Connor Greer Follows the Flicker

Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Connor Greer. Photo: Agata Storer

For the last several years, Connor Greer has been returning to a visual experience he still cannot quite explain. Its pursuit is part of what brought him to Provincetown, one of the few places where he could watch both sunrise and sunset over water. What fascinates Greer, it seems, are experiences defined by the ephemeral.

The first time he felt the sensation was in Copenhagen, where Greer wandered into an installation by James Turrell, the American artist known for immersive light works, without knowing much about him. Turrell’s work asks viewers to see light not just as illumination but as a subject unto itself, creating conditions in which the eye loses its usual bearings and begins to register space differently. Inside, Greer says, the light began to flicker, “almost like a strobe light,” though the effect felt stranger than that, “impossible to say what it is.”

He describes the installation as a room within a room, a box of shifting color that became almost psychedelic in its intensity. The experience captivated him enough that he went back, trying to decide whether what he had seen was really there.

Then, while traveling in the Moroccan desert, Greer saw something similar at sunset. As the light changed over the dunes, he says, “that same effect” seemed to begin overhead. “Something is happening that I cannot understand,” he remembers thinking. “And it’s just staggeringly beautiful.” Since then, he has kept trying to rediscover that sensation. “You get these things that happen to you,” he says, “and then you’re just trying to figure them out, or you’re just trying to follow them.”

Greer grew up in Rochester, N.Y., studied at Reed College, and received his M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Michigan. The years after graduate school took him through fellowships, residencies, and stretches of travel in Japan, Tunisia, and Iceland, while he tried to figure out whether writing was really “my way.”

Provincetown offered a way to keep following what he had found. Before arriving at the Fine Arts Work Center as a fellow, Greer imagined building a daily cycle around the town’s unusual geography, catching sunrise over water and returning for sunset at day’s end. The sunrise plan never quite held, but the sunsets stayed. Nearly every evening this winter, he went to Herring Cove to take a picture. “A lot of artistic practices are just arbitrary things you decide that you’re going to do,” he says, “and then you just see where they go.”

Last year, as a writer-in-residence at the Mitchell Center of the University of Houston, Greer and a friend began going every Friday at sunset to a Turrell Skyspace inside a Quaker meeting house. They called it “church.” By then, he had started seeking out such experiences wherever he went. “Everywhere I’ve gone,” he says, “I’ve tried to find a way to touch it or get close to it.”

He describes another place that stayed with him in Sapporo, where he spent time at Tenjinyama Artists Studio and frequented a nightclub called Precious Hall in the basement of a shopping mall. The experience of sound there, he says, was “incredibly spiritual.” It was linked, by friendship and influence, to David Mancuso’s Loft parties in New York. Sometimes people danced. Sometimes the club held “listening nights,” with chairs set out on the dance floor so people could just sit with the music until morning. In Japan, he points out, the metro stops at midnight, so if you go, you stay — they even have sleeping rooms there. “You go in there and you just start crying,” he says. “It was unbelievable.” By morning, the trains were running again, and the spell had broken.

His writing routine at FAWC has that same late-night bent. He says he had hoped, in Provincetown, to become a morning writer, just as he had hoped to make sunrise part of his daily rhythm. That did not happen. He writes at night with music on, dancing for a while before he sits down to work, then rising again as the hours pass.

Greer has been working on a novel he began here, though he won’t say much about it. “It’s kind of under wraps,” he says, admitting that there is “some sort of odyssey happening” in it.

What matters to Greer, at least for now, seems less the finished thing than the practice, the act of returning — whether to the light, to the page, to the dance floor, or to the moment just before the sun goes down.