Artist residencies come in all shapes and sizes. How do you pick the one that suits you?

I'm writing from the fourth floor of a crumbling Art Deco apartment block in Kypseli, Athens. For the next three weeks I'm a writer in residence at Argo Arts, one of four international artists sharing a huge apartment in a neighbourhood that is bustling, eclectic and even more hipster than Wellington. The city feels familiar – it’s grungy and fuelled with creative energy. Graffiti covers the walls, scrawls of fuck off tourists and free Palestine and the tiny single lane streets that are full of rubble and people wearing jeans and black t-shirts. 

Everyone here is working on something. The room next to me houses an Iranian illustrator from New York. Down the hall are two painters, one from Canada and the other Bulgaria. I am here to finish my second novel, a sexy story set in New York. We spend our days working in the apartment, or at the nearby Argo Studio where we each have our own work room. We are a group of misfits, and we are all here in Athens to make art. 

During my first residency earlier this year, when I was completing the draft of my manuscript, I put a huge amount of pressure on myself to be productive from day one, because time away from kids and obligations doesn’t come easily. I came home exhausted (but with the story drafted) and a wise friend later told me to always spend the first three days on residency doing nothing: unwind, wander and don't even try to write. This time I listened, and the words are coming more easily.

If you're a writer or creative thinking about applying for a residency, it helps to know institutional residencies aren’t the only ones available. The concept of being an Artist in Residence evokes a prestige of sorts, and yes these things depend on being selected, but there is a wide variety available, suitable for different stages of a creative career. 

If you are curious about pursuing a residency, you want to be sure the one you’ve picked is right for you.

Institutional residencies have famous names and are highly competitive: MacDowell, Yaddo, Camargo for instance. They are often not-for-profit, funded by grants and foundations and philanthropy and therefore usually cover some, or all, of your costs. Often you need to apply six months to a year in advance, and the odds are brutal. Yaddo's own site says it receives about 2,600 applications each year, and about 10% of applicants receive invitations. 

Most institutional residencies are deliberately remote. MacDowell, the oldest and perhaps most prestigious artist-in-residence program in the U.S, warns applicants that its rural setting (a 450-acre wooded rural campus) requires “self-sufficiency and comfort with solitude”. I've been waitlisted for one with the Virginia Center of Creative Arts, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which will be awesome for the editing stage of my novel. But right now I am in the creation phase, the drafting phase, and I want the city: the weird noises, the local brews, music and culture, that fresh voltage that seeps into the work and helps bring the creative muse knocking. 

While there are some institutional city-based residencies, they often have narrow application criteria and often require longer fellowships (i.e. they demand you stay for set periods of time, often months). If being among the bustle of a community, a city or a local scene is your thing, and you haven’t the ability to vanish from life for long periods of time, then you may be more aligned with a privately-run residency. 

Privately-run residencies are generally created by generous, slightly mad individuals who want artists to be able to live in a great city for very little money. Because each one reflects the person or people running it, no two are alike. They're still by application, and still competitive, but less ferociously. Generally the fee to attend is modest (much cheaper than accommodation nearby) – which makes a foreign city suddenly possible on an artist’s budget. 

Argo Arts is run by two wonderfully eccentric creatives, Sara and Matt, who welcome a constant stream of creatives that flock here to complete artistic projects. The main reason why I love privately run residencies like Argo is that they're almost never in tourist districts. You arrive at a house or apartment in some cool local neighbourhood and spend your time immersed in the culture of the people that actually live there. 

In Bali earlier this year, I found myself the lone westerner in a district one hour away from Ubud. No one around me, except the artist running the residency, spoke any English. I found myself wandering laneways and streets eating the most beautiful meals for less than $2, making friends with locals in that hand gesture-facial expression way you do when there are no shared words. This time, in Kypseli in Athens we four are rubbing shoulders with an immigrant neighbourhood – hence the eclectic vibe. Few people speak English and my menu ordering is a wonderful game of food-roulette. I visited the Acropolis, was charged $11 for a coffee in the tourist area, and couldn’t wait to get back to my local haunt where I’m eating €2.5 Spanakopita for lunch every day and everyone assumes I am Greek (until I open my mouth and bungle my greeting). 

A foreign city can be very lonely, and assuming like me you don’t seek solitude, then choose a residency that hosts other artists at the same time. Multiple artists of different disciplines under one roof means constant creative osmosis, shared meals and that unique bond formed over the shared experience of a foreign land. 

Being a writer is often a lonesome task, and I am not one to sit for many hours banging away on my keyboard. During the drafting stage I need movement, visual stimuli, and that trance state that erupts the creative flow – induced either when daydreaming or under the influence of something. Getting lost in an unfamiliar environment, and the discombobulated feeling of a culture shock can, I find, help the creative muse appear. 

This morning a WhatsApp message popped up. “Going for eggs, who's in?” I wandered the backstreets of Athens with a fellow resident from Iran, finding breakfast in a café I will never find again. Tonight, the Canadian artist will make a massive pot of popcorn and we will sit around talking nonsense.

If you're choosing a residency, ask yourself three things:

• Do you want silence or cultural immersion? 
• Do you want to be alone or among others? 
• What can you afford? In Bali, my cost of living was less than $5 a day.

I spend my days publishing other people’s work and making room for their art. The only time I give my own writing the space and attention it needs is when I run away from my family, my work and obligations. I made a decision this year to do this, in order to finish my novel, and I am so grateful it is working. Because for me, as a working mother, a residency is both a chance to slow down and to push my writing forward. The main reason I could make this happen is that I am on my way to Frankfurt Book Fair for Folly Press – and the good people of Argo Arts invited me to tack this residency onto my trip. It’s been achievable, because they were flexible enough to allow me to be here for only three weeks, which was the most I could justify when juggling school holidays and work.

The book I am writing follows a woman in her early thirties around New York as she explores her sexuality with a baby in tow, or rather, after offloading the baby. I am stuck on page 125 of 180, reading Georges Bataille to prove to myself there is no such thing as too much. 

At Argo, we go to parties, we go to bars, we drink too much coffee and stay up until 2am talking. There is no routine, but as the sole early riser I spend my mornings sitting on the sunny deck tapping away in a dreamstate. At some point the artist from Bulgaria wanders into the lounge to work on her painting. The resident from Iran asks who wants to go for coffee, and we all collectively wonder what happened to the Canadian painter and why he’s an hour out of Athens. Did he even make it home?