I am in my studio. Magpie Girl Studios. Catie think’s it suits. This morning she said, “You are like a Magpie, Momma. That words sounds spunky and….cool, like you!”

It does looks like a magpie’s den. For starters, there are three vintage glasses on the book shelf: the umber wineglass spilling over with marbles, the green pudding cup filled with skeleton keys, and the emerald water goblet a resting place for my cell phone. Next to them lies a rusty tackle box rescued from a junk shop on my glorious Rockaway retreat with Jen. For my birthday Paul cleaned and painted the interior and now its accordion trays house the flotsam and jetsam of my craft – saint medallions, sparkling stars, old wax seals, a small brass elephant. After these antique treasures come more practical things. Twin baskets house a tin of watercolors, graphite paper, ridiculously trendy stationary in oranges and pinks, and postage stamps. There are recycled jars for colored pencils, unused acrylic brushes, brave new illustrator’s pens, and a set of tiny white brushes with fine-haired tips. A wooden box that once housed teas now holds a collection of odd size envelopes with wrap ties, and an exotic looking box from a local import shop stores a bevy of gorgeous origami paper.

That’s just the first shelf. The others are held up by old bureau drawers bought for a buck apiece and lined with high-end wrapping paper that called my name before I realized it cost $4.50 a sheet. Worth it though, those red birds in gilt cages and the stylized dandelions, full-seeded and ready for wishes. My books half-fill one drawer: three paperbacks on collage, the Julia Cameron collection, and of course, Annie Dillard’s irreplaceable Bird by Bird. Two incongruous hardbacks have slipped in amongst the Mary Oliver and the War of Art. A shocking thong bikini made out Old Glory peeks out from the spine of Pornified, and a bright red price tag screeches the title of Not Buying It. Both of these remind me of writing projects conceived, but not yet tackled and they stir my resolve to dwell within in these walls, my fingers on a keyboard. (“Mommy!” Eden proclaims, “Your fingers are moving so fast you can’t possibly be writing anything!” Sadly, fast typing does not guarantee a yield of finished projects.)

Moving on from the deeply gorgeous bookshelves we reach my desk, utilitarian and bold. The bulletin board above it is unadorned save for three bright pages of cold press. A swallow in blue, salmon, and brown. A scrolling banner in pink. A rectangle of background in dusty lime. Oh, and there is a single page of copy paper with MAGPIE GIRL in a newly purchased Singapur script. My new goldfish, only a one day resident in its bowl, is floating dangerously close to the surface and I fear it will not make it through the day. A beta awaits its fate on my mental list.

Here I sit and here I type, my dog on a faux sheepskin rug at my feet, a candle lit on the table, snacks from the whole foods store safe in my filing drawer. I am a writer. I write.

I have a chaise lounge in the studio, rescued from a thrift store with twenty dollars of birthday money. It’s is covered in fabric so bad it has achieved a kind of kitschy goodness – all browns and blush and gold with full-blown cabbage roses and blue ribbons twisted throughout. I stole the brown fake-fur throw from our bed room at home, and the upholstered stool no one ever sat on from the living room. Now they are my studio blanket, my side table. My studio. A room of my own.

I sit here sometimes, when I am tired of writing or stuck on some piece of work, and read Virginia Woolf. It is cliché to love her so, this sister from long ago — growing angry at her denied entrance to the all-male university library; losing a precious and important thought when waved off the boys-only college lawns; and eventually, desperately, walking into a river, her pockets weighted with stones. She is, as I am, woman of privileged, with her 5,000 pounds a year and a room of her own. She does not have to earn her money; she creates art merely for its own sake. She dines on partridge and pudding. She drinks fine claret.

My tastes veer towards organic oatmeal cookies and ‘smart’ water that costs $2.00 a bottle – not so refined perhaps, but similar it it’s lack of concern for basic needs, rendolent of pampered solitude and a space to breathe.

Even with money and privacy I struggle to write – to be betrothed to one project, faithful to one thought. This is perhaps the result of an undisciplined mind. Or perhaps, the fault of one silly girl playing at doing something important. Still, ‘though I am unsure of whether I merit the privledge of complaint, I like what Woolf has to say on the topic of women not writing. It makes my drift and distractions seem ever so much more political and important. As Mary Gordon summarizes in her forward to a 1981 edition of A Room of One’s Own:

“[Woolf wonders] why are women so poor, and why have so few women written? The first question provides an easy answer: women are poor because, instead of making money, they had children. The second question is far more complex, and her attempt to answer it leads her to history. She reads the lives of women and concludes that if a woman were to have written she would have had to overcome enormous circumstances. Women were betrothed in their cradles; they were married at fifteen; they bore a dozen children, and more children died, and they went on bearing children. Moreover, they were uneducated; they had no privacy; even Jane Austen had to write in the common sitting room and hide her work under blotting paper so as not to be discovered. Yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no tradition to follow. No sentence had b been shaped, by long labor, to express the experience of women. “It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure…[They] never helped a woman yet, thought she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use.”

I feel this keenly, through my ‘alienated privileged life. ’ (Although I know even as I feel this, that I will be accused of, and perhaps actually am, whining.) Woolf discussed these writing barriers decades ago–and many women have been educated past them, have lived through them. But I grew up in the protestant evangelical church in America, and thus in a time warp. I, like Virginia, have been denied entrance to holy places reserved only for men; have felt the lack of well-traveled roads to follow; have wondered if my own new- formed sentence, lying there in defiance of conventional forms, has the god given right to be born. I have, without really thinking, borne a child, and watched him die, and borne more. I have by instinct and tradition chosen to raise those of my womb, and by fate and fortune begun to raise those of my heart. All of this childrearing is done both with gladness and with much hard-won effort. When I veer from these womanly tasks, I have been told to remain silent and obedient by men I have loved and respected, as well as by those who I have not personally known. I have at times – too many times – been told to be silent. I have, more often that I’d have liked, been left without a voice — a writer’s most essential tool — and have struggled to find it again. Until now, I have lived without a room of mine own, every space filled with husband and children and parish friends, and I have been happy in the hubbub. But I’ve also longed unknowingly for something as benign as four walls and a some floor boards, something as innocuous in our urban landscape as Herman Miller cubical made of mobile walls and pressboard.

Now, I come five times weekly to these aqua, pistachio and chocolate walls to write and paint, to craft a story. I am overjoyed — so happy that I cannot sleep with the anticipation of it. But I am recognizing an uneasiness too, a background hum of worry about wasting time and money. Also, unused to being alone and solitary, I find that I am overly attentive to the footsteps in the hall and the lack of voices around me. I acclimatize. I adjust.

There is man in my building who works in a space even tinier than mine. He works always with his door open, his desk facing the hall way, his tie loose and his voice loud on the phone. I feel a stab of ill will towards him every time I walk past, though he’s spoken no word to me, done nothing unneighborly. I realize on my third or fourth passing, that what I am envying is his freedom. That unlike my painter-neighbor Mary, or my own new artist-self, he does not have to spend time getting used to the idea that he has time and space for working. He has always had these things. Sliding into this new space is effortless, does not require the shell-shocked interim of looking around at one’s walls and thinking; “This is mine. This space is mine.”

Also, he does not have to be afraid in his own space, working behind locked doors when the hallway seems empty. Peeking through the fish eye lens to see who is knocking. His physical safety is untarnished. No wanderer off the street will attack him; no one will threaten him with rape in a partially deserted building. His voice moves down the phone lines, through the open door and into the hallway. His children are somewhere cared for by other, and no one threatens him as these four walls of work are his — as they have ever been. He does not speak to himself in an inner voice about guilt and privilege; He does not worry about the possibility if narcissistic tendencies just because he has the time and space to work. He does not agonize over placing a fee on his product, or wonder about whether he will ever receive compensation for his efforts. He just is, he just does.

“And Mary pondered all these things in her heart.”

I think that Virginia may have had it wrong. It may not be true that in order to write, one must have money and a room of one’s own. Surely women all over the world are forming their stories: orally in the dust of their huts, longingly on the backs of found paper in the poverty-sick ghettos, privately in the pages of a rose coloured journal. But I suspect, if one can get over the shock of it, a room of one’s own will certainly help.