In the first decade of the twentieth century, two sisters, Victoria and Vanessa Stephen, broke free of the Victorian/Edwardian stiffness and stuffiness of their upbringing in Kensington after the death of their famous father, literary critic Leslie Stephen. In their flat in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of Central London, they opened a salon. Writers, artists, economists, dancers and various others all congregated at 46 Gordon Square to exchange ideas and art and laughter and work.

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Eighty or so years later, I lived in London for a semester abroad, studying the Bloomsbury Group at the University of London and following their tracks all over the city and to their country home in Sussex. During the Blitz, the original flat in Bloomsbury was destroyed, but their country home in Lewes, which they called Charleston, remains. The Bloomsbury writers and artists made art in their home, and made art of their home.

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Rugs, walls, dishes, furniture – all made canvases for Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and others who became part of the Omega Workshop. They believed art need not be confined to museums or canvasses, nor to hidebound ideas of beauty.

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Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West, Dora Carrington, Katherine Mansfield, Lydia Lopokova -- among others -- were all involved in some way with the Bloomsbury Group.

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In 2006, I bought a small cottage in the mountain town of Silver Cliff, Colorado, which I have turned into BloomsburyWest, a writer and artist retreat. The one-bedroom clapboard house, painted yellow and blue in tribute to Frieda Kahlo’s Blue House (another inspiration), was once home to miners back in the day when the town boasted opera and an enormous population dedicated to gouging silver out of the cliffs, which they did with great success. Around the time the future Virginia Woolf was creating new language for prose, an anonymous writer built the tiny cabin, which, eventually enlarged, would become BloomsburyWest.

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Now, its yellow and blue walls house writers, artists, musicians, readers and anyone needing to spend time in a quiet place of beauty. As a retreat, the cabin offers high-altitude sunlight and wooden floors but no TV and no Internet. A restored turn-of-the-century Baldwin graces the living room. Bookshelves contain the varied works of Bloomsbury artists in addition to critical and historical work about the Bloomsbury Group. A vintage manual typewriter collection also pleases the early-twentieth-centruy aficionado.

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Unlike Gordon Square or Charleston, my Bloomsbury is not a place for the creative ferment of many artists and writers at once, but rather the blossoming of one artist/writer at a time. In its three years of operation, BloomsburyWest has already helped shelter writers who have gone on to publish poetry volumes, essay collections, and songs/CDs.

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When not writing or creating at home, visitors have hiked the Sangre de Cristos, whose jagged peaks you can see from the living room windows. There’s rafting on the nearby Arkansas River, horseback riding at various ranches, and all sorts of seasonal delights available in the summer months.

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It's connected to the original Bloomsbury in the most essential way: it provides a safe haven for artists to pursue their art with low expenditure or even with a fellowship for artists-in-need. Because, to quote Woolf, everyone needs a room  of one's own.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Annie Dawid, Guest Blogger

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Annie Dawid is an English professor and director of creative writing for 15 years at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is also a photographer and the founder of BloomsburyWest, a retreat for writers and artists. She is the author of three books: York Ferry, Lily in the Desert, and, her most recent, And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family, which won the 2007 Litchfield Award for Short Fiction. Her photographs have appeared in various literary magazines as well as in shows in Oregon and Colorado. She can be reached at www.anniedawid.com - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor