Puget Sound Writers’ Colony Aims to Nurture Women Writers

A quaint farm on an island in Puget Sound has been converted into a retreat for women who want to write and think and dream in solitude, beyond the press of family and jobs.

The writers’ colony at Hedgebrook Farm, which began receiving its first authors-in-residence in August, is the creation of Nancy Skinner Nordhoff, the 56-year-old daughter of a shipping executive who has long been active in community affairs in the Seattle area.

‘Something to Say’

“Women need the chance to explore their craft without having to wait until the kids are in college,” says Nordhoff, a 1954 graduate of Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. “Women have something important to say. They need to be heard.”

Women writers selected by a screening committee can spend two weeks to two months at Hedgebrook Farm for free. Nordhoff purchased the farm with her own money--she declines to say how much it cost--and foots all the bills.

Why? “It’s a gift to myself and to the writers. It’s because I know from my own life the pain of not being affirmed. You know, I have the ability, I have the interest to be able to say women deserve to be heard and to be able to do something about it.”

The 30-acre farm, 30 miles north of Seattle on Whidbey Island, has a remodeled yellow stucco farm house and two timber-framed, skylighted cabins, with four others in the works.

Simple Comfort

Every day a picnic-basket lunch is delivered to each writer’s doorstep, “with just a loud enough thump so that they know it’s there,” Nordhoff says.

Almost every article in the cabins is hand-crafted, from the porcelain sink basins to the pillows and afghan for curling up next to three ground-level windows. A loft and bed look out stained-glass windows into the trees.

None of the cabins’ windows face other cabins. Nordhoff says they were designed that way so writers would feel “separate, but not isolated.”

The cabins were designed by architect Chuck Dougherty, a University of Washington graduate who designs structures for the Amish in Lancaster County, Pa.

Communal Dinner

Writers are afforded solitude all day but eat dinner in the farm house at a big wooden table looking out over Puget Sound, along with Nordhoff and the “farm family” of carpenters, cooks and other friends.

“It’s a place where people can work the way they’ve always wanted to,” says Sheryl Feldman, 47, of Sommerville, Mass., a nonfiction writer.

Nordhoff gave up her long career as a community activist to develop the farm: “It was meetings, meetings, meetings, all the time. Too much formality and ritual.”

Nordhoff had been instrumental in forming the City Club, a United Way volunteer bureau. She also served on Bellevue’s Overlake Hospital board and was president of the Seattle Junior League.

Seed for the Idea

Nordhoff says that after traveling around the country in a van, she realized she felt most at home in the country, with her hands in the dirt. She bought the farm as “something for me,” and as something she wanted to share.

Nordhoff, who now grows vegetables in her Hedgebrook garden, co-wrote a book on fund raising for nonprofit groups. But she says she doesn’t consider herself a writer.

She says the idea for Hedgebrook came from a visit to the McDowell writers’ colony in New Hampshire. She liked the colony, which is for published writers, but wondered where people who hadn’t published anything could go.

“The idea for Hedgebrook became attractive to me. A place where I could say, ‘I care about women writers and support what you are doing--even if you haven’t been published.’ ”

Recommendations Needed

A selection committee of five writers recommended to Nordoff by bookstore owners, English professors and librarians, screens applicants. Two of the five members on the selection committee are men. Nordhoff says they look for women who are dedicated to being writers.

An applicant must submit a sample of her writing and a letter saying why she feels a stay at Hedgebrook Farm would be important for her work.

Letters from women have been pouring into Hedgebrook:

“I have seven children and there hasn’t been much opportunity for quiet in my life,” wrote a Pennsylvanian who wants to write poetry.

A 42-year-old counselor for the disabled in New Mexico wrote: “I have been writing poetry since I was a teen-ager. For a long time I put my work as a counselor first, but now I realize I need to nurture parts of me I had previously set aside.”

Fall Session

Although Nordhoff started out advertising mainly through local networks, she is receiving applications from all over the country. She hopes to eventually accept writers from different locations, but for now is focusing on writers from the Northwest.

Fourteen writers were in residence at some time during the first session that ended Dec. 10. The next session, which runs from Jan. 10 to June 30, can accommodate 18.