I’d like to think size matters.

I have studio envy.

My sweetheart is an artist with a five hundred square foot, two-room art studio in the same house where I have an eight-by-ten spare bedroom as an office. My desk, bookshelf, reading chair, copy machine stand and filing cabinet just fit.

My desk is my talisman.

My desk is a kitchen table from my maternal grandparents’ kitchen. My grandmother was an incredible cook who raised eleven children, cooked for rich families and spent every Sunday making a batch of the best breaded and baked chicken I’ve ever eaten for all her children and grandchildren when we visited.

Memories are powerful.

Though I’d love to have a real desk with all the special features, I love my kitchen table desk more. The drawer that used to hold butcher and carving knives now holds flash drives and sticky notes. There is love in this desk.

I sit at my desk and create stories, mostly fiction. Many of them involve family and strangers, mermaids and dragons. They are retold fairy tales and futuristic possibilities. Love and loss, comedy and irony, and growing up are themes running through them.

The desk fits my little laptop, the machine that does it all: it researches, writes, connects with submission and agency sites, and saves everything in specific files.

As much as I dream of a bigger space to work in, I do pretty well fitting the world of storytelling within the space of one, small kitchen table desktop.

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”  ~E.B. White

*All images are my own unless noted.