A piece of solitude, on loan

ANDREW WINER has characters and dialogues and plot lines in his head that get drowned out by the distractions at home. So each weekday afternoon, the author of the coming-of-age bestseller “The Color Midnight Made” kisses his wife and toddler goodbye, bundles up his laptop and notes for a second novel, and drives to a place where he can conjure an imaginary world.

E.L. Doctorow said that all he needed to write was a blank wall. Eudora Welty created all of her fiction in her family home. Winer has found that he prefers the foreign silence and solitude of someone else’s house to get the job done -- a fact he has discovered as the first person to be invited by author Adeline Yen Mah and her husband, Bob, to use their weekend residence in Laguna Beach as a writer’s retreat. No cost, no interruptions, no time limit.

When Winer finishes his book, the Mahs plan to open the six-bedroom dwelling to other writers. For the couple, who had lucrative careers in science before retiring, the gifted space fulfills their dream of supporting emerging and established writers. In their starkly modern retreat, Winer has found a place where he can compose and revise his complicated story about art, marriage, religion and false identity set in Vienna during World War II. He credits an increased flow of prose to working in this expansive, almost empty place that lets his creativity roam.

“I can’t be left alone in our cottage because my daughter will find me, and I worked for years at the public library, but I found I was always shushing loud talkers and cellphone users and that got my heart racing,” says Winer, standing in the Mahs’ elevated living room with soaring windows that frame a Zen garden and the ocean.

“But here it’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities,’ such a different world. It’s quiet and the angles of the house draw me out into the canyon, air and space. I feel as if I’m floating on the edge of something, and there is a sense of limitlessness and potential.”

Though it may seem counterintuitive to start a deeply personal endeavor like writing in a place that by definition isn’t personal, Winer says the Mahs’ gesture inspires a sense of purpose and has become a symbol of encouragement -- from one writer to another. “It’s not just any other house,” he says. “It’s about writing.”

Winer likes to work at a table in the dining room, facing a wall of glass, but after a while he no longer notices the view. Instead, he’s transported into whatever scene he’s constructing.

“I have New York agents who ask, ‘How do you ever get anything done in California? You just want to surf. You write, then walk on the beach,’ ” says Winer, who also teaches at UC Riverside in its master’s program in creative writing. “I tell them that I don’t want anything to affect whatever emotion is called for, but I also don’t believe that a writer has to be in a banal or ugly place to work.”

When the momentum stops, Winer simply walks out to one of the terraces. “This place makes me feel a little more free,” he says. “Unencumbered.”

THE house, as Adeline envisioned it, needed privacy but also a sense of community, a colony where storytellers could gather and share their struggle of capturing the right words on a page.

“Writing is a solitary experience and although writers are not all alike, I think many of us would like to have a serene environment,” says Adeline, 68, a former physician who spent decades scribbling thoughts in hospital dining halls before quitting medicine to complete “Falling Leaves,” her 1997 million-selling memoir about growing up in China, unwanted by her family. “For myself, I also need the company of interesting people for intellectual stimulation between bouts of writing.”

The couple bought this contemporary house from a developer before it was completed in 2004, with the intention of making it a writers retreat. They spent a year redesigning it with architect David M. Parker. The floors are polished concrete, the Modernist furnishings selected by Adeline. On the walls are abstract paintings by Bob, 73, a UCLA microbiology professor who started painting after he retired.

The decor is spare, even austere in places; some rooms look as blank as a new sheet of paper.

“Writers need to have a place that is uncluttered and aesthetically appealing to inspire what comes forth,” says Adeline, who writes in a white-walled office in the couple’s longtime Huntington Beach home and spends weekends in the Laguna Beach house hosting dinners for artists.

Instead of showy furnishings and finishes, this house shines with its unpredictable architectural lines.

The galvanized-iron roof rises and falls in seemingly random fashion. The largest window in front is an angular oddity, slanted at one end and wedged into place like a geometric jigsaw puzzle piece. Inside, steel supports lean at 45 degrees, corridors jig and jag, and railings bow like actors after a performance.

The couple liked the galley kitchen’s asymmetrical walls but thought the center island took up too much space. It was removed to make room for a built-in banquette.

“Writers can sit and talk here,” says Adeline, looking out the window at the view that extends to Santa Catalina Island.

COLONIES for writers, composers, designers and other artists have existed in the United States for more than a century. Of the 250 identified by the Rhode Island-based Alliance of Artists Communities, about three-quarters have been founded in the past 25 years. Most offer room and board for a few days to a few months, and 60% don’t charge a fee, says alliance program director Caitlin Strokosch.

The two best-known artists’ communities in Southern California are the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica and the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, a rustic retreat in Temecula beloved by “The Lovely Bones” author Alice Sebold. It’s being rebuilt after its 10 buildings burned in 2004.

Although most colonies are in rural settings, isolating participants from big-city noise, more are being built in urban areas, Strokosch says, adding, “Having a place to retreat to is inspiring in itself.”

The Mahs wanted to start modestly and in their own community.

“I’m merely giving my dream a trial run on a very small scale,” says Adeline, sitting with Bob in two reclining chairs in the den off the kitchen. They acknowledge that the screening process will be difficult. Once the word spreads, how will they decide who gets a key to the front door? How many writers can comfortably work in the 5,500-square-foot house at the same time, and how long can they stay?

“We haven’t come up with the house rules yet,” Adeline says, who adds that no applications are being accepted. The Mahs will select writers-in-residence through UC Irvine’s Master of Fine Arts Writing Program.

To set up guidelines and reach out to emerging talent, the Mahs contacted Michelle Latiolais, an associate professor of English and co-director of UCI’s program, which in its 41 years has nurtured talents such as Pulitzer Prize winners Michael Chabon, Richard Ford and Yusef Komunyakaa, as well as novelists Sebold and Aimee Bender.

Latiolais knew Winer, who is a graduate of the UCI program, and applauds the idea of a private retreat.

“To be supported is a major thing for any artist, and it’s not something our country does,” says Latiolais, who is developing a plan to have recent UCI graduates spend time at the retreat.

Loneliness, she says, is a necessary part of literature. Certain writers thrive on it, but most want an exchange of ideas. The retreat, she says, creates that kind of shared experience regarding the writer’s process. “If there are even two people around who understand,” she says, “that’s a good community.”

IT’S Saturday night, and the Mahs have invited a group of writers to dinner. The conversation circles around books, art, cinema and politics.

Winer is there, comparing the Mahs’ house to the Newport Beach Public Library.

“I cannot have a big ego writing in the library because there are millions of books and I’m there adding yet another one,” he says. “In that sense it’s healthy. But here, I’m free to have grandiose dreams.” Which is precisely the point.

Winer’s wife, author and actress Charmaine Craig, hopes to use the Mahs’ retreat soon. She says their own house is overrun with heaps of Winer’s research books and 20-month-old daughter Ava’s toys -- visual and psychological clutter she didn’t have to deal with when she wrote her 2002 book, “The Good Men,” about the French inquisition. Her “office” is a corner of a desk brimming with his notes.

“Most writers long for a neutral space of tranquillity in which to work,” she says, “away from the ringing phone and the dishes in the sink and the constant interruptions of life at home.”

The Mahs’ retreat is important not just for the space it provides, but for the goals it represents, Craig says. “I don’t take for granted a meal, conversation or interaction with another person grappling with similar questions of how to engage with life through an artistic lens.”

janet.eastman@latimes.com