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A writer's dream: time and space Photo by Bob Pennell Mary Hotchkiss has a computer and solitude and not much more for the next six weeks at a cabin outside Gold Hill. The Eugene writer received a Walden fellowship, which gives three Oregon writers each year some time and a place to write. Fellowship gives Eugene writer six weeks in a mountain cabin By BILL VARBLE GOLD HILL -- Mary Hotchkiss eyes the interior of the tiny cabin: four walls, a bed, a computer. "I feel like I've been waiting for this my whole life," she says without irony. The 45-year-old Eugene woman won a Walden fellowship that brings with it six weeks of solitude here high above Sardine Creek near Gold Hill. She aims to finish a first draft of her first novel here amid the bird song, the scent of lilacs, the wind in the treetops ... and not much else. She brought a lavender oil-and-rosemary candle (for creativity), some trash novels (to kick back with) and some favorite tunes (Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne). There's no TV, no Internet. The cabin is offered to a lucky writer for a six-week residency three times a year by its private owner. "It's to give Oregon writers a chance to pursue their work in a quiet setting," says Brooke Friendly of Southern Oregon University's Extended Campus programs. Any Oregon writer may apply (for details, call 552-6901 or go to www.sou.edu/ecp ). Since 1987 writers have used a journal here to tell of being trapped by spring snows, driven out by forest fires, intimidated by rattlesnakes. It's been quiet since Hotchkiss arrived Saturday to stay through June 10. She's been enjoying the view of the chicken coop out in the madrone, fixing rice and salads and banana-yogurt smoothies in the tiny kitchen, eating when she feels like it. "I don't cook," she says. "My friends are laughing at the idea of me being here." Her retired General Motors executive father had this advice when she told him about the fellowship: Don't quit your day job. She quit her day job. Her son, Gabe, is 21 and out on his own. Her partner, Tauni, is supporting her the rest of the year. "She said I'm a better bet than the lottery," Hotchkiss says. Friends say that just may be. "She just has a really powerful, almost exotic style of writing," says Sharon Wetterling, of Eugene, who belonged to a small writers group with Hotchkiss. "She's very determined. It's like she's breaking into a seed that's always been there." Hotchkiss says she always wanted to be a writer. "I've lived my life knowing I was going to write one book," she says. "I hold experience knowing it will be art." When she was 17 she made a list of the things she thought a real writer needed to do: Hitchhike around the country, take acid, be a groupie, live in a commune in Boulder, skinnydip in every state in the union, become a pinball wizard, become a prostitute and a junkie, then quit. "I did more than my share," she says. She figures her idea that drugs were a dead end helped her quit. "Most of the people I know died or went crazy," she says. She says she thinks men have felt freer to write frankly about those times than women. Hotchkiss came west in 1977 from Syracuse, N.Y., with her Vietnam vet husband. "We had a map, and I put my finger on Corvallis, but we ran out of gas in Eugene," she says. The marriage ended. She entered the University of Oregon Honors College in 1980 and earned a degree in English and a Phi Beta Kappa key. Over the years she had a couple poems published. Mostly, she worked as a nurse, and later a bookkeeper, and raised her son. "I've worked hard for 25 years," she says. "Work and a relationship is a life." She's 120 pages into her book, "Night of Jade," which she calls "autobiographical fiction." She's doing 10 to 20 pages a day but hitting some problems with incorporating the character's childhood into the present of the story. The novel starts with a 1972 hitchhiking trip to Texas with her first lesbian lover. There are themes of excess, escape and sexual identity against an endless war in Vietnam. There's the sense that the personal is the political. "For women, political action seems to spring out of personal experience more than abstract ideas," she says. She doesn't have an agent, but she has a nom de plume, Mary Brighid Etain, after two Celtic goddesses. And now she has time. "We live our lives in these little chunks of time," she says. "It feels like I'm exhaling for the first time in years." She admits to being worried about her conservative, Irish Catholic parents' reaction to the book. "I'll probably call my mom and tell her all bets are off," she says. Her goals for the coming weeks: Work out the story sequence. Complete a first draft. Write some poems. Write a couple short stories. "And I want to achieve some balance in my life," she says. "That means going out to take a walk and eating and sleeping when I want." 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