March 11, 2009
Wednesday

We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,
And the door stood open at our feast.
              — Mary Coleridge, 1861-1907
                  English novelist and poet

My studio/dwelling at Hambidge is known as the Mellinger Cottage. It sits at an elevation of 2500 feet at the end of a long and narrow (but not really very winding) dirt road that is a carpet of fallen leaves. It is named for Marie Mellinger, a local environmentalist and friend of the Hambidge Center, whose picture hangs at the bottom of the narrow, winding stairs to the sleeping loft. I saw it first from the back, the east wall of rough siding broken only by two small windows, one on top of the other, and then the dreary gray façade of the solid north wall. How delightful, then, to pull around to the front and see the cheery orange entrance door.

I spent most of today arranging the tools and materials I’ll be using and the items I’ve brought that make a versatile, unadorned space a personal space. Novelist Anne Tyler reportedly works only in a single room of her house, using blank white index cards and unlined white paper at a table that faces a white wall. That’s not for me. As I loaded my car on Monday I began to realize just how much stuff I keep around, out where I can see it and use it. By the time I was ready to leave, my kitchen, particularly the table that faces the southern vista of our property, looked clean and uncluttered, more like the eating space it is intended to be than the writer’s desk it has become.

Below is the space where I will, over the next four weeks, produce about 25,000 new words for my novel (that’s about 100 pages). At left is my journal writing area, the spot where I will begin each day as I do at home, with C&C (Coffee and Contemplation). The lamp is from my study at home, and I’ve arranged my talismans (a figurine that represents the woman at the well from the Gospel of John, a rock from Wyoming, a jade turtle), a votive candleholder I am fond of, some family pictures, and a cobalt pitcher with some daisies and roses. The office chair provided by Hambidge slides easily to the space where I’ve set up my laptop and printer. I can look out a window from either position, or, from the computer station, I can lift my eyes to the white wall which is already splashed with my sticky note reminders (“Scenes to write: Susan wakes up the morning after, Helen visits her parents’ graves on the Feast of Stephen . . . “ — “Tom Chapin’s birthday end of week; mail card!!” — “Check Dauphin County Library account for due date of Plum-Ucci book”) and my work plan for the next four days.

Novelist Margo Rabb keeps a special notebook for each project she’s working on. In her class at Bread Loaf last August she held up the one she used while she was writing Cures for Heartbreak. It was one of those beautiful journals, decorated soft cover, creamy lined pages and a ribbon bookmark that hung down as she held the book up to show us. I could see her upright, spidery script moving across page after page. She said it took her eight years to write that book.

I’ve been carrying Perpetual Light for seven. I don’t have a single repository. Rather, I have stuff here and there in my general journals, a three-ring binder with charts and timelines and newspaper clippings about cemetery controversies and a service that will put a solar-powered video player in your gravestone so you can talk to the people who come to visit, and computer files with text that now has hit the 10,000 word mark.

I’ve brought it all along. I don’t know that I can ever be as intensely focused and single minded about a project as some of the writers I’ve met along this road. I don’t know that I want to be. It is my nature to be somewhat scattered, to be looping instead of linear in my approach. But the table is set now, and the orange door stands open at my feast.

 

  

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