Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Personal space
Lisa Childers
Where I live: An older neighborhood in west Little Rock off Markham Street. It’s near everything I love.
Occupation: Nine months of the year I teach senior English at Bryant High School. During the summer, I indulge my creativity. I belong to a writers group and the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers, I read and sketch and I volunteer for the Weekend Theater.
My favorite space is: My bedroom.
Why? It takes up half of my top floor, and it’s filled with my books, my late husband’s guitars; sketching, bookbinding, and calligraphy tools; my writing desk; and sewing equipment. The bed is the biggest thing in the room, and that’s where I sit the most, with my laptop or sketch pad. The art is mostly from local galleries or the River Market. The mugs are Dryden; they’re discontinued designs from the 1960s. Byron Taylor painted the portrait of my daughter. Judd Mann did the stained glass. The piles of fabric by the sewing machine are from my costuming gig for the Weekend Theater’s [recent] production of Inherit the Wind. I had fun changing modern-day pieces into 1920s styles, but there are still pins and thread everywhere in the carpet.
If I could make one change to improve this space, I would: Have a skylight so that I could see the constellations. I grew up on Lake Hamilton when there was almost nothing out there but summer cabins. I miss the Milky Way.