My Life in a Shed: Making the Space to Write
I am writing to you in the middle of a rainstorm. The rainstorm is both outside, but also inside my head. I found myself being distracted by the box of maple creams on the table, my cat, and the laundry piled up and still needing folding. So I took a writing retreat about fourteen steps from my front door.Perhaps, I should explain. Five years ago, I realized I wasn’t writing as much. As mother, wife, and work-from-home writer, I would sit down but never really went into The Zone, you know that place—some call it “flow,” but it’s the place where a writer can lose track of time and body, and instead becomes the words on the page, the poem, whatever project that occupies their thoughts.
I am the type of writer who needs to be alone and who needs quiet to write. Some writers just put in the earplugs and they are off into their work; I would fall into what one might call a more sensitive writer. Any conversation around me could pull me from my work—from the sounds of my cats acting out a scene from West Side Story in the hallway to the vibration of footsteps of someone walking past the door behind me. So in 2008, when I received a large $7500 award from the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize, I decided to use some of that money to build a writing studio.In my mind, writing studios had been only for “real writers” who wrote novels that involved wizards or rich writers who had a lot of extra cash to have the architect visit and draw up some plans. They were not for poets, or more likely, I thought they were not for me.One day while visiting Lowe’s to get some gardening supplies, my husband noticed the variety of sheds in the parking lot and said, “Those would make a great writing studio for you.”“Are you teasing? A shed as a writing studio?” I half-thought he was annoyed with me and wanted to lock me in a shed to get a little peace.But as we walked over to the sheds, I realized how well built and how much bigger they were than I imagined. He was really being sincere.As I looked at the various sheds, which started at $699, I realized I could fit a desk and a chair in even the smallest one. In the larger ones I could fit a bookcase and my golden retriever. I became intrigued with the idea of “the writing shed.” My husband who wanted to make sure I saw his vision for me, bought me this book for Mother’s Day, Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways: Big Ideas for Small Backyard Destinations, I was hooked.While I know I’d still be a writer without this writing shed, what it offers me emotionally and even rather spiritually, is a place to be alone with my words and with my thoughts. The writing shed does not make the writing come, but instead brings me into a place where I can begin without the distraction of the world, where I can focus more easily. And it seems to create more time—I can get two hours worth of work done in my writing shed that would take me four hours in the house.
Having my writing studio, which I’ve now named “House of Sea” to mirror my friend Susan Rich’s writing studio (a wonderfully converted garage) in West Seattle named “House of Sky,” I’ve realized the value of having a space of your own. Some nights when I’m running ideas through my head about my next manuscript, I go into my writing shed with a pad of paper and sketch my thoughts. Some mornings after feeling as if my house is a disaster and I need some space to think and write, I walk into this space and feel relief circulate through my body. It is my tiny commute that takes me from one frame of mind to another, from wife/mother/friend/daughter to writer, from the domestic to the artistic world. As I look down in this space, I see the words I painted on my wooden floor—Write Here—a reminder to myself to be in the moment enjoy this small personal retreat, and to do what I love to do—write. 
Kelli Russell Agodon is author of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press), Winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Prize in Poetry and a Finalist for the Washington State Book Award, Small Knots (2004), and the chapbook, Geography (2003). Kelli is also the co-editor of Fire On Her Tongue: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry.
Born and educated in the Washington State, she’s a graduate of the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University where she received her MFA. Kelli is the editor of Seattle’s literary journal, Crab Creek Review, co-founder of Two Sylvias Press, and co-director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women.You can connect with Kelli—
on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agodon
at her blog, Book of Kells: www.ofkells.blogspot.com
or on her website www.agodon.comTake Kelli's workshop, Fire On Her Tongue: Writing the Poems You Need to Write, at Hedgebrook's Winter Salon. >>Register Now. Hedgebrook supports visionary women writers whose stories and ideas shape our culture now and for generations to come. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily representative of the opinions of Hedgebrook, its staff or board members.