The Center of All Creation

I first learned of Ossabaw Island from Musa Mayer’s Night Studio (1988), a memoir of her life as Philip Guston’s daughter. At the time I was writing a short story about Guston and had grown fixated on his wife, Musa McKim, who’d given up painting for poetry. McKim’s time at Ossabaw in 1974 was one of the few occasions when she left his side, for a two-week residency to work on a manuscript. It offered a moment of revelation, or at least reversal. A letter Guston sent to McKim during her “vacation” is obsessive, spiraling, as if the magnetic center of his life had been temporarily removed: “Every minute my thoughts are with you—seeing you picked up at the DeSoto Hotel—by whom? Going to the Island—how?” he writes. “If only I knew—had seen Ossabaw—I would feel a little better—but as it is, I feel so lost, so alone without you.”Ossabaw is a 26,000-acre heart-shaped barrier island off the coast of Georgia—a patchwork landscape of salt marshes and maritime forests, tidal creeks and interdune meadows, feral hogs and plovers, lofty cabbage palms and live oaks hung with portieres of Spanish moss. Its name, AW-suh-bah, from the Muscogee word for land of holly, is unhurried and airy, yet some...