As a young girl I immersed myself in the imagined worlds of Lucy Maud Montgomery. First meandering around Green Gables and then wandering all of Prince Edward Island with Anne Shirley. Places like the Lake of Shining Waters and the White Way of Delight formed my vision of natural bliss. It wasn’t long after that when Louisa May Alcott painted a delightful life in Massachusetts, and I fell hard for the March family, especially Jo.
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It can not be coincidental that the two characters I connected with and carried with me into adulthood were themselves writers. I wove my future with Anne’s and Jo’s, stealing bits and pieces of their stories to become part of my own. So it’s no surprise that by the time I was 22, I had not only devoured the books containing the details of their lives, but I had visited the actual places where their authors lived and wrote.
At thirteen, on a trip to Boston with my best friend, we visited Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott. I stood in the room with her compact, simple, wood desk and pondered what made a place so special. After we’d toured the rest of the 1600’s farmhouse where Alcott penned “Little Women,” we explored more of Concord. While walking a dirt trail to Walden Pond and taking in the serene beauty, I thought again to Alcott and how she must have walked this same trail as a girl.
Upon graduating college in the Spring of 2004, I travelled to Prince Edward Island to see for myself the delightful places Montgomery describes in her classic novels. While wandering the white farmhouse with the iconic green gables, I thought about the inspiration of spaces for writers. How our physical spaces affect the very narrative of our lives and therefore influence our voice, style and story. Had Montgomery not spent time at her cousins home growing up, in all likelihood there wouldn’t be an “Anne of Green Gables.”
Which makes me question what spaces have influenced or are currently influencing my story. In making more time to write recently, I’ve realized it’s less about where I choose to hammer out my thoughts and so much more about where I was when those thoughts actually began forming.
It isn’t the location where we actually put pen to paper, or fingers to keys as the case may now be, but the setting in which the stories get written inside our heads and on our hearts.
Before I could even recognize it, these two authors from my youth showed me how important place is to my writing. I very rarely physically write while I’m on a mountainside or watching the waves, yet all the time I spend enjoying God’s handiwork, inspires in me thoughts and words that begin deep in my soul. Surely it was the same for Alcott and Montgomery. The environments we inhabit form in us the ideas and images we later produce with the written word.
It’s much less important to me to create the perfect writing space and instead imperative that all the time I spend not writing is in a place that inspires creative thought and a story well-lived.