Some writers’ birthdays mean more to me than others, and I can judge my impartial ranking of favorites based on the pitter-patter of my heart as my bookish social media circle links away to celebrate a dead author’s birthday.

Flannery O’Connor’s birthday is way, way up there. On this day, my heart beats nostalgically for her prose. I think of her and want a book in my hands. Is she my favorite American writer? She’s close. I will have to measure my heart’s electrical response to the other authors’ birthdays and make a chart of hearts.

I’m glad I’m not alone in liking authors’ birthdays, houses, and literary landmarks, particularly O’Connor and her houses. So I’m pleased to welcome writer Ann Napolitano’s guest post on Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah. Napolitano’s novel “A Good Hard Look,” is a smart and poignant look at the struggling and vibrant souls who made O’Connor’s small town of Milledgeville, Georgia come to life.

I showed up at Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in the middle of a crashing thunderstorm on a July evening. I was there to read from my novel, A Good Hard Look. Flannery O’Connor is a character in said novel, but this was my first visit to her Savannah home. A Good Hard Look covers the final years of Flannery’s life, when she lived on her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, so as much as I’d always wanted to see where she grew up—the place where Flannery became Flannery—I’d had no excuse until now.

I arrived at the house early, and was rewarded with a private tour. Flannery’s childhood home is a stately townhouse on one of Savannah’s famous green squares. Her parents, Regina and Edward, could never have afforded the mortgage; the home was owned, and lent to them, by a wealthy relative. And it was the fineness of this home that struck me first; I was accustomed to the slightly ramshackle beauty of Andalusia, Flannery’s farm. The delicate moldings that lined the ceiling, the hand-stitched lace covering Regina and Edward’s bed, the church bells that thrummed through the house at regular intervals—all of these were unexpected notes to add to my mental archive of Flannery O’Connor.

My favorite moment in the tour occurred in the writer’s bedroom, where she slept from birth until the age of thirteen. The tour guide—a veritable encyclopedia of Flannery facts, and an aspiring novelist himself—paused in front of the mantel, which was adorned with framed photographs of Flannery and her parents. He tapped his finger against a picture of Flannery as a three-year-old. I thought I was being cued to say how adorable she was, and began to put the appropriate words together. But he cut me off.

“A little after this point,” he said, “something happened to change this little girl into the Flannery we recognize. Between the ages of four and six, she started to call her parents Edward and Regina. She began to speak to everyone as if she were an adult. She called her teachers by their first names, and that got her into some trouble at school. Her parents allowed it, though. They were ever after Edward and Regina to her.”

I love this anecdote, because the obvious assumption would be that something sinister had happened to Flannery during that period to alter her, or force her to grow up too quickly. But, as the tour guide assured me, and as I’d learned from my own research, that simply wasn’t the case. Flannery had, on the whole, a happy childhood. She simply did away with the trappings of childhood as soon as possible. She became herself earlier than most of us do. The vision of a fierce five-year Flannery pleases me, but it also rings true. The true Flannery could never be denied, not even by childish impulses.

Downstairs, I paused in front of a glass cabinet, and was confronted again with the Flannery I had written about for so many years. A fine example of her nascent literary criticism was scrawled across a book called The Fairy Babies. The words read: “Not a very good book.” I couldn’t access the novel to check it out myself, but I don’t doubt that the young Flannery was correct. I stood and smiled at the image until the tour guide cleared his throat behind me.

The house is not large; only two bedrooms, the stately living room and dining room are open to the public. I had been to Andalusia the day before, and had both endured and enjoyed that visit with shaking hands—after all, I had lived on that terrain for the seven years it took to write my novel, and that house meant a great deal to me. I was able to experience Flannery’s childhood home differently; I took everything in from a place of calm and appreciation. This was where the fierce female writer, who would effect my life and countless others, took her first strides, and I was honored to stand on her ground.

Photo by Nicola Dove

Ann Napolitano is the author of the novels A Good Hard Look and Within Arm’s Reach.  She received an MFA from New York University; she teaches fiction writing for Brooklyn College’s MFA program, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and for Gotham Writers’ Workshop.  She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

This week, we published The Way Life Should Be by Mira Ptacin, an essay about her visit to E.B. White’s house. The post was rounded up by Brainpicker, Kottke, Longreads, Page-Turner, Poets & Writers, and others. We are so thrilled to see the reception to Ptacin’s expectional piece.

Today is Shirley Jackson’s birthday! To celebrate, we recommend Susan Scarf Merrell’s piece, Shirley Jackson Doesn’t Have a House.

Also, in WH news: Open Culture posted profiled our site.

Elsewhere: The Boston Globe paid a visit to Emily Dickinson’s house and Curbed posted photos of Judy Blume’s Florida home.

David Wood wrote about the allure of the writer’s cabin. Among others, he cited Henry David Thoreau and Dylan Thomas.

In auctioning news: the NYTimes reports on the ‘recent trend’ of selling historical hair locks; rare Brontë letters turned up, were purchased in auction by the Brontë society, and will now return to the Brontë Parsonage.

The Charles Dickens Museum has reopened, after a $4.8 million renovation. The London Free Press and Daily Herald both wrote about it.

Submit events or writers’ houses news for consideration to writershousesnews@gmail.com.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

It’s a great day because it’s been a while since I’ve been able to post a new essay by a guest curator here. I have several in the hopper, some for an embarrassingly long time, and am grateful for the collective patience of generous contributors. Things have been a tad overwhelming, I had surgery in fall and it took a while, much longer than expected, to get better, there was a hurricane, I took on new freelance work and a bookstore job, and have not quite regained my rhythm, but it is slowly happening.

One thing that’s in the works is that this website is becoming, knock-on-wood, a non-profit. I’m in the process of incorporating now. It’s difficult, I’ve learned, to keep a website going without resources to run it. And this website is a resource for so many. So I’m hoping that making it official will help keep it functioning and useful and growing for years to come. Stay tuned.

For now, I’m thrilled to introduce readers to a wonderful journey in the form of an essay, The Way Life Should Be: The House of E. B. White, that writer Mira Ptacin has generously allowed Writers’ Houses to publish. She fled New York City for the wilds of Maine and one day, not long after, set out to find E. B. White’s farm. Who can blame her?

“I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else.” –E. B. White Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

MAINE IS A RIGHTEOUS STATE of fewer than two million people living on over four thousand mostly tiny islands and one large wing positioned just north of New Hampshire, south of Canada and flecked along the Atlantic coast. Deeply greened by the sun, Maine’s mainland is just about the size of Ireland, a country where similar predilections prevail: stoic vulnerability, aloof independence, and ferocious modesty.

The number one supplier of blueberries, lobsters, and genetically purebred mice, Maine also has more moose per square mile than any other state. It is the grayest state in our nation: with the median age at 42.7 percent and rising, Maine tends to attract retirees and retain its older residents while the younger ones flock to much snazzier places for work or to avoid their own boredom, even though Maine’s state nickname is “The Way Life Should Be.”

It’s late September and my husband and I are in North Brooklin, Maine, walking down a plain gravel path towards the cedar shake writing shed of someone who hasn’t invited us: Elwyn Brooks White, better known to some as the late essayist E. B. White, and to those who still don’t know, the man who wrote the classic children’s books “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.” With each step away from the old brown barn and to the shed, we see living relics from White’s world: A lush emerald garden. His old chicken chopping block. A tall apple tree doubling as a raccoon lookout. The sterling pond, large brown geese skirting its brim. And then, as if it was just a shed, his writing studio appears.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

It wasn’t easy getting here. Three months ago, Andrew and I did the same thing that E. B. did nearly seventy-five years ago: took a clean break from city life in search of a much simpler existence. We said goodbye to all that and hello to more peace, more quiet and less distraction. Early this morning, we left our house on Peaks Island, took a ferry into Portland, got into our car, and drove north. We passed sagging barbershops and rainbow-colored trees, hand-painted campaign signs sharing yards with baying hounds. There was the Belfast curling club, a poultry concentration camp, and so many “For Sale” signs that I wondered if they’re for sale because everyone here is old and dying. We passed a public supper, a scarecrow contest, some steeples and sailboats until we crossed the Narramissic River and drove into the town where E. B. White wrote, hid, lived, and died.

NORTH BROOKLIN, MAINE

“I never cross that stream without thinking of…the dependability of small, familiar rivers. Familiarity is the thing—the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness.” –E. B. White, “Home-Coming” Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on July 11, 1899. As a young boy, White was very shy and prone to incessant worry. He was drawn to solitude and thrived in nature–a Mainer by inclination. He spent much of his youth foraying on his bicycle into the gentler parts of Mount Vernon—the countryside, the barnyards, the stables. He took a particular liking to spiders and mice and, for several years, Elwyn kept a pet mouse that accompanied him about town, tucked into his coat pocket.

From a young age, White wrote profusely: editor of his high school newspaper, then editor-in-chief of his college newspaper at Cornell, where he picked up the nickname “Andy” (at Cornell, tradition confers the moniker “Andy” on any male student surnamed White, after Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson.) After Cornell, White went on to be a reporter for the United Press, the Seattle Times, the New York Evening Post and the New York Herald until, at the age of twenty-four, discharged from the Seattle Times and in search of adventure, he hitched a trip aboard The Buford, a troop carrier bound for the Alaskan wilderness.

After Alaska, White played piano in a café and pitched hay, all the while writing and working his way back East until he finally began working steadily as a freelance writer in New York City. In 1931, already a successful writer living in New York, E. B. White purchased a forty-acre saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine, where, for years, he commuted back and forth from New York City until finally, in 1937, at the age of thirty-eight, White took what he called a “sabbatical.” This sabbatical was actually a full retreat, and the saltwater farm in Brooklin, Maine—complete with 15 sheep, 3 geese, 112 New Hampshire Red pullets, 36 White Plymouth Rock pullets, a pig, a mouse, a tomcat and one dog—became E. B. White’s permanent home.

In 1905, when he was five years old, he visited the state for the first time when his father rented a camp on Maine Lake, a spot they’d visit summer after summer after summer after summer, always on August 1st, and where White would return with his own son, years later, after Maine had become his home. Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

Although precision was a predominant feature of his writing, E. B. White was always intentionally vague on where exactly in Maine he lived. For instance, in the New Yorker, he published a series of essays written in Brooklin, Maine, under the dateline “Allen Cove,” a place that appears only on nautical maps. That way, said White, no one will be able to find [me] except by sailboat and using a chart. He was a soft man who preferred privacy. Once, after the publication of “Charlotte’s Web,” a swarm of uninvited tourists and busloads of schoolchildren showed up unannounced at the author’s Maine doorstep, demanding a tour of Wilbur the pig’s famous barn. Not long after he died, the New York Times designated his house “historic literary territory,” a title that, had E. B. White still been living, he surely would have surely rejected. In fact, in his will, he stipulated that the saltwater farm was to remain in private hands to avoid it being turned into a museum.

Knowing that E. B. preferred to be left alone, even after he was dead, made it all the more difficult to knock on the door of his former home and ask if we could snoop around. Today, the house is unmarked and occupied by new, unrelated private owners. Andrew and I had no idea where the actual house was located; it wasn’t listed anywhere, and other than the latitude and longitude we’d found online, the White house was hidden in plain sight. But there were other options. There were other White-related places to see: the library, the general store, and the cemetery. “We’ll just get a feel for his essence,” I proposed meagerly. “That should be good enough.”

THE FRIEND MEMORIAL PUBLIC LIBRARY

“All that I ever hope to say in my books is that I love the world.” –E. B. White, May 14, 1961. Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

The Friend Memorial Public Library, located in downtown Brooklin, is as white and pristine as a chapel. Across from the library is the general store, a small red building that rents videos, sells candy and canned food, and sometimes gasoline. Fourteen years after White’s death, a reporter from TIME magazine came into town looking for information on Mr. White and struck up a conversation with a man who used to run the red general store.  Here’s what the reporter wrote of his experience:

“Mr. White always left town on his birthday,” [the Mainer] said, “because that’s when the reporters would show up, bothering him. He’d tell us at the store where he was going, but nobody else.”

No kidding, I said. Where would he go to hide?

“Oh, I can’t tell you that,” the man said.

I pressed him a little. After all, I said, Mr. White is–well, dead.

“Sir,” the man said, offended, “I told Mr. White I wouldn’t tell anybody. And I’m not going to.”

And he didn’t.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

There are two types of people in Maine: those were born here in Maine to parents who were also born here, and those “from away.” Since I’m from away, I was hesitant to even mention the word “spider” and blow my cover, so I eased into the conversation with the librarian about our mutual love for books. New books, handsome books, old books, delicious books, good books. We talked about new releases, gushing over “Harold Fry” and “Rin Tin Tin.” We talked about things we were currently reading and what was on our list. Then, after being hushed by a patron, she went back to her computer and I began casually browsing through the alphabetized shelves, paranoid and pacing myself so not appear overeager to reach the W’s.

There was an entire shelf filled with Stephen King stories. Lahiri, Murikami, N, O, Paterniti, R, S, T . . . I kept searching until I finally reached a small section of the library on the subject of MAINE, and that’s where I struck “White.” There they were, their crisp beige pages old and furling inward like September leaves. Rare first edition autographed copies of books written by E. B. White, vulnerable treasures shelved among the other books without bias.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

From 1938 to 1943, the years White claimed to be the happiest years of his life, he also wrote a column for Harper’s from his home in Maine entitled “One Man’s Meat” (later to become a book). His prose is known for being plain and graceful, and he favored subjects like the difficulties of modern society, war and internationalism, the failures of technological progress, and the pleasures of urban and rural life. He advocated respect for nature, was skeptical about organized religion. He commended simple living.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

In 1918, William Strunk, Jr., one of White’s professors at Cornell, wrote the “Little Book,” a handbook of grammatical and stylistic guidance for writers of American English. Strunk published it privately in 1919. In 1959, long after the book had gone out of print, White edited and updated the guide, now called “The Elements of Style.” In the preface, White wrote: The truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty, and seldom with any exact knowledge of what is taking place under the hood.

It was in his later years that White turned to writing his most famous work for children. Every fall, White’s wife Katharine was assigned end-of-the-year reviews for children’s books and the White house was inundated with cartons of them (which later were donated to the Friendship library). The invasion of these books, together with the badgering of White’s many nieces and nephews, got him thinking about writing for kids and in 1945, he published first children’s book, “Stuart Little,: a realistic fantasy about a talking mouse born to human parents in New York. Many years ago I went to bed one night in a railway sleeping car, and during the night I dreamed about a tiny boy who acted rather like a mouse. That’s how the story of Stuart Little got started, White wrote in a letter to readers.

In 1952, Charlotte’s Web, White’s story of a pig named Wilbur and a barn spider named Charlotte, was published. The novel is a meditation on isolation, morality, the passage of time, and the gift of friendship. Some scholars say White’s background was an incubator for the themes: his sequestered childhood as the youngest of seven children; the commotion of the New York’s publishing world (where White also found his career and mentors); and his lifelong struggle with anxiety, which was ameliorated, in part, by the company of animals and nature.

“Look up,” the head librarian whispered, breaking my spell. “Look up. See? Above you.” I looked up. “There are two of Garth Willian’s original ‘Stuart Little’ drawings hanging right over your head.” There were indeed.

As I turned to thank her for showing me, I caught a glimpse of a cemetery, just outside the window to my left, and I finally gathered the courage to ask where White was buried. This is where we went next.

BROOKLIN CEMETERY

“I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of a wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, 'Put in some tooth twine.' I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me.” –E. B. White, April 8, 1980 Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

The air was salty and wet. We put the dogs on their leashes and the four of us–Andrew, Huckleberry, Maybe, and I–walked thought the iron gates of the Brooklin cemetery to find E. B. White. The cemetery was a green soft field of old beige stones, and it smelled like pine. We zigzagged about, quietly searching, until we reached the last full row of graves. There, set a bit back from the others, it was: Elwyn Brooks White 1899 – 1985. Even his gravestone was modest: sleek, seal black and straightforward, with no more than a name and two dates. Buried to his left was White’s son Joel, a naval architect who ran a boathouse in town. On White’s right was his wife Katharine. I pulled my sleeve over my hand, spit on it, and polished the three gravestones.

E. B. White first met Katharine Sergeant Angell in the reception room at The New Yorker in 1926. She was the magazine’s fiction editor, a divorced mother of two. White was six years younger than she was in 1926, single and timid, but Katharine had a talent for making him feel at ease. He described her as “impervious to disorder and very beautiful, with a lot of black hair,” and he compared Katharine’s laugh to “a little piece of music.”

In 1929, they got married and in the spring of 1930, she became pregnant with Joel. Shortly after sharing the news with her husband, Katharine received a letter from their Scottish terrier, Daisy.

Dear Mrs. White, the letter began, and went on to reveal that a certain 30-year-old “Mr. White” was thrilled that there was to be what the column writer in the Mirror calls a blessed event. Using his dog as a puppet, White continued his attempt to express the bundle of emotions that often overcame him in his personal life. Daisy went on to explain that nothing her master ever said or wrote was able to quite express his true feelings.

E. B. and Katharine bought the farm off the coast of Maine six years into their marriage. When I got a place in the country, White later recalled, I was quite sure animals would appear, and they did. In North Brooklin, Katharine continued editing and gardening, while she and White wrote and took care of the animals on his small farm. White wrote, There was never a dull moment, never a dull day, year in and year out. I think if I’d turned out to be a bum writer our marriage would have gone on.

In 1961, Katharine developed a rare skin disease. It was treated with massive doses of cortisone, which destroyed her appearance and crumbled her bones. After battling the debilitating affliction for another sixteen years, she succumbed to a series of congestive heart failures. She survived four of them, White would remark after Katharine’s death in 1977. She missed the fifth.

Up until his own passing, E. B. White continued to mourn his wife’s death tremendously. He died some eight years later from Alzheimer’s disease on October 1, 1985, at their farm.

One of the first things my husband and I did after we left New York was go to a funeral. The father of one of Andrew’s childhood friends had, just a couple of weeks prior, been diagnosed with liver cancer. Days before Brent passed, Andrew and I brought cookies to his wife Rosemary, who’d been keeping round-the-clock watch at her ailing husband’s bedside in a nursing home. I remember it was the Fourth of July and nearly 110 degrees outside. In the room, Rosemary sat beside Brent, who was sedated with morphine. She’d been barely eating or sleeping, and had only just begun to comprehend her husband’s fate. “It feels like a dream,” she’d told us. “It feels like just yesterday we even found the cancer.” It had practically been. Once diagnosed, her husband had been given about a month to live—two, tops. As she stroked Brent’s arm, Rosemary told us that after the doctor given her husband his fate and left them alone in the exam room, the couple, who’d been married for thirty-five years, raised two grown kids and had three grandchildren, suddenly had to say goodbye.

“That was it,” she said. “That’s when Brent turned to me, took my hands and said, ‘Well, Rosemary, we’ve had a good run.’”

The day after we visited, Brent was gone.

Before Andrew and I left New York, I was ambivalent about uprooting. I worried that I’d be saying goodbye to my career as a writer. I also knew that while Andrew and I were living in New York, I’d let my drive and career ambition eclipse everything else. In his essay “Here is New York,” White writes: Many persons here…are from a deficiency of spirit, who find in New York a protection, or an easy substitution. In New York, I was working to fulfill a vision of myself as a successful writer, as if there was a deadline or someone that needed proof of my success. As if paddling as hard as I could would move me ahead. Maybe it did, some, for my career. But at what risk? If I’d had stayed in New York, my spirit would have died; I was unmoored. My marriage, my health, my sense of peace all had been placed on the backburner, and if we’d stayed in the city, they would remain on the backburner. Our marriage might not have survived. Our run wouldn’t have been so good. That’s why we moved to Maine.

“Well?” said Andrew as we walked away from White’s grave. “What would you like to do next?”

“I think we’re good,” I told him. “Let’s just go home.”

THE SALTWATER FARM

“The quality in New York that insulates its inhabitants from life may simply weaken them as individuals. Perhaps it is healthier to live in a community where, when a cornice falls, you feel the blow; when the governor passes, you see at any rate his hat.” –E. B. White, “Here Is New York” Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

I don’t usually visit the birthplaces of celebrities or the homes of dead writers, and never understood why people do. Before we came to North Brooklin, I just figured it was just another beautiful town in Maine that happened to be the place where an author I admire lived and wrote. But after breathing in the moist air, I remembered how desperately, when living in Brooklyn, New York, I wanted to inhale such things: pine, waltwater, sand, isolation. I didn’t want to smell smog or hear so many signs of life, millions of them, all at once. I was too sensitive for New York, too easily saddened or distracted. I didn’t want to be calloused. I just wanted to remain the sensitive creature I was, write, love, and be a little hidden.

After spending a few hours in North Brooklin, it occurred to me that I wasn’t out of place; I was barely out of town. I live here now, in Maine, and my trajectory was similar to White’s. Upon leaving the cemetery, I realized that my visit to Brooklin wasn’t about snooping; it was about veneration. And I knew that by not visiting his home, I’d regret not trying to forge a bond. True, it would be easier to just to call it a day and go home, but that option seemed disrespectful and dismissive, like not calling one’s uncle on his birthday.

After gathering my nerves, a bit of Googling, and connecting the dots, Andrew and I finally located the address of a house that belonged to a couple from South Carolina who’d purchased E. B. White’s home after he died. At first, were just going to drive by, but then I asked Andrew to slow to a halt. Across from the Creeping Thyme Farm, elegant, expansive, and almost breathing, there it was, the White House. We pulled into the driveway and before Andy even put the car in park, I stepped out.

I got out because something in the air had taken over me, like the home itself breathed out the secret to something I didn’t even know I was looking for, or something I had been looking for so long that I’d nearly forgotten what it was. There was something I needed to know and I felt like I was close to the answer. An essence in the wind. A sign. I could feel it nearby, and my desire to meet it, or to touch or connect to it became almost visceral.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

I knocked on the front door. No one answered so I knocked again, harder. There was a barn just off the side of the house, so as Andrew and the dogs watched wide-eyed from the car, I tiptoed around towards it. That’s when a dog that wasn’t mine barked loudly and rapidly and I became painfully aware of the fact of what I was doing and how quickly I’d been discovered: I was trespassing, and not just trespassing, but trespassing in Maine.

“I’m coming out,” someone called. My heart skipped. He said something else, words I couldn’t make out over the dog. I felt like a jerk, and I stood there feeling that way for what felt like twenty minutes before a tall, owl-faced man pushed open the screen door. I mumbled some kind of jumbled explanation and speedy apology. The man frowned. I kept rambling and after I mentioned I was a writer, he turned and motioned Andrew to get out of the car.

Photo copyright: Mira Ptacin

Inside the barn, the air was cool with a calming smell, the wood fawn-brown and sturdy. The barn, rich in its plainness, was still its natural condition: handmade plank buttresses and hoof-scarred floorboards, rakes and hoes and ladders still hooked to the walls. During our ad hoc tour, the southern gentleman explained how things in the barn worked back then and how they function now. The horse stalls sat horseless, fronted by silent trapdoors, which were used to dump manure into the pigpen belo —the same pigpen where White housed his pigs, which inspired his essay “Death of a Pig,” which inspired him to write the story “Charlotte’s Web.”

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

“Would you like to see Charlotte?” asked the man from South Carolina. Of course we did, so we followed him outside. I spotted a pair of cobwebbed old ice skates hanging on the wall and an adoption certificate from the Woodland Park Zoo for Mr. White’s adoption of an Egyptian Spring Mouse.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

“It's true that ‘this boy’,” White wrote of himself as a child, “felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people.” Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

The yard just outside the old pigpen was a very wide and very green field, with a crooked wooden fence cutting through it and running, it seemed, all the way down to the water. It was beautiful, so much so that the setting seemed almost unreal. As our tour guide pulled open the pigpen, he turned to me. “You know, Andy always said, ‘write about what you know.”

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

We stepped into the sty. The room was dusty and dark and big enough to store a small boat. It was pigless, and other than a few cobwebs, the room seemed devoid of life, more like a tomb.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

In letter to schoolchildren, White wrote: "I didn't like spiders at first, but then I began watching one of them, and soon saw what a wonderful creature she was and what a skillful weaver. I named her Charlotte.” Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

“So is that what you do?” the gentleman asked. “Do you write about what you know?”

It was a difficult question, but not one he’d intentionally loaded. I took in a breath and nodded, told him I was a nonfiction writer and that I was doing my best. It was the truth.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

“I can tell you’re a sweet person,” he said. He told us that it looked to him like Andrew and I were very much in love, and that it made him feel good. “It was a nice to meet you,” said the man, “but I’m going inside now.” Then he invited us to continue the tour without him and head down towards the water and until we find Mr. White’s writing shed. The men shook hands and I hugged him. “The latch is a little tricky but you’ll figure it out,” he said, then scooped up his dog Rooney and ambled back inside while Andrew and I got on the path towards the water, starting walking, and now, here we are.

THE SHED

The theme of my life is complexity-through-joy. --E. B. White Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

Above us, crows. Ahead of us, the tide is coming in. We pass a small forest on our left, and I think back to all the times I’ve sat down to write. To get anywhere, I had to unplug, and even though it was so simple a task, I would often cheat. All it took was opening one window on my computer and I’d get lost in Internet nonsense. To get anything done as a writer, I must disconnect and disappear. To attempt to create something true and good, something that will still remain fresh and unexpired in twenty or two hundred years from now, I know the first part of my process is to just sit in the silence and let the truth emerge on its own, rather than by force. When White finished the first draft of “Charlotte’s Web” in 1951, he let it sit for a year. In a letter to his patient editor, White wrote: I’ve recently finished another children’s book, but have put it away to ripen (let the body heat out of it). It doesn’t satisfy me the way it is and I think eventually I shall rewrite it pretty much.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

Walking along E. B. White’s path, I think about how he took this road each time he went to go write, how he’d leave his house carrying his heavy typewriter along, and walk far enough to really commit to what he was doing. And then, he’d write. Just write. No phone, no Internet, no pressure. Just write. Just the woods and the wind and the water and you inside a small fisherman’s shed with a woodburning stove, an ashtray, and a desk. You want to write your truth? You break free, if that’s what it takes. You walk alone forward and you listen.

As we arrive at the writer’s studio, my husband takes my hand and but we say nothing.

Outside the old fisherman’s shed that E. B. White used as a writing room. Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

I unlatch the door with the delicacy normally reserved for cutting a wedding cake, then I gently step inside. The room is warm and full of sunlight. It houses a few scattered belongings of the current owners—some posters and rope, buoys and oars—but I also recognize items from Jill Krementz’s (widow of Kurt Vonnegut) famous photograph of White at work at his desk. There is the deep brown desk White built himself and on top of it, his ashtray, still a little soiled. Tacked to the wall next to the desk is a list of rubrics for White’s “Newsbreaks” column at The New Yorker.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

On the Maine farm, White wrote that he found himself “suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens … a time of enchantment.” In his writing shed, White said he was a “wilder” and “healthier man.”

Photo by Jill Kremenz

The shed is about 150 square feet, which is about the size of the cabin of Henry David Thoreau, White's greatest literary muse. "What seemed so wrong to Thoreau was man's puny spirit and man's strained relationship with nature,” White wrote. Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

The cabin is plain and encloses only what a writer truly needs: the urge to communicate something, the means to record words, and solitude. There is the woodburning stove White used during the cold winter months, and in a very old Abercrombie & Fitch box, now used as a shelf, are a pair of loafers that were there before the new tenants moved in, a box of sharpened pencils, and an old tin can full of rusty paperclips.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

We stay in the cabin for about 15 minutes, Andrew admiring the carpentry while I keep touching every object, not wanting to let go of this feeling that has taken over me. What is this feeling? Some kind of new, fresh inspiration? A cheerful forecast, maybe a nod from the world that we’d made the right decision by moving to Maine? Indeed, I am on an errand of my own, and in being here, I’m beginning to feel that I can trust myself as a writer, and as a human being. I don’t want this sensation to end.

Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

Shores of Allen Cove, outside White’s shed. Photo credit: Mira Ptacin

In his essay “Coon Tree,” White writes about two stoves in his kitchen: one, modern and electric-powered, and the other old and wood-fueled. My stove, White writes, which would be impractical in many American homes, is nevertheless a symbol of my belief. He explains that fancier stoves are metaphors for the future, and White’s wood-burning stove represents the past, recalling the stove’s simplistic beauty when it “dries the wet socks” and “cools the hot little brain.” White detested the material desires that fueled the lust of man. He believed that it was unfair to toss something as good as an old stove. That sometimes it is right to be in with the old and out with the new. In the essay’s post script, White writes that, six years later, his kitchen fell victim to remodeling and was upgraded, invaded by modern appliances, and in the end wound up looking like a television commercial: I liked the kitchen better the way it was before…whether or not [it] was a guardian of our health I will never know; but neither my wife nor I have enjoyed as good health since the back kitchen got renovated. I would hate to think it’s just a coincidence.

Now it’s just me in this room overlooking Allen Cove, the spot where White most likely wrote this passage. The room feels frozen in time, inches from the edge of the earth and far from the hot smell of modernity. In being here, things seem somehow sharper and healthier, more alive and more right than they ever have. And I would hate to think that this, too, is just a coincidence.

Mira Ptacin is a creative nonfiction author and New York Times bestselling ghostwriter living on Peaks Island, just off the coast of Maine. She teaches at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and is founder of Freerange Nonfiction Reading Series & Storytelling Collective. Find her at www.miraptacin.com and on Twitter: @miraptacin

After a brief recess, we are back!

The Edgar Allan Poe House, recently closed, was vandalized at the end of November. Fans have been doing their best to help the house.

In other upsetting news: Hurricane Sandy significantly hurt the Pearl S. Buck House and surrounding area. George Eliot’s writing desk has been stolen.

Oscar Wilde’s flat is on the market for $1.8 million. J.K. Rowling’s former house (two-story, eight bedroom town house) sold to a Scottish businessman.

Exploring three Russian authors’ homes: Bulgakov, Gorky, and Tolstoy.

At the Margaret Mitchell House, two before and after photos: one of the house back when it was Margaret Mitchell’s versus 1991; another of the before and after a devastating fire in 1996. Also: a tattoo.

Upcoming: the Emily Dickinson Museum will have an open house on December 12, to honor the poet’s 182nd birthday. The first 100 visitors will be given a long-stemmed rose. Also at the museum: Kay Ryan was recently awarded the “Tell It Slant” award. For the holiday season The Mark Twain House is hosting a live version of the board game Clue!

There’s a new artist’s house open in Maine. Welcome to Winslow Homer’s place.

An expert at the Bronte Parsonage announces that Kate Middleton has something in common with Charlotte Bronte. A few images from the Parsonage are in the UK edition of Country Living.

Submit events or writers’ houses news for consideration to writershousesnews@gmail.com.

The Brontë Parsonage Museum is exhibiting photographer and filmmaker Simon Warner’s work, focusing on Top Withins, the farmhouse three miles from the museum that’s often assumed to be the model for Wuthering Heights.

Also at the museum: the Brontë Parsonage is receiving a makeover via “decorative archaeology,” to make the house even closer to how it was while the sisters lived there.

Through Jan. 15, the Mark Twain House is exhibiting “Illustrating Twain,” illustrations by and about Mark Twain.

Mo Yan won the Nobel and his hometown quickly released a $110 million plan for a theme park.

Jan Turnquist, Executive Director of the Louisa May Alcott Orchard House, has been invited to Concord’s sister city in Japan.

Mysore University is now proposing that they turn Indian writer RK Narayan’s home––of much recent controversy––into a study center.

In upcoming events: Edith Wharton’s 150th Birthday Celebration will be held at the Harvard Club of Boston, with special guest Julian Fellowes.

Submit events or writers’ houses news for consideration to writershousesnews@gmail.com.

Mira Ptacin, on her visit to E. B. White’s house. She gives a taste of her upcoming essay, to be published here on Oct. 29: “With each step away from the old brown barn and closer to the shed, we see living relics from White’s world: a lush emerald garden. An old chicken chopping block. A tall apple tree doubling as a raccoon lookout tower.”

William Cullen Bryant’s Cedarmere Estate needs volunteers to help plant trees and tend the gardens.

Charles Dickens’ great-great-grandson plans to visit the pub his great-great-grandfather gave a “zero star” review to, 153 years ago.

Consider us gobsmacked by Etgar Keret’s Tablet essay about his triangular house in Warsaw.

War poet Wilfred Owen’s house gets protected status in Shropshire.

Richmond’s Poe Museum is hosting a “Masque of the Red Death” Unhappy Hour and a Poe-themed pumpkin patch.

From the Emily Dickinson Museum, ever-developing daguerreotype news. And they are searching for books to replenish the poet’s bookshelves. Can you help them?

Tonight, in London, it’s a Dickens debate.

The Anne Frank House has a new temporary exhibit called ‘So I’m now fifteen’ – Photos, letters and books of Anne Frank.

Submit events or writers’ houses news for consideration to writershousesnews@gmail.com

Top five artist studios turned into museums, including Musée Rodin and Musée Gustave Moreau.

Adding to the mountain of Poe House news: there is now a revival plan in the works.

On the market: a two-bedroom garden apartment once owned by Charles Dickens.

“But does it matter where we work? I think it must.” A wonderful post from Dinah Lenney about the importance of the space writers write in. She references another great article, Mark Helprin’s “Bumping into the Characters,” published by the New York Times last week.

A slideshow over at CNBC: Homes of Writers, including Anne Rice, Sinclair Lewis, and Truman Capote.

Writer Mira Ptacin tweeted and blogged about a little bit of her journey to E. B. White’s house this past week, and Writers’ Houses will soon be publishing an essay on her trip.

Ghost Tours are a Friday happening through the month of October at Edith Wharton’s The Mount. There’s even a special Halloween Ghost Tour on the 31st. The Mark Twain House in Hartford also has weekly ghost tours through the month.

The Willa Cather Foundation received wonderful donations to its collection this past June.

If you have an event or writers’ houses related news you’d like us to consider for The Weekly Guide to Writers’ Houses, please email it to writershousesnewsATgmailDOTcom.

Writers' Houses received this atmospheric virtual postcard taken surreptitiously from Victor Hugo's Parisian bedroom. Thanks, Michelle Legro!

A lot happened with the Poe House in Baltimore this last week. The house closed, “hopefully temporarily.” The city snuck the Poe House’s report past the public.  They also continued to experiment with privatization of the house; they agreed to pay the B&O Museum $180,000, with the hopes that the museum will become a tourist destination. This weekend on Oct 7th, the anniversary of Poe’s death, there will be eulogies delivered by some famous dead folk (Abraham Lincoln and H. P. Lovecraft!) at his grave site. And at a grave in Richmond, Virginia, Poe’s first and last love interest will receive a plaque. Our respects to Mr. Poe and his Baltimore house.

Poets.org interviewed Langdon Hammer about his biography on James Merrill and Merrill’s spiritualism. Back in 2010, when Writers’ Houses first started up, Ivy Pochoda wrote an essay, Unfamiliar Spirits, about the James Merrill House, a house “so splendidly strange and so simply splendid.”

The house where J.K. Rowling wrote four of the seven Harry Potter books is for sale, in case any of you muggles are interested in an 8 bedroom mansion in Edinburgh. The house, of course, comes with a secret door.

The Mysore City Corporation blocks a grant that would helped to restore and converse R.S. Narakayan’s house.

Laura Ashton writes about her childhood visit to Salman Rushdie’s secret home.

An Australian newspaper writes a travel piece about On the Road: “Here are five key cities to visit, places that Kerouac knew and that still inspire the “bug” that drew him across the country more than 60 years ago.”

On a very hilarious, light note: You can honor yourself with a Blue Plaque in London now! Yours for only £109.99.

Upcoming: On Oct. 11, the Mark Twain House and Museum will host “Mark My Words,” a fundraising event featuring R.L. Stine, Steve Berry, and Sandra Brown.