Tuscany is a long way to go to sleep well, and perhaps it’s the late-night dinners, but I seem to dream well here, too. Last night I dreamt that I asked a woman what she would not want to ever give up. Her teeth, she said. For me, it was my office.

My writing life began, I think, with my first winter in Canada, in Nain, Labrador, the sub-artic. I read a lot that winter—all of Lessing‘s Children of Violence series, Anais Nin‘s diaries, Virginia Wolf‘s A Room of One’s Own. And it was in reading Wolf’s book that I began to dream of just that, a room of my own.

I’ve had desks in dark and crowded basements, desks in the corner of utility rooms. In reading Cameron‘s The Artist’s Way I began to seriously dream of an office I could call my own. I put it on my wish list. For a long time I was considering a tent and then a house-trailer. Then came my first foreign sale and lo—the means to consider the impossible: an office addition to our house.

And yes, my office would be the one thing I would not ever want to give up.