I bought the $25 desk at a museum sale in California. The rolltop doesn’t function, one of the legs is coming off, and I have to pry the drawers open, but I like how the desk part slides a little forward. It makes me feel as if I always have secret extra space, the way our apartment includes a long frosted glass window with a light behind to suggest that there’s another room. The French doors open to the living room/dining room/everywhere else room. A Murphy bed fronted with bookshelves folds down beside the desk for optimum concentration. My office is essentially the bedroom. I don’t know what to say about that.

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Six months ago, I was in Cambodia, where I saw houses that jarred me out of complacency, thinking over Woolf’s call “that it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry” (105). You can read about it here.

Three days ago, my laptop bid me adieu in a very aburpt fashion, unexpected, though even if it had been expected, that wouldn’t have changed a thing, hopefully, it’ll be ok, it’s being “diagnosed” now, but over the last few days, I’ve reframed Woolf’s concept of “room” to fit today’s modern sensibilities.

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We bought this place in east London last year. The study isn’t finished yet, so I do most of my writing on the dining room table. It mostly always looks like this – unless our two cats have been on the table and knocked the books on to the floor, which is something they do from time to time. I know they enjoy doing this when I am out of the room. It doesn’t bother me that much, because cats will be cats. I didn’t write The Canal in this room; we moved here after I had finished it. I wrote The Canal in various cafés and pubs in Hackney, east London and I’m afraid I didn’t take photos of them.

I write longhand and then edit as I type it up on to my laptop. My laptop is quite old now and sometimes gets very tired, but it still does the job, so I can’t really complain. READ MORE >

[Andrew Ervin is still the author of Extraordinary Renditions, coming this fall from Coffee House Press and which Publisher's Weekly recently named their "Pick of the Week."]

Since February, when this original Word Spaces feature ran, I have decided to move back to Philadelphia. I thought it might be interesting to look at what happens when one’s writing area is dismantled, when it stops being what it is. It’s kind of cool and kind of terrifying at the same time.

Here are the crop circles that the buckling stacks of milk-crate bookshelves left in the rug.

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(thanks to Michael Schaub, Bookslut editor and occasional HTMLG contributor)

There were 127 respondents to my survey about publishing, but the free account at Survey Monkey limits results to 100 people. All the other responses are sitting behind some Internet wall, trying to get me to spend $19.95.

So, below, are the responses I got for free. A very hearty thank you to everyone who participated. I won’t argue that this survey was perfectly-composed, but it was at least anecdotally helpful for me, and thought provoking. I assume I’ll be honing these questions over time and coming back with more questions.

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Lee Rouke’s debut novel, The Canal has just been released in the the States and will be hitting the UK in less than a month. I’ve already said good things about it & so have Shane Jones & John Wray . I conducted this little interview with Lee over email.

First, an excerpt, then another after the interview:

She addressed him only.

“Do you remember me?”

There was a long pause.

He looked at the woman next to him, then back at her, then back at the woman. He looked nervous, rubbing his thumb into the palm of his hand. The woman’s eyes began to narrow and her whole face started to contort. He looked back up at her.

“Er . . . I’m . . . afraid . . . I’m afraid I don’t, sorry. Er . . . Have we . . . Should I?”

“You tell me.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve never seen you before in my life. I fear you may have mistaken me for another person, someone else in your life . . . I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sorry? That’s all you can say? Sorry? Don’t you remember me at all?”

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Yes, I know I linked this clip a couple weeks ago. But seriously, I can’t watch this video enough. Any time I’m feeling low, I think to myself: At least I can put a burger in my mouth. Ok, so I don’t eat meat. I’ll rephrase: At least I can put a veggie burger in my mouth.

Much like David Hasselhoff, I am a mess. Not in the “I’m so drunk I can’t put food into my mouth” kind of way, but literally: I am a mess. I am messy. My desk has enough space for my laptop to sit flat, but otherwise, I’ve got stacks of papers–manuscripts, my own and others’, half-opened bills, half-filled out contracts, old insurance cards, random sheets of paper, who knows what’s important and what isn’t –books I’m half done reading, at least eight notebooks of various shades and sizes, and pens, blue Bics, like a dozen of them, rubber bands and barrettes.

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Here’s me in the tub, circa 1999, reading Infinite Jest to Benji. Thanks to our third roommate, Craig, for sending me the photo.

Except for submissions, I read almost exclusively in the bathtub. I’ll even take a bath in the middle of the day so I can get some reading done. I think it just works best for me ergonomically. What about you?

I used to be in a writing group, there were three of us (I’ll name one F and the other K because they may or may not want me writing about them publicly), all women, professors in our mid-twenties to early thirties, with at least one book published, and drastically different writing styles, and it was the radical range in style that made our group function: there was no secret animosity, no competition, we read and respected each other’s writing, worked towards doing what we wanted to be doing. This group functioned how a writing group ought to function, at least to me. Then, of course, as things go with the academy, we scattered. K got a TT job. F and I stayed put in South Bend. But the group dynamic wasn’t the same, since we lost 1/3 of our membership, and eventually, I left too: up north, with my partner, who’s here for grad school, and I’ll start grad school in the fall too, in Geography, a move away from writing entirely.

But back to my story, I tend to wander: We used writing group time to “workshop,” absolutely, but between stories, we’d talk about process. Both K and F write primarily by computer, though they always have a notebook handy, in case they get ideas. Maybe, let’s call it, a hybrid type of writing, relying mostly on laptop. I write by hand, usually a whole draft or most of a draft, but I transfer to computer every day or three. We talked about that for a while, the difference between these two modes of composition, and—I’m getting to my point, slowly, but I assure you, I’m getting there—then, we talked about paper.

We all write in Moleskines, typical, cliché, we can admit that. Here’s the difference though: F writes on blank paper, K on lined, and I write on graph paper.

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In three hours I will own a house. There will be a room to write in. A word space of my own. There will be books in this room and a big blue French farmhouse table. There will be a comfortable chair and sunlight. The sounds of birds outside the window. A big hawk’s nest in the tree above. There will be college students next door, and sometimes I will think about how new their lives are as I write, how unformed creatures begin to take form and find shape. There will be coffee. I will make lamps out of the glass jars I’ve been collecting for a year. I will live alone with my pets in this house. At night, it will be quiet, and sometimes I will cherish the silence.

Sometimes I’ll wonder what I’m doing there in my new writing room, all the luxury of selfhood skating away.

Sometimes I’ll be afraid.

What scares you about writing?

In 1929, Virginia Woolf rallied that women need a room of their own, not just to be a writer but to be free. Free here is used loosely. Freedom has more to do with creativity and empowerment, which may ultimately be what “freedom” means. I just want to differentiate between “freedom” in the constitutive or religious or new age definitions and what I mean.

I first read Woolf when I was eighteen or nineteen. In the most cliché ways, she totally rocked my world. Back then, I was some suffering, struggling poet—and a very bad poet too! Since then, I make it a point to teach her to my first years, hoping she’d inspire them to think critically, in the same ways she’s inspired me. And she did inspire me: I believed her. I believed I needed a room of my own to write, to be a good writer.

But driving through the Cambodian countryside—countryside here being a very poor translation. Here’s the problem with language, yeah? I say countryside to many Westerners, and they (WE) think of pastoral cowfields or quaint little bed & breakfasts—I’m reminded of Woolf and her call for a room. See: the houses in Cambodia sit on stilts (which is utterly irrelevant to my point, more of a cool observation) and they don’t have any doors, or rather, if they do have doors, they’re never closed. Driving by, anyone can see straight through the houses, which are more like shacks. They’re small, no bigger than my two bedroom apartment, and there aren’t even walls to differentiate personal, individualized space.

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[Andrew Ervin is the author of Extraordinary Renditions, coming this fall from Coffee House Press. He took some time to show us around his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he edits the Southern Review.]

As usual, I have a number of different projects going on and for each I write using different tools.

For short stories, book reviews, and whatever this thing for HTML Giant turns out to be, I use the program OmmWriter, which my friend Nikki recommended. I like it a great deal & encourage everyone with a Mac to download it. For the edits to Extraordinary Renditions, which will be published on Sept. 1, I’m using Word for Mac, which I detest.

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Writing Room

Yesterday I spent a few hours in the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum and got to see the room where he wrote more than half of his work, though he only lived there for about ten years on and off . His routine was to wake up at six am and work until he had 700 words or it was time for lunch. Then he went out to fish until happy hour and then he drank until he was tired. That was how he wrote most of his books. His writing room was only accessible via a catwalk from the main house, and no one ever went in there except for him. (It is now my life’s goal to have a private writing room only accessible by catwalk or maybe a ladder and fireman’s pole or maybe a zipline.)

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On the last morning of my summer stay in St. Petersburg, I briefly left my wife and her family to walk to 47 Bol’shaya Morskaya, the childhood home of Vladimir Nabokov. The building, originally the mansion of the Nabokov family, houses on its first floor a museum, which I entered and was allowed to tour on my own for 100 roubles

To celebrate the publication of The Original of Laura, I’d like to post an illustrated account of my visit to the Nabokov Museum. I stupidly did not pay the extra 100 roubles to take photographs, so what follows are pictures I have lifted from around the web, sorry. I’ve also tried to explain, as best I can, what I learned of Nabokov’s life in this house – I consulted the museum website and Wikipedia when my memory failed me. I hope you enjoy, and please, if you have corrections/additions/Nabokov stories, share in the comments.

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Today Heather’s The Difficult Farm is officially arrived and live from Octopus. If you’ve preordered, I believe they are forthcoming. If you haven’t, you should now.

On the event of this event, Heather has kindly shared some talkings about where she makes her words:

Where I write I have only been writing for three months if we are talking about the room.  If we are talking about the chair then it has been just over four years.  If we are talking about my head we should talk about what we talk about when we talk about my head.  You go first.

Once I drew my chair when it was new (to me) and I had fallen in love with a man who had gone away for a while.  I sent him the drawing and because I married him we still have it.  The problem is that he looked through many files and areas and he can’t find it.  He did find this postcard:

Never mind.  It works like this:

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Hi everyone. Here’s Nick Antosca’s apartment and a few paragraphs describing where he writes. He wrote Midnight Picnic in this apartment. Thank you, Nick Antosca, for taking the time to do this post.

I write in my bedroom.  I have a large bedroom for New York, so I can fit a small couch in it.  (My bedroom used to be half the living room, but we chopped it up when we moved in.  Three people live in what was originally a one bedroom apartment.)  My bed is in one corner and diagonally across from it is the black leather couch I sit on when I write (on my laptop).  This is really not ergonomic, but when I used to write at a desk, with ergonomic pads in an ergonomic chair, my wrists and back hurt a lot.  They don’t hurt now; I don’t know what that’s about, but that’s the way it is.

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Stephen Elliott’s post here makes me realize that I should reevaluate some of my assumptions about writers’ work spaces. Because I often write in one room at one desk at a certain time, it’s very easy for me to assume the same about others. This assumption is obviously flawed, but I cannot help myself. Having seen/read this bit about where Elliott gets his work done, I’m reminded that others’ habits can be quite different than mine.

Here’s Stephen Elliott’s essay on his word space.

I don’t always have a “writing space.” I mean, I have an office in the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, that I share with Isaac Fitzgerald. A lot of times there’s empty offices so Isaac sits in Jason’s office, and a lot of times I’m not here, especially recently when I was working on a television show and when I’m traveling, which is more often than I really like.

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