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Our favorite authors give us a peek into the space where they write, research and yes, procrastinate. Today, The Wedding Shawl author Sally Goldenbaum welcomes us to her porch.
Where I write?
In heaven.
Or one little sliver of it, maybe.
It's a room off the back of our Prairie Village Kansas, home, tucked behind the family room and kitchen.
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Courtesy of Sally Goldenbaum
A white, screened-in porch, square as a box, with a sisal rug angled beneath the furniture and a traffic pattern faint and tan on its surface. An old cabinet saved from an interior renovation is built into one corner and looks like it has owned the space forever. The chairs are casual with blue and white cushions, and the couch is the perfect length to hold a resting writer between chapters. It even has its own special breeze, one that travels through the space on warm Kansas days and whispers, 'Stay here. Be still. Write.'
Each spring I eagerly await the first warm-enough week when I fill buckets with soapy water and head out to clean the wide ceiling fan. Next come the screens and the walls, dreary with winter dust. The cushions are washed and piled on the deck to dry in the sun, the chairs wiped off, favorite CDs and books and candles brought out for their summer stay in the corner cabinet.
And in the far, upper corner of the porch, on the other side of the screen, I know for certain that porch-writing season is about to begin. A pair of robins tells me it's so. They come back each year to burrow into the space they've hollowed out beneath the porch eave, filling it with ribbons and straw and dryer fluff as they ready themselves for the birth of their young. The magic rite of spring.
And I settle in, too, preparing for the birth of a book.
The writing porch isn't a fancy one. The furniture is a dozen years old and the pillows have taken the shape of resting bodies. But from March to late October and sometimes all the way to Thanksgiving, it's an office, a home. A writing space.
It isn't only the robins that share this space with me. I've a writing companion, too-
Nancy Pickard (
The Scent of Rain and Lightning)-who shares the breeze and the white furniture, who, on most days, appears like magic with her black Mac in hand and settles into the wicker chair across the porch from me, or some days the rocking chair or the couch.
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Courtesy of Sally Goldenbaum
Although Nancy and I write our own separate books, we share the space and the writing vibes, sometimes the muses if they show up. But especially we share a kindred spirit and sensibility. Another person who knows that sitting at a computer isn't always easy. That cleaning an oven or walking in a freezing rain or going to Target sometimes sounds devastatingly attractive.
But no, it's time to write, our presence says to one another. And so we stay put. Without a single word passing our lips, we shout to the other:
I'm sitting here on this lovely porch writing. Don't you think you should be, too?
The rule of our writing porch is simple:
Quiet.
Authors at work. And mostly that's what we do, saving news updates and gossip for later, pausing only for water or coffee or diet Coke refills.
But sometimes priming-the-pump breaks are in order, when one of us might head to the deck where the dogs are napping in the sun, to sit with Sophie and Daisy and hope the bungled chapter will straighten itself out in our absence. Or maybe we'll talk through a snag together, walking around the yard, smelling the lilac blooms or the spread of iris as we help one another figure out why a new character appeared on the page. Or we might sit side by side at the edge of the pool, pants legs rolled up and feet in the water, to talk about the perfect murder or red herrings or why a plot is suddenly falling apart.
Then back to the porch and the hum of the fan, to papa Robin flying to his nest with a fat worm in his beak, to open laptops and pages begging for words and resolution.
Eventually the sun crawls across the sky, sinks down beyond the thick band of shrubs and trees at the edge of the yard, and shadows blanket the porch (and weary writers).
5 o'clock.
And as if by magic (the writing muses at work? A very nice husband?), wine glasses and cheese and crackers appear on the glass-topped coffee table. We set aside our Macs and celebrate the day, the amazing people living in our books, the magical way a plot unfolded or a friendship was strengthened.
Sometimes.
And sometimes we simply reach for our wine glasses, sink deep into the cushions, and wonder when writing became so hard and why our brains hurt.
But always-always-we celebrate the joy of having written.
Some days the muses take a vacation and so does Nancy, venturing off to take care of life. And on those days especially-when I'm alone on the porch-my mind wanders away from the current mystery my seaside knitters are trying to solve and slips back into real-life events-ones that happened right here on this same porch, the memories embedded deep in the cushions of the chairs. If these soft chairs could talk, I think, they'd spin as many stories as the authors who settle here.
Even before the white porch gave birth to
The Wedding Shawl and Nancy's
The Scent of Rain and Lightning, it heralded beginnings. Sometimes even the stuff of novels -- it's where our family gathered to welcome grandbaby Julian home from the hospital, and where we introduced a new daughter-in-law from California to the rest of the family.
It's where we sat in somber silence as we learned of a relative's pending divorce-and where we mourned the loss of the family patriarch.
The porch has hosted baby showers and birthday parties, bridesmaids' luncheons and family reunions-and quite possibly teenager trysts, mercifully hidden from parents' radar.
And it's where our daughter and her fiancé looked out over the yard one summer day to plan a magnificent wedding ceremony-right back there beneath the trees, in the exact spot where a pool now sits. The same backyard wedding that inspired a scene in
The Wedding Shawl.
The porch.
It's where we go. Where our family gathers.
Where memories-and books-are born.
So that's where I write-on my porch with my friend, Nancy. It surrounds me, cushions me, and holds me still. And perhaps it's this stillness that carries me forward, for like all writers, I also write from another
place. A place deep inside me where my mind's eye can see beyond the white screened-in porch and the green backyard. It's in that other 'place' where I see the color of the sea, feel the smoothness of a wet, sandy beach, smell the salty air. It's there I hear the voices of the seaside women.... and write.
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Courtesy of Sally Goldenbaum
Sally Goldenbaum is the national bestselling author of the Seaside Knitters Mystery Series and twenty-five other novels. Her most recent mystery, The Wedding Shawl, was released this May. Sally lives in Kansas, far from the sea, but her porch, like a magic carpet, transports her to far-away places where mysteries lurk and Sirens sing. Visit her online at sallygoldenbaum.com
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