John Hay’s Writing Studio Is Giving Writers ‘A Week To Play With Words’

BREWSTER – Until this past winter, the little shack in the remote Brewster woods sat empty for decades.

A stone’s throw from John Hay’s house, the wooden structure he visited each morning marks the beginning and the end of his published work. The naturalist put down every word of his lifetime right here, beginning in the late 1940s. His many books capture life in many forms, including “The Run,” Hay’s history of the migrating herring.

But in 2005, after 60 years in Brewster, John and Kristi Hay left for Maine. After they died, a bequest to the Brewster Conservation Trust in 2015 allowed the organization to buy the land. This March, the Trust began developing Hay’s abandoned shack into Cape Cod’s first proper retreat for local writers.

“You could see the promise of a great studio,” said volunteer Lauren Wolk, who leapt at the chance to scrub down the interior. “The mice and the red squirrels had certainly had their way with it — and so had the mildew, the dust, the pollen and the dirt.”

She and Bob Nash, an old colleague from the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, spent those cold, gray weeks patching holes, painting walls and repairing the chewed-up window frames and worn floor.

In June, the Trust opened the refurbished study to select writers, free of charge, to test whether the project might have legs beyond summer.

“A lot of people who aren’t writers don’t understand the need for that solitude and that focus,” Wolk said. “But this is a place where people will get it.”

A Slice Of History Reborn

More than 50 acres of woods surround this no-fuss writing room, offering a serene getaway atop one of Brewster’s highest points. Sun pours in through the large window, where Hay spent his mornings thinking and typing and overlooking Cape Cod Bay until the trees claimed the view.

Born in Ipswich, Hay married Kristi Putnam in 1942 and they made their home in the Brewster wilderness when he returned from the war. Hay later founded the Junior Museum to educate children, and for 25 years served as its president of the center, which became the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. The Hays raised two daughters and a son, who sold the family property after their father died in 2011.

“By the end of his life,” Hay’s obituary reads, “he had become an exemplar and an inspiration to a rising generation of American nature writers.”

Cape Cod’s First Writers’ Retreat

Retreats are expensive and often require the added stress of travel. With that in mind, Trust outreach director Jeanie Yaroch suggested re-establishing Hay’s studio as an oasis for local writers “representing different backgrounds, life experiences and literary genres.”

Amenities are limited to Hay’s old side table, a water cooler and a Wi-Fi connection. A nearby bathroom is locked by late afternoon, so working hours end at dusk. That schedule was fine by Kim Baker, who on June 3 became the first writer in about 20 years to walk into what she described more than once as “a sacred space.”

The poet remembers returning from a trail that Monday afternoon and locking eyes with a deer outside the studio.

“There’s a little piece of me that thought, ‘That’s John Hay greeting me,’” said Baker, 67. In that spirit, she threw herself into “writing, rewriting, thinking, revising and reading” poetry each day before driving back home to Mashpee.

At 18, Baker left New Jersey for Rhode Island, and later taught freshman composition at Roger Williams University. It was during those years that the poetry bug bit.

“It occurred to me one day that I was a writing teacher who wasn’t writing,” Baker said. “I thought, ‘I have to be writing if I’m going to tell my students how important it is. So, what do I want to write?’”

The retreat allowed her a run of days without distraction and a break from her role as operations director at Cotuit Center for the Arts.

“That was what was so wonderful about it,” Baker said. “That it was OK for a week to just play with words.”

Other writers offered a week’s residency this summer include Rose Auslander, Anna Babineau, John Bonanni, Sheila Cordner, C.L. Fornari, Mary Kane, BettyAnn Lauria, Carol Panasci, Mary Ellen Redmond, Robin Smith-Johnson, Al Starkey and Brett Warren.

Hay’s revived studio, though brimming with charm, needs more work. The Trust is searching for a partner to help upgrade and maintain the place as a longterm, affordable option for writers like Eir Lindstrom-Holmy of Dennis.

“It’s like entering a whole other magical land,” she said with wide eyes, before lugging a typewriter up the hill from her car.

“It’s really like a great blank canvas.”