Juliet Cutler
Who: Juliet Cutler
Where: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
What: Juliet is an American writer who currently lives in Amsterdam.
By day, she develops exhibitions for museums, national parks, and nature centers throughout the world. Some of her recent, more prominent projects include an award-winning exhibition on African cranes for the International Crane Foundation and a forthcoming exhibition for a new museum in Doha, Qatar.
By night, Juliet is completing her first book Sacred Tears, a memoir about her experience living among the Maasai in the late 1990s.
In addition, Juliet publishes monthly travel essays for an expatriate magazine in Amsterdam and on her blog The Tarnished Compass. Her writing has also appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Legacy, and The Minnesota Preservationist.
In 2009, Juliet was selected by Orion Magazine to participate in their annual Wildbranch Writing Workshop.
Juliet spent a week working on her memoir at La Muse in 2013.
In Her Words:
I arrived in the sleepy village of Labastide-Esparbairenque on a sunny, Friday afternoon, laptop in hand and ready to work. John had collected me and two other writers from the Carcassone train station and then shuttled us to the grocery store and bakery before driving us up a winding, tree-lined road to his hillside retreat—a sprawling 12th-century structure of stacked slate-and-schist masonry held together by broad ancient timbers and topped by earthy crimson-clay tiles.
Almost immediately, I heard the town’s bell tower chime as if it had been counting out the days in 30-minute increments for centuries, and I realized it probably had been. The simple village embodied uncomplicated living—no restaurants, cafés, or shops on its serene lanes. Most residents, even those above the age of 90, tended gardens and got the remainder of what they needed from the weekly bread van and épicerie truck.
My week started with the goal of keeping to a rigid schedule trusting that if I showed up and did the work, creativity would find me. I slept from 10 o’clock in the evening to 7 o’clock in the morning. I started every other morning with a slow, but diligent climb over a slate-strewn sandy path up, up, and further up into the Montagne Noire, or Black Mountains. By 10 o’clock in the morning, I’d bathed, eaten breakfast, and spent 15 minutes in quiet reflection before beginning to write. I would break for lunch at noon and take a short walk up to the village’s natural spring, known as “the source,” to fill a bottle with fresh-from-the-earth water, which I drank immediately. I would be back to writing by 2 o’clock.
Day by day, creativity did find me, and two pages turned into ten, and ten pages turned into twenty.
To read more about Juliet’s experience at La Muse, please check out her article.