Before her 2002 residence at Yaddo, contemporary author Janice Lee had worked at Elle and Mirabella magazines as a books and features editor, and her writing had appeared in Elle, Mirabella, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour and Newsday, among others. But it was at Yaddo that she finally found the time, space, and artistic community that inspired her first novel. "My time at Yaddo was invaluable," Lee recalls, "because I was a young artist, without many publications to my name, and it was enormously helpful to be around other artists at different stages in their work. They provided a roadmap of possibilities and manifestations of what I could become.Being at Yaddo gave me the gift of time and place: time that had no constraints, save the limit of my stay, and a place where all I was obliged to do was work. I came away from my time at Yaddo with a reworked beginning to something that I was no longer afraid to call a novel." That novel, entitled The Piano Teacher, will be published in January, 2009 by Viking Press.