Sitting in my deep green recliner the other day doing a bit of the life review that we’re told is an important part of aging, I began to think about the places where I have felt most inspired and productive as a writer. The first was the basement room in our rowhouse in Washington DC. I called it Hogwallow Flats, a name I first came across while hiking in Shenandoah National Park. I liked it. Somehow it fit. I’d tiled the floor brick red, filled one side of the room with bookcases, and sat either at my makeshift desk (a wooden plank over two file cabinets) next to my typewriter table or on large floor pillows near the radiator where I wrote in my journal and produced longhand drafts of essays and poems on a yellow legal pad. My first two books were conceived there, mostly in the evenings after long days at work, first in international health and then in our DC family practice clinic. I was 31 when I began.
The second place was the leaf-green room in my third floor apartment overlooking Glover Park—a woodsy branch of Rock Creek Park that runs north and south through Washington. It had built-in bookcases and a window seat next to a wall of windows. Perfect. I’d brought along my desk and typewriter from the house but not the large floor pillows. I especially remember writing in the early morning before my work at the women’s clinic. My next two books were birthed there. I was 51 when I began.
Those two places were my home for a total of 32 years. True, two more books have come since then but perhaps not with the intensity and focus of those earlier years. Purely by chance, after writing the first draft of this note, I happened on a quote attributed to Alice Munro in her book Too Much Happiness:
In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
For me, there were these two.