Cyber Shack

My pocketful of girlhood dreams always included at least three things: being a wife, a mother and a writer. And perhaps since my undergraduate days (despite my ignorance of the consuming ways of motherhood and family life) I envisioned for myself a writer's shack: a modest 10 x 10 wooden structure situated at the far edge of a lush backyard lawn. Inside: a desk, a chair, a carpet sample; a place to nurture my writing self without distraction.

I witnessed my first writer’s shack eleven years ago, in the backyard of my MFA professor’s charming Berkeley flat. Tucked among patches of Lavender and poised stems of Queen Ann’s Lace, the cottage, as she referred to it, was complete with tribal rugs, a nature lover’s art pieces and inspirational quotes tacked to the four saffron-yellow walls. I suspect the spirit of Virginia Woolf is getting a groove on over this first-rate “room of one’s own.”* Inspired by what a writer’s shack could be, I have been collecting quotes and clippings for my own ever since.

Though I do not yet have my backyard fantasy shack (I suppose owning a house comes first) I am at last honoring the foresight of my twenties, if only in spirit, with the construction of this here cyber shack. While a blog is almost certainly not what Woolf had in mind eighty years ago, when she asserted women writers need a room of their own, and though her groove may not be quite as on as it is with the aforementioned Berkeley cottage, I think she could be pleased with this modern concept of a writer’s own room -- both because her essay* refers more to owning the right to create than an actual room, and because for now, for this woman writer and mother of three, a room in cyber space holds all the promise of calling me out of the godforsaken laundry room (not to mention all the bedrooms hopping with vexatious little dust bunnies and, God help me, the monopolizing kitchen) into a space I can at least call my own; one fashioned for the sole purpose of nurturing these ancient ambitions I have to write and create.

It’s not that I haven’t relished the dreams-come-true of wife and mother; on the contrary, I have embraced them! And it’s not that I’ve written nothing over the last ten years; it’s that what I’ve written ends up in clammy cardboard boxes underneath the house. It’s that I’ve scribbled out lines on receipts at stop signs or on stolen magazine pages in the dentist’s office. On the rare occasion that I clean out my car or my purse, I find myself weeding through random papers with the guiding question, is this a receipt or a poem? This sorting ritual has become a commentary on my writing life and the rather undignified place writing has occupied since finishing grad school and having kids. The writer has been lost in the pocket of girlhood dreams like an anonymous piece of lint; but I am determined now to find her and to restore dignity to the words she has to say. From increasing experience, I know that added attention to the whole of my life’s aspirations will only serve to expand my joy as a wife and mother and increase my sense of purpose as a separate and finite human being. So I am eager! And while eventually this pursuit of wholeness could mean I’ll be heading back from Home Depot with cuts of lumber hanging out the mini van windows, for now this little cyber shack will do.

*The essay I refer to, “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf, can be found online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/.