A Room of One's Own

continued

a toolshed in the garden of Monk's House in Sussex, England.

In twenty-first-century Ann Arbor, writing sometimes seems like a spectator sport, with authors composing in coffeehouses and libraries, on park benches and buses. But some of the city's literati still heed Woolf's advice, writing in rooms of their own.

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Steve Amick, author of The Lake, the River & the Other Lake and Nothing But a Smile, both Notable Michigan Book winners, clatters down the open steps of a nearly empty 1929 white Cape Cod on Jackson Avenue to a marginally musty basement. In August, he'd just moved out of his office here, a bare room half-paneled in rough-hewn wood. Upstairs there are a few pots and pans in the kitchen, a folk art buffet and coat rack he built, an antique upright piano across from the fireplace in the living room, a few lamps and boxes. Most household items and furniture are in the family's new home in a rural area near Zeeb Road, but the bedroom that will serve as his office there is still a mess--he jokes that his wife, Sharyl Burau, "would kill me if I showed it to you now."