Yes, Virginia, I’m listening
I’m back from Kindling Words West. For a week, I got to feed my muse and focus on my writing, and only my writing. I can hardly wait to sign up for next year.

I didn’t take any of my old projects with me, or anything that needed revising, because I wanted to work on a new project. I also left my laptop at home, and relied on spiral notebooks and my Alphasmart Neo. I hiked every morning but one at dawn, then spent most of the rest of the day writing. In the afternoons and evenings, I would emerge and rub my eyes, and be ready to talk.

Now that I’m back home and dealing with the regular day-to-day stuff and all the things that piled up while I was gone, like laundry, I realize what a gift I gave myself.

And I’m going to give myself another. As soon as my daughter moves out, I’m moving into her room. She’s working on emptying the closet for me already. It’s way past time that I had a room of my own to work in, as Virginia Woolf eloquently reminds me when I reread her essay.

I can’t wait to tack up some postcards on a bulletin board to remind me of my time at Ghost Ranch. I also have some quotations from Georgia O’Keeffe, who made the area around Abiquiu, New Mexico both familiar and famous.

Here’s my favorite: “The cliffs over there, you look at it and it’s almost painted for you, you think until you try.”

Georgia O’Keeffe painted the table top mountain Pedernal over and over, and once boasted that because she painted it so often, God had promised it to her.

I think it’s hers all right.