Victorian Inspiration

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Some stereotypes hold the truth.  Since we couldn’t afford a vacation this summer, we arranged a couple of our versions of “staycations.”  For us that means driving some place a couple hours away, staying in a hotel for a night or two, and exploring a new place for the weekend.  We’ve done that to explore the Lancaster area and a couple of times to the Poconos.  When possible, and affordable, we like to stay in unusual places rather than the typical hotel.  For example, around Lancaster we try to book a caboose at the Red Caboose.  Since those are expensive over the weekend, typically we have to take a vacation day or two to do them before the weekend proper sets in.  On a trip to the Endless Mountains region, we stayed at the Victorian Charm Inn in Towanda.  This is a converted ten-bedroom house from the late Victorian era.  Not a typical hotel, it’s an inspiring place to stay.

What I mean by stereotypes is that such places inspire me to write in their genres.  After staying in the Red Caboose, I typically write fiction about trains.  I’d been on a gothic kick when we stayed at Victorian Charm and indeed, it inspired gothic writing.  Not that we could’ve afforded it, but when we were looking for a house, I really wanted to buy a Victorian.  We looked at a couple but neither one had been well kept up.  I thought they would inspire my writing.  Perhaps it would get old, living in such a house and reading Poe and other Victorian writers, but I wonder if it might have led to more gothic stories.  The fiction I do write tends to draw from my experience of living in various places.  Victorian mansions have a feel to them.

Writing is mostly a matter of discipline, rather than inspiration.  All writers, I suspect, crave inspiration.  I know that I do.  When I awoke to a thunderstorm in a Victorian mansion I experienced something that had never happened to me before in real life.  It made me wonder what it would’ve been like to have been able to live in such a place.  The cracked plaster, the faded elegance.  The nooks and alcoves.  An honest-to-goodness fainting couch.  And who knows?  Perhaps a ghost or two.  Our house was built in the Victorian Era, but by those of much more modest means.  It is an inspirational place to write, but it’s also the place associated with work.  That’s why, in stereotypical behavior, we need to get away on the occasional staycation.

Following Irving

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I’m growing fond of staycations.  Maybe it’s because I’ve become such a creature of habit that major disruptions seem daunting, but I still like a change of scenery with my family.  We settled on the Poconos because of, well, a chocolate factory.  More on that anon.  In any case, said location was near Honesdale, Pennsylvania.  Before setting out we learned that Honesdale is one of those quaint downtowns that has made it an island of culture in a sea of red, if you get my drift.  While researching things to do we learned about Irving’s Cliff.  This is an overlook of the town from a bluff atop one of the many hills.  What really caught my attention is that the Irving was none other than Washington Irving, the author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  This cliff was a view he enjoyed, so it was named after him.

The view from Irving’s Cliff

Honesdale is a small town.  Less than 5,000 people call it home.  Growing up in western Pennsylvania I heard about more affluent people going to “the Poconos” out east.  It was a “romantic” getaway for some lucky high schoolers while the rest of us had to use our imagination regarding what such a place might be like.  Of course, living just south of the Poconos now we’ve driven through them many times, but we never stopped to linger here.  As I tried to commune with the spirit of Irving on his cliff, it occurred to me that he had been a world traveler.  Nipping across the border from his native New York to Pennsylvania must’ve been no big deal.  Still, he wrote incessantly and the locals obviously appreciated that a famous writer had tarried in their town.  Standing here, I knew the view he took in was quite different.  The hills would’ve been here, but a much smaller town and, above all, no cars.

My forthcoming book on Sleepy Hollow will have a thing or two to say about Washington Irving, of course.  It’d be a fool’s errand to try to follow in his footsteps, just as it would be to try the same for his namesake George Washington.  Besides, I was born in a western Pennsylvania town visited by our first president.  Although we couldn’t afford accommodation in Honesdale itself (it is a quaint town), we checked into our hotel knowing that “Washington Irving slept here.”  And when you’ve spent a few years writing a book about a guy’s work, well, a staycation to a place where he had one is worthy of comment.