I recently stumbled upon this interesting article about famous writers' small writing sheds and backyard cottages. The one pictured above is Roald Dahl's writing hut, the Gipsy House (the yellow door!). I've always been fascinated by the objects creative people choose to surround themselves with in their most intimate spaces: loose papers tacked to walls, photos of family members, plenty of light, magazine cuttings, comfortable chairs, and bits of nature tucked here and there.
I thought Dahl was fantastically particular about his surroundings:
"The whole of the inside was organised as a place for writing: so the old wing-back chair had part of the back burrowed out to make it more comfortable; he had a sleeping bag that he put his legs in when it was cold and a footstool to rest them on; he had a very characteristic Roald arrangement for a writing table with a bar across the arms of the chair and a cardboard tube that altered the angle of the board on which he wrote. As he didn't want to move from his chair everything was within reach. He wrote on yellow legal paper with his favourite kind of pencils; he started off with a handful of them ready sharpened..." - from The Guardian
I think my favorite is Dylan Thomas' "wordsplashed hut", which was actually a boat house located on a cliff in Laugharne. The walls were covered in lists of rhyming words and alliterations, and magazine clippings of Walt Whitman, W.H. Auden, and William Blake.
I think I'm particularly drawn to these spaces because all I want to do this summer is find a little cabin in the woods somewhere and hide out for a few weeks (or months, if we could swing it). I just want to wander around in the woods for a while, go fishing, swim in a lake, maybe write a bit, and definitely read late into the night. It just sounds nice to get away, hang out together, and be as far away from Wonder Pets and the Fart Piano app (ugh. i can't tell you how much I dislike both of these things, or how much my kids love them) as humanly possible.
What about you? Any big plans or dreams for the summer? Maybe a spare cabin I can borrow for all of August? Yes?
