry book from a bookshelf in my studio, a memoir in sonnets by the poet Diane Seuss, which she’d started writing in the very same cabin I was sitting in. I read her beautiful dedication to the place and the artists to come, and in the first poem she wrote of her journey to the residency at the mouth of Cape Disappointment. She wrote: “Forget all the way back to where you were before you were born.”

Where to begin the work? First, with remembering.