Last week, Rookie started featuringshrines for their month-long theme of Obsession. (If you're not familiar withRookie, go poke around. It's fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson's brain child, andfairy godmothered by Jane Pratt, the genius behind the sadly gone Sassy. Very cool.) There are shrines to everythingfrom Florence Welch to The VirginSuicides to Barbie, all carefully and lovingly constructed by readers.
I've never made a shrine. Not a tangible, touchable oneanyway. But looking at the photos readers submitted, I realized I've had a fewshrines in my head for a long time.
Sylvia Plath is in there, and if I'd made a shrine to her,it would be lined with scrawled, handwritten drafts of poems, pointed sketchesof faces, pieces of honeycomb, and a red balloon just to start. She may havebecome a clichéd icon of teenage girl angst, but she's a lot more, and for me,worth every thought I ever spared her. I reread the collection Letters Home so many times, I could probably still quote from it.  
Even though the letters she wrote home were apparentlyruthlessly edited by her mother, to shine up some of Sylvia's rougher moments, shewas still a girl a lot like me – one who read and felt and thought and wanted,more than anything, to write. And she fought for it, to hone her own voice andpoint of view, to say all the things she wanted or needed to say, and during atime when men were still considered the masters of poetry and academia. In theend, her own mental health conquered her instead of the other way around, buther suicide doesn't diminish the work she did while she lived, and that'ssomething I still hold onto really tightly.
So no, there's no actual shrine, but whenever I see a beekeeperlike her father, or read about a couple buying a country house in England, or agirl getting into Smith, or a young poet winning a prize, I think of her. Andfor a second, I remember that she lived, and that she's important to a lot ofwomen, writers or not, even now.  
Do you have a shrine, real or mental?