A Tiny House of One’s Own
Submit your essay for the chance to win a week-long writer’s retreat in my Tiny House in Northern California
As a person who has worked full time as a writer for over four decades now — since the age of 18 — I learned, long ago, an essential element to locating the focus to fully immerse myself in the story I’m telling, and do my best work.
I had to leave home.
When I was younger, raising three children as a single parent, I sometimes checked into a cheap motel for a few days, with nothing but my computer (this being the days before laptops). Once, when I was working on my memoir — a story that required me to revisit some of the most painful times in my life — I was fortunate that a friend lent me a cabin in Oregon. I had to open up some dark places that time, and I didn’t want to be around the people I loved — or to have to cook dinner and help with homework at the end of the day — while I was doing that.
In more recent years, I’ve been lucky to spend time at artists’ residencies — Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, UCross in Wyoming, and the MacDowell Colony. I didn’t need, and don’t even want, luxury during these moments. Just the luxury of time, and the freedom to do my work removed from the usual distractions of daily life no longer a part of my mental landscape.
I started and finished one entire book at MacDowell — my novel, Labor Day. At UCross, I wrote another.
I work at home, too, of course, and I have a wonderful writing studio. But for a writer — this one, anyway — there is nothing like total immersion.
A year and a half ago, my husband and I moved to a home on nine acres of very quiet and secluded land, surprisingly close to the San Francisco Bay area — a place where you hear owls at night, and see the stars, and deer graze just outside my window. For me, it’s a paradise.
Not long after we moved to our new place, my husband received a serious cancer diagnosis, and my writing life stopped for a time. I knew better than to try and create other stories at a time when I was totally immersed in his, in ours.
My life became filled with visits to doctors, hospitals, tests. But I wanted to hold onto some part of my writer self, and to be productive. And I found a good way of doing that.
I decided to create, at our home, a place where other writers might find a taste of what I had been lucky enough to experience over the years of sequestering myself in those artists’ residencies. I began researching the concept of Tiny Houses — small, portable, self-contained structures on wheels, with enough space for sleeping and preparing food and one more thing: writing.
After months of studying house designs online, I found one that felt just right — a 10-by-20-foot home built by a young carpenter in Berkeley. After I bought this house, he brought it to our land with his pickup truck, and we set it in a beautiful, quiet glade, looking out to a brook and a very old oak tree.
I named the tiny house “The Hunsaker Canyon Writers’ Retreat,” and I set it up with every good thing I would want, myself, if I were there writing a book: a good French press for coffee and a nice mug for drinking it, a comfortable chair by the desk, nice sheets, good pillows, warm blankets, a CD player and some books I love. There’s a fully functioning kitchen and two lofts (one for sleeping, one for reading) and a teak-wood shower, and a bathroom with a stained glass window, and a deck for sitting and thinking when the weather’s nice. And not a whole lot else.
One thing I provide my guests at my writers’ retreat, that a person doesn’t find at any residency, is the presence of a mentor: me. The writers who come to work on their projects in Hunsaker Canyon — of all levels, from just starting out to those who have published numbers of books — meet with me in my own writing studio at the end of their writing day, to talk about their work. Sometimes we plot out a story arc on my white board. Sometimes we study a single paragraph.
This winter, with the publication date approaching, of Under the Influence, the novel I was finally able to finish — when my husband got well enough that I could work again — I decided to make this house available to someone who might not be able to pay for it.
So I’m launching a contest with my publisher, HarperCollins, and asking interested writers to create an essay of no more than 650 words on the theme that is at the center of my new novel: a friendship gone wrong, the story of a person we once loved and trusted, who disappeared from our life.
I’ll be judging the essays in this contest, along with my agent and my editor at HarperCollins. First prize: a week at Hunsaker Canyon Writers’ Retreat (one hour by public transit from the San Francisco or Oakland airport), use of a car, a redwood hot tub under the stars, and four mentoring sessions with me.
Enter here.
I look forward to reading the stories coming my way.
LOGISTICS: Entries will be accepted through March 17, 2016. Prize to be redeemed by Dec 31, 2016 for a mutually agreed-upon date. Must be a legal resident of the U.S. 18 or over. The contest is being sponsored by HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007. No purchase or entry fee necessary to enter. For additional details, please see the official rules of the contest here.
