The Long of It:

Whether she knows it or not, every woman needs a she-shed. Most men never think about it, but they do too. (That’s what their workshops, man caves, and perhaps even the insides of sports cars really are, by the way.) 

In my latest novel, God, Send Sunday, the heroine whose name is Sunday, has a little stream behind her slave cabin which, unbeknownst to her master, she calls her own. It’s her balm. Her refuge. Like Sunday, when I was a girl growing up, I seized spaces and places that soothed me. I savored the times when the moon was waxing. A time when I could sit on the front steps—washed with honeyed light—well into the night and dream, seizing that temporary ambience as my own. 

So recently, pushing the excuse of a needed writing space, I finally won the battle of getting my very own she-shed—only to find that, with all my past longing for it, its true essence was not precisely what my imagination had designed. I had envisioned a place to write while looking through the oversized windows at the deer and their spotted babies. A place to catch a nap without the guilt of looking at the dust beneath the adjacent chair. A place to pretend the wrinkles on my arms have not become full-blown crevasses.

A pint-sized getaway.

Turns out, the shed, writing stimulant though it is, mostly offers what everyone needs from time to time: sanctuary. Ninety-six square feet of my own space (invisibly marked JFW) where I can expel the unwanted and invite the unreal. So here it is:

The Short of It:

Everybody needs a carved-out a space of their own—real or imaginary—even if sometimes it means a simple line drawn in the sand.

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