Several years ago I fell in love with Kenneth Branagh’s character’s “backyard bungalow office” in How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog. So cozy, so rustic, so…not in the house. I don’t remember much else about that movie, but the office stuck with me. I noticed Cate Blanchett’s character in Notes from a Scandal also has a snug backyard workshop.
And then recently Book of Joe posted about a site called Shedworking, and that kind of stuck with me too, the idea that people all over the world are setting up sheds in their backyards and going to work in them. Financial Times even did a story on the phenomenon recently, with a focus on writers: “Apparently writers not only want rooms of their own; they want them outside the house, in more natural surroundings.” Sheds, cottages, shacks, and huts — writers have tried everything conceivable, it would seem, to make a room of their own. According to the article, Jenny Diski,
who wrote her recent, acclaimed travel book On Trying to Keep Still in her office amid a wildflower garden in suburban Cambridge, says it’s not only the “hermit quality” of these substitute caves that appeals to writers. A garden room is also “a way of making space between you and where you are living. It’s a way of going out to work, which writers don’t often do. And going somewhere to start work is important; it is a kind of ceremony.”
I recently worked out a schedule in which I make time for writing right after lunch. My problem is that while I have the whole house, with the exception of my husband’s office, to myself, I don’t have that “space between you and where you are living” that Diski is talking about. When I sit in my family room or living room or bedroom and try to write, all the associations of those places (including their relative state of cleanliness) crowd in on me. Plus, there’s the Internet, instant messaging, email, etc., which to my shame I don’t have the discipline to turn off.
Last Sunday I had a sudden inspiration to set up one of our tents in the backyard. No special reason; it was a nice day and my son had a friend over and I thought someone might enjoy using it. Then I had another inspiration — I would use it. So now most afternoons I go out to the tent with my notes and steno pad and a pen and scribble for an hour or two. Sometimes I nap. Sometimes I sit and listen to the birds. It’s very refreshing. I look forward to my writing time every day now instead of dreading it.
Shedworking features a yurt and a — whatever this is — but no tents. I think tents are the next wave of shedworking. Light, portable, affordable — Tentworking.
That sounds great! I’ve got a nice office in my house but I spend almost all my time there whether I’m working or not, so it isn’t really separate from where I live. I’ve thought often I’d love to build a writing cottage outback somewhere, or at the very least one of those prefab gazebos plopped down in a field or the woods. Your tent idea is good . . .
Elizabeth, I completely agree about tentworking. I think it sounds marvellous. I use ’shed’ as an all-encompassing term rather than a concrete architecturality (so a tent definitely counts).
It’s been great weather for tentworking.
[...] Tentwriting [...]
Well, as for the “whatever this is,” it’s hard to tell with all the vines, but a dacha is a Russian cottage in the countryside. Or it used to be when it was the USSR and I was in college learning about all those neat things.