Home time and island time: novelist Pearl Cleage finds inspiration just outside her window in Southwest Atlanta, while Paule Marshall has twice drawn on a long ago trip to Grenada.

When Pearl Cleage is ready to work on a novel, a play or a column, she simply walks down the hall to a room in the front of her house in Atlanta's historic Southwest community.

Cleage's office is dominated by an old battered gray-metal desk she picked up for $20 many years ago and still loves. Photographs of her daughter, husband and other family members surround her. A bulletin board is in place for Cleage to jot down thoughts as they come to her. Papers of various sorts are scattered around, the CD player is going, and the tigerlike cat that leaped on her screen door some years ago, as an orphan kitten is asleep somewhere in the room.

Two regular-size windows in Cleage's office that are anything but regular when it comes to influencing her writing. "Through those windows in I can watch my neighborhood go by," Cleage says. "I watch girls getting pregnant too soon, guys hard eyed and looking mean whom I knew as cute four year olds. By choice, I don't leave my Southwest neighborhood much, and these windows are my windows to all of it."

Cleage's Southwest neighborhood is an historic section of Atlanta. It is home to the Atlanta University Center, which includes Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown, and the Interdenominational Theological Center. African American singles and families live in charmingly renovated Victorian houses, as well as in more recently built homes.

Cleage enjoys the extremes and contradictions that can be found in her neighborhood. "Southwest has everything I'm into in writing, and it feeds me in a way that makes me enjoy my work more," Cleage explains. "The mayor lives here, so does Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Young. We have $500,000 homes, rooming houses, crack houses and homeless people."

From her corner of Cascade Road, she has a view of a school-bus stop where she observes young girls struggling with baby carriages, and she witnesses people doing good and bad things on a regular basis.

There's also the vibrant garden of a neighbor across the street that mixes in with the urban elements of the area. Like most of her writings, many of the characters and the urban gardens Cleage wrote about in her latest novel, Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do (One World/Ballantine, November 2003), were created from her window sightings. The same can be said for the young women she created in her novel I Wish I Had a Red Dress (William Morrow, July 2001).

"The contradictions that I write about in my novels are here every day," Cleage explains. "Some writers write about blacks, but they never see blacks. I came up with the idea of a safe zone for women (in I Wish I Had a Red Dress) because I'd love to walk around here at night, but I don't because I have to be conscious of muggers and predators. So I wondered what it would be like if Southwest had a safe zone for women."

Cleage does not find most other places in the world nearly as fascinating as Southwest Atlanta. "I'm less interested in finding something New," she says. "I'm content and happy with what I've found here."

Nonetheless, Cleage is planning to travel to gather material for her next play. One of the characters still brewing in her head will have spent time in Havana, Cuba, and Cleage wants to go there before writing.

"I hope to go on one of those artists exchanges" she says. "I've been invited but I have a fear of flying. Now I'll go on a boat. That's me. Give me two weeks in Cuba trying out my bad Spanish, and I'll be able to make the character more real."

Marshall's Peripatetic Life

From mid-August to mid-December, Paule Marshall teaches writing at New York University in Manhattan, and she spends the rest of the year writing at her condominium in Richmond, Virginia. Years ago, this daughter of Barbadian immigrants developed a strong curiosity about the beauty of Grenada, also called the Spice Island because of its well known production of cinnamon, cocoa, mace, nutmeg, saffron and other spices.

On approaching the West Indian island of Grenada by boat, travelers are greeted with the view of colorful lush hillsides dotted with houses, endless unspoiled, white sandy beaches, and warm, crystal-dear blue waters lapping lazily at the fine powdery shoreline. This is the view that author Paule Marshall saw in the early 1960s when her cruise ship docked in Grenada, where she was to spend a year conducting research for a novel. Marshall was ultimately inspired to write The Chosen Place, The Timeless People in 1969 (Vintage; reissue edition, September 1984), and Praisesong for the Widow in 1983.

What Marshall found on this 21 mile long and 12-mile-wide island during her one-year slay was a physical splendor that was much different from her parents' homeland of Barbados, the coral island she often visited.

"There was the huge pristine expanse of white sand that curved endlessly," Marshall says. "The water was so extraordinarily clear that you could see through the depths, and the roads were a canopy of exquisite bamboo."

Marshall had received a Guggenheim Foundation research grant, which made it possible for her In hire a housekeeper and sitter for her two-year-old son, and rent a home minutes from the island's well known Grand Anse Beach. She says she and her son spent every afternoon swimming on Grand Anse Beach, and watching for that green flash of light that is visible for a split second when the Grenadian sun disappears out of sight behind the sea.

The author thought this lush paradise would be the ideal place to write. To her surprise, "I had a massive writer's block and couldn't get anything done the whole year," Marshall says. "I thought I'd write four to five hours a day, but it didn't happen. So part of me enjoyed Grenada, but I felt down that I wasn't working that well."

Not that it was Grenada's beautiful distractions that stopped her writing. According to Marshall, she'd simply spent too much time on historical research: "That's not the way to write fiction, and once I'd seen that I'd unwisely done too much research, I said I'd forget about that and write."

But Marshall's friends first encouraged her to take a trip to Carriacou, the largest of the Grenadine Islands, which is about 20 miles north of the main one. Known worldwide for its boat building, this tranquil, hilly landscape, complete with clear blue green waters, sugary sand beaches and 9,000 friendly residents, awaited Marshall when she arrived.

"I took a schooner over, rudely put together by the locals. I went with a friend and spent time with the people. That experience gave me what I needed to write my novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, the novel I was trying to write at the time," she says.

In addition to seeing dolphins and whales on the six-hour trip to Carriacou from the mainland, she experienced seasickness. At one point in the journey, three bodies of water come together for a boat rocking experience that often leaves travelers feeling as if they cannot complete the journey. The locals call it "kick-em-ginny."

"For some reason that whole experience of the illness on the boat stayed with me, and I later decided to use it in Praisesong for the Widow," she recalls. "I mean, I was so outrageously sick that I was hanging over the side. Now I wasn't as sick as Avery (the main character in Praisesong), but the sea misbehaved grandly and I wanted to slide over the side. But Avery's whole transformation takes place in Carriacou."

Marshall also witnessed the Big Drum dance in Carriacou, a spiritual ritual that involves chants, fire, dancing and song. It's not something the locals are usually willing to let tourists see. But the friends she made there gained her entrance.

"There was the physical and environmental beauty, but the dire conditions of the people made it hard at times to live there," she says. "The people touched me deeply. They were so ill-treated because of the politics in place when I was on the island, but they were wonderful, strong people," she continued. They are a hearty people whose history includes a sacred cliff, Leaper's Hill, where in 1651, indigenous natives chose a death leap into the sea over being enslaved by French colonials.

The country has changed a lot since Marshall's visit--there are more hotels, the potholes on most roads have been filled in, and large air-conditioned ferries transport locals and visitors between Grenada and its outer islands in less than two hours.

Marshall plans to return to Grenada someday. In the meantime, she stays in touch with her friends there and works with a foundation to help the children of Grenada.

Travel Tips

Getting to the Grenadines: Air Jamaica has direct flights from New York and nondirect flights from Baltimore, Philadelphia and other cities. Also check US Airways, BWIA, and LIAT airlines.

Where to stay: There are nearly 100 hotels and quaint inns to choose from on the mainland of Grenada, Carriacou or Petit Martinique, with prices ranging from $18 (for real) to $800 per night. (www.grenadagrenadines.com or (www.grenadaintimateinns.com)

Eating out: The Nutmeg, located on the Carenage in St. Georges, the capital, has the best seafood, steak, and chicken rotis in town. La Sagesse Guest House restaurant in St. David's-specializes in fresh seafood and vegetables. The Callaloo Restaurant in Carriacou serves the best callaloo and is one of the few places travelers can get fresh-brewed coffee on the island.

Other attractions: Club Fantasia 2001 plays reggae and calypso music at its beach location. Do try the chicken and fish that's cooked on large grills on the club's grounds. Also don't miss Grand Etang, site of a peaceful volcanic lake, and lush rain forest filled with monkeys that will eat bananas and mints from your hand. Grenada's National Museum in St. Georges also has historical information on the island and it sells spices and books.

Gwendolyn Glenn is a reporter/producer in the Washington, D.C., area. Her work has aired on CNN and National Public Radio.

Gwendolyn Glenn is a veteran journalist based in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Her articles and commentaries have been published ha The Baltimore Sun, Black Issues in Higher Education and The Washington Post. As an award winning broadcast reporter/producer, her work has aired on CNN and National Public Radio. For this issue's special feature, "Home Time and Island Time", Glenn highlights the places where writers Pearl Cleage and Paule Marshall actually do their writing. The jaunt begins on page 30.