July, 27, 2025

If not now, when?

by Vonda K. Givens

Once I turned 50, I began to feel a kinship with Gustav Stickley. Let me explain.

After dabbling in writing and teaching in my 20s, I began a career in small museums in my 30s. That career really hit its stride in 2008 when I began working at the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms in Parsippany, New Jersey, first directing educational programs, and then as the Executive Director.

When I’m writing in my museum director voice, I often say that Gustav Stickley, who is best known today for his furniture designs (this is a classic example of a Stickley chair), built Craftsman Farms to be a manifestation his Craftsman ideals. All of this is an accurate and arty (and who doesn’t love the word manifestation?), but if I were to write the same thing in my own voice, I would say it more simply: Craftsman Farms was Gustav Stickley’s dream home. It was more than a dream home too, of course, which is why Craftsman Farms is a National Historic Landmark today, but I suspect that first it was a dream home.

Gus was 50 when he began buying the 650 acres that became Craftsman Farms. He was 52 when he sold his home in Syracuse, NY, and moved his whole family, which included his wife, Eda, his teenage son, and his five daughters, ages 13 to 23, to Craftsman Farms.

When they moved, the Stickleys’ family home had not yet been built at Craftsman Farms (and sadly, it never was built), but enough structures existed for the family to relocate and so they did. During this time, his daughter Mildred kept a journal, and we know, at least from her perspective as a 21-year-old young adult, it was not an easy transition from a bustling city to the New Jersey countryside. When I’m leading a tour and talk about the property and Gustav Stickley’s daughters, I often say, “this was Dad’s dream.” 

I have always sympathized with the Stickley daughters’ predicament, but the older I get, the more I relate to Dad’s. I just turned 55, and I get it. You have a dream, and it seems within reach. It’s right there. You bought the land. You’ve built some small cottages on it. You want to get the whole thing going. Like now. Now would be good.

Around 2020, the year I turned 50, a novel began nagging me to be written. This was not typical for me. I write regularly as part of my museum job. Program descriptions, fundraising campaigns, a director’s column, grant narratives, board reports (and more than I can’t remember right now), and it’s satisfying. Over many years, I found that those forms of writing satisfied my creative urges.

So, it was a surprise, at 50, to feel the impulse to write fiction tickling at my brain. The tickle wasn’t intense, but it was persistent. I would feel it whenever I had a free moment, which, if you’ve ever been the director of a small historic house museum (particularly during a global pandemic), was not often, but it was there. The impulse is hard to describe. It was like hearing a faint tune, a wistful and abiding tune, the melody of a song I once loved but had forgotten. 

That melody lured me into writing fiction again. Initially, as with writing in my 20s, I dabbled. But I found it harder to do. For the first time in my life, with any form of writing, I could not get my fingers to tap out on the keyboard what my brain could see. The mysterious connection between my hands and my mind’s eye that, as a writer, I had always relied upon, felt out of reach, like a lost Internet signal.

 More than 20 years had passed since I had attempted fiction writing, but it was disturbing to face the reality that I might not be able to do it. I felt like I had lost a part of myself, like the fourth toe on my right foot had gone missing, and I hadn’t ever properly appreciated it in the first place. How come I hadn’t paid attention to fourth toe? I had always taken it for granted and now was it gone forever?

Years passed, I turned 51 and then 52, but the urge to write didn’t. Now, though, the urge had combined with frustration. I knew that wanting to write a story wasn’t the same as being able to do it. I talked to my husband, Wes, a painter for more than 30 years, about my creative plight. In hindsight, I, perhaps, talked about it a lot. As he always is, Wes was patient with me for a long time, but then one day, he turned to me, and said curtly, “Look, if the muse comes to you, and you don’t listen—if you don’t acknowledge it—the muse will move on.” 

 Somehow it was the right thing to say. I’m not sure why, but I heard him. I had a muse? Who knew I had a muse? It was a revelation. Was that tickle in my brain the muse? I think it was.

 Wes challenged me to begin taking myself seriously as a fiction writer, and I did. In 2023, my vacation days from work were all shaped around writing. I spent an entire week writing in a cottage at the Jersey shore, and just as much time writing anywhere else I could. In 2024, the museum’s generous board granted me a 6-week sabbatical, and during that time, I finally finished the first draft of the novel that had been nagging at my brain for years. Now, I’m working on the second draft of that novel, and preparing to begin novel 2 in the series.

When I think about Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms dream and his, arguably, hasty decision to move his entire family to New Jersey before they had a house on the property, I get it. Let’s say: At 50, an idea forms in the back of your mind, and it’s there for a while, maybe years, until finally something motivates you to act on it. And once you do take action, it feels great and makes you think: hey, this thing could happen. It could really happen. And once you think that, you want it to happen, like, today, because now you’re 55, and who knows what life is going to bring, but maybe it can bring this too.

I’m guessing, at this point, you can see why I feel a kinship with Gustav Stickley. Should I mention that he moved to Craftsman Farms, put many thousands of dollars into his dream home, but then a short time later, in less than 10 years, his dream fell apart, and he had to sell the property?

Yep, harsh reality can bring an abrupt end to your dreams. It happens. At 55, I understand that listening to the muse comes with risk, but I’ve decided to be like Gustav Stickley. It could turn out that I’ll live this fiction-writing dream for less than 10 years. Right now, a 10-year dream feels pretty good, and it’s better than no years. I have always hoped Gustav Stickley felt the same way about Craftsman Farms.