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Virginia Woolf says that a woman must have, �money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction�. I first read this when I was a teenager, then later in my twenties. The second time proved to be more meaningful, and pushed me to create one. Our house is very small, but there is a space next to the kitchen where a very small table and chairs should go, that I have made my room. We did not need a table, I thought, as much as I needed a room of my own. So in this small space I put my desk, a gift from my parents, almost too big for the little area. On it is the essentials, the computer, the dictionary, Virginia Woolf books, writing books, etc. Taped to the windows are quotes and pictures. There is a picture of my sister and I with my grandmother, all innocence without knowing it. It keeps things simple. There is a picture of my best friend and I laughing; the hard kind of laugh that makes you look funny. It keeps my sanity when no words come and nothing seems funny. There is a blue velvet box full of letters, old and new, that I open and read when nothing is happening. There are candles, so that I can breathe slowly and think clearly, and a small statue of the Eiffel tower that I got in the gift shop in Paris. There is a lantern that hung at my sisters wedding, a picture of downtown Venice that in itself invokes a need to tell a story, and a framed picture of an angel in prayer, for when things get tough, as they have lately.

It is cramped and I often dream of a big studio, but it is unmistakably mine. It works for now. When I sit down the rest falls away, and my fingers fit on the keyboard as if they have always been there, and the view from the window reminds me that seasons are changing, and the books stack up reminding me of all there is to read and write, and yet all of this chaos that is life becomes distilled in this little messy corner.