I've always been fascinated by the people who came before us. Not necessarily the famous ones, but those who seemed to approach life a little differently. The artists, writers, thinkers, and wonderfully unconventional people who followed their curiosities, challenged expectations, and created lives that reflected who they were.
I often wonder what their days looked like. What inspired them. What kept them awake at night. Whether they questioned their decisions, struggled with their ambitions, or felt the same desire to make something meaningful out of the time they were given.
Recently, I found myself falling down a rabbit hole learning about Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Born in Maine in 1892, Edna was a poet, a free spirit, and a woman determined to live on her own terms. She came of age during a period when women were expected to follow a fairly prescribed path, yet she pursued a life filled with literature, romance, intellectual curiosity, and artistic independence.
She attended Vassar College, found her way into the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village, and became one of the most celebrated poets of her generation. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (the first woman to do so).
But it wasn't her accolades that held my attention. It was her life.
A Life Built Around Creativity
In 1925, Edna and her husband, Eugen Jan Boissevain, purchased a farm in Austerlitz, New York, not terribly far from where I live and work. They called it Steepletop.
The property encompassed hundreds of acres of fields, gardens, and woodland. There, Edna established a home that allowed her to write, entertain, wander, garden, and retreat from the demands of public life. I find myself thinking about that decision.
Here was a woman who had achieved remarkable success, who had experienced the energy and excitement of New York City's artistic community, and who chose to make a home in the countryside where her creativity could have room to breathe.
Not because she lacked ambition, but perhaps because she understood what her ambition required. I recognize something of myself in that.
As a jewelry designer, so much of my life revolves around creating. Yet owning a business means that creativity is often sharing space with responsibilities, schedules, financial decisions, and the countless details of keeping everything moving.
It's a peculiar balance, wanting to build something substantial while also protecting the quiet, unstructured time that allows you to create in the first place.
I wonder if Edna felt that tension, too.
A Candle Burning at Both Ends
Of everything I've discovered about Edna, it's her little poem First Fig that has stayed with me.
Four lines. An entire philosophy.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
I read it and immediately recognized something of myself. I've always been someone with more ideas than hours in the day. One creative pursuit inevitably leads to another. A small idea becomes an ambitious project, which opens the door to three more possibilities I hadn't considered. And I love that about my life. I love the curiosity, the momentum, the feeling that there's always something worth discovering or making.
But I also understand the candle. There is a cost to wanting to do everything. To being endlessly curious. To building a business around something you love, only to discover that the business itself can sometimes consume the very time you need to practice your craft.
Lately, I've been thinking quite a bit about expansion. About what it means to grow, not only as a business, but as an artist and as a person. I've imagined bigger spaces, new opportunities, and entirely different ways of bringing people together through creativity.
And while those possibilities are exciting, they've also made me consider what I want to preserve. The quiet mornings. The freedom to follow an idea without knowing where it will lead. The simple pleasure of sitting down to make something with my hands.
What I find beautiful about Edna's poem is that it doesn't apologize for the flame. She acknowledges that it cannot burn forever, but celebrates its light anyway. I don't know that I want to live quite so recklessly. These days, I'm learning that protecting the flame might be just as important as allowing it to burn brightly.
But I understand the impulse. And perhaps that's why her words feel so familiar.
The Art of Living Differently
The more I read about Edna, the more interested I become in the contradictions of her personality. She was fiercely independent but deeply romantic. She enjoyed the company of other artists and intellectuals, yet valued solitude. She was ambitious and accomplished, but drawn to the simplicity of gardens, seasons, and the natural world.
She was also imperfect, complicated, and at times deeply troubled. I appreciate that.
I don't particularly want my muses to be flawless. In fact, I think their humanity is what makes them interesting. It's easy to admire someone's finished work. It's something else entirely to consider the person who made it, the circumstances they navigated, and the choices they made along the way.
Edna lived during a time of tremendous cultural change. She challenged conventional ideas about relationships and women's independence, wrote openly about desire and mortality, and refused to make herself smaller to satisfy the expectations of others. I can't help but admire that willingness to question the life she was supposed to live.
Perhaps that's one of the things I find most inspiring about her: the reminder that we have some agency in deciding what a meaningful life looks like. Not necessarily the biggest life, the busiest life, or even the most successful by conventional standards. But one that feels distinctly our own.
The Places That Hold Us
There's another part of Edna's story that I find especially moving. Her relationship with place.
I've always believed that our surroundings influence the things we create. The light in a room, the objects we collect, the landscapes we return to, the familiar rituals that give our days a certain rhythm.
I think about this constantly when considering the future of King + Curated.
I've spent years building a space that reflects my appreciation for craftsmanship, history, unusual objects, and the beauty of things made with intention. And lately, I've been imagining what more room might make possible.
Not simply a larger shop, but a place where people could gather, create, read, learn, and find a little space for themselves. Somewhere that encourages curiosity and makes creativity feel like a natural part of everyday life.
When I read about Steepletop, I recognize that impulse. Edna's home was more than an address. It was a landscape she shaped around her creative life.
I love the idea that a place can become an extension of the person who inhabits it. That the spaces we create can quietly tell our stories, even after we're gone. And perhaps what I'm searching for isn't necessarily more space, but the right kind of space. A place that allows creativity to flourish without requiring every moment to be filled.
I didn't know Edna. I certainly wouldn't presume to know exactly what motivated her choices. And I don't imagine we would have agreed on everything. But that's not really the point.
There's something remarkable about discovering a person who lived nearly a century before us and finding little fragments of familiarity in their story. A shared curiosity. An appreciation for solitude. A desire for independence. The complicated relationship between ambition and contentment. It's almost as though someone has left a small trail of breadcrumbs through time. And we're fortunate enough to stumble upon it.
I think this is how we find our muses. Not always through a single extraordinary work of art, but through the accumulation of small discoveries about another person's life. We read their words, visit the places they inhabited, look at the things they made, and begin to understand how they saw the world. Somewhere along the way, their story starts informing our own. Sometimes a muse encourages us to follow an unfamiliar path. Other times, they simply help us recognize the one we're already on. And occasionally, they offer us a little perspective on how we might want to travel it differently.
What We Leave Behind
I haven't yet visited Steepletop, but I would like to. I'd love to walk through the gardens, see the landscape she loved, and imagine the ordinary afternoons that unfolded there.
Not necessarily to find inspiration for a particular piece of jewelry, but simply to feel a little closer to the person I've been reading about.
There's something beautiful about the fact that Edna's words, her home, and the life she built continue to invite curiosity long after her death. It makes me wonder about the traces we leave behind. The things we make with our hands. The spaces we create. The ideas we share. The people we encourage, sometimes without even realizing it.
As a designer, I often think about the longevity of objects. Jewelry has this extraordinary ability to move through generations, collecting stories and meaning along the way. Perhaps our creative lives do something similar. We are all, in some way, building upon the lives of those who came before us. Finding inspiration in their work, recognizing ourselves in their struggles, and carrying small pieces of their stories forward into something new. And perhaps one day, someone will discover something we've left behind and feel that same unexpected connection.
For now, I'm grateful to have found Edna. Her candle burned brightly, and more than a century after she first put those words to paper, its light has managed to find its way to me. I think that's a rather lovely thing.
Lauren