Lisa Woods, visual arts teacher at Weaver Academy for the Performing and Visual Arts
60 O.Henry
September 2012
Marianne Gingher wrote her first novel here. An anecdote from her book, Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer’s Journey from Inklings to Ink, illustrates an artist’s need for tranquil space: “Fred Chappell once told me that when left to write at home with his young son, who was screaming to be set free from his playpen, he sprung the kid from captivity, then, lugging his typewriter, Fred crawled into the playpen himself to work. The arrangement made everyone happy.” In a later paragraph, Gingher describes her second-floor studio, a former sitting room, for which she paid $25 a month. “My room measures about seven feet by eight. It also doubles as a hall for the artist who rents the studio behind me and accesses her space through mine . . . Outside the building, I find some old bricks lying around that I haul up to use for paperweights. The office comes furnished with a clunky, old, schoolteacher’s desk and a sprung swivel chair with a lopsided seat. I build a bookcase with cinderblocks and boards. There’s no air conditioning, and this is North Carolina in July, when humidity is as thick as jam and sometimes breathing feels the same as drowning. Some days it’s so hot that my typewriter cassette ribbons start melting. No joke, first thing I do when the writing’s going well is strip down to my underwear and bra and type barefooted, in the seminude. . .” Gingher’s room sounds no different than most of the rooms here — plain, devoid of all but the bare essentials. White walls pleading for a splash of color. But, like many others, she deemed it “pure sanctuary” — a perfect backdrop on which an artist’s world comes alive on paper, canvas or otherwise. “I once spent a happy afternoon photographing all manner of vegetables The Art & Soul of Greensboro