resolution: writing space and time

I intend to do more writing in 2009, and it's important to figure out when and where my best times and spaces are for that. I decided I need Rudyard Kipling's study after seeing it in a slideshow of authors' writing spaces at the online Architectural Digest, December 2008 issue. Is that too much to ask?

Ok, I could settle for Dylan Thomas' water and tree room on the cliff or what it reminds me of: l'atelier: rustic and sort of like a playhouse.-

Rudyard Kipling's study:


The Nobel Prize-winning writer Rudyard Kipling’s study at Bateman’s, in England, where he moved in 1902. The surrounding Sussex countryside would become the backdrop for later works, including Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies.

This copy of Puck has illustrations by Arthur Rackham.

from Puck's Song (read Kipling's whole poem here)

Trackway and Camp and City lost,

Salt Marsh where now is corn;

Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,

And so was England born!

She is not any common Earth,

Water or wood or air,

But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,

Where you and I will fare.

-
~ : ~ : ~ : ~ : ~ : ~ :

Dylan Thomas' water and tree room on the cliff:

“A fresh beginning,” poet Dylan Thomas said of moving to the Boat House in the coastal village of Laugharne, in South Wales. Above: Thomas’s writing shed—his “water and tree room on the cliff”—displays pictures of D.H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman.

from Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry, . . .

. . . (finish Thomas' poem recollecting his childhood on a farm here; if you've never read "Fern Hill" please take a few minutes to read it for its lyricism alone, it is so beautiful, one of my faves, very "dingle starry"!)

Both "Puck" and "Fern Hill" are about country life in childhood, reflecting on farm life nostalgically. I think there is a little farm in all of us, and lucky me, I am spending my second childhood on one.

l'atelier, our studio that Don and Peter converted from a chicken coop - before we had chickens. To answer Shicat, this building is still a studio. Don rejuvenated another coop in the big green barn for his brood.