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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The books here are pretty good or whatever, but what I like is that this bookshelf is functional. Who wants to make me one?

D.A. Powell lives/teaches in San Francisco and is the author of three previous books of poetry, Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, which was named a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His latest book is Chronic, out from Graywolf Press. You can read the title poem of the book at PoetryDaily, a review at the LA Times, and a longer essay at The Critical Flame.

In addition to the basic bio, I want simply to say that D.A. Powell is the sort of person you want on your side: he’s generous, kind, approachable. And very funny. If you have a chance to speak to him in person, do so.

This past weekend, he took a few minutes to send in some pictures/paragraphs of his writing room. I hope you enjoy, and, if you haven’t yet, please consider buying his new book.

His words/pics after the break.

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View of the house from the gardens.

Matthew Simmons already did a quick feature on Leo Tolstoy’s Word Space (the desk in the photo from Matthew’s post, I believe, is the desk from Tolstoy’s family estate in Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow), but I wanted to post about his Moscow home, in which Tolstoy and his family wintered from 1882 to 1901. According to what I’ve read on various travel sites, he purchased the home to placate his wife, who had grown tired of spending so much time out in the country.

In this house, he wrote The Death of Ivan Illych, among other of his later writings, took up bicycling, played chess, met Tchaikovsky, etc.

After the jump, I’ve posted a lot of photographs. They are not my photographs. I did not take photographs of the house when I was in the house. The photographs come from a personal blog I found through Google image searches. The travel blog belongs to someone named Bryan Persell. Thank you, thank you, Bryan, whoever you are, for posting these pics in 2007. I’m going to type about each photograph the things I remember from when we toured the house in June. The things I type up are what our guide told us, but if anyone knows more or has a correction, please share in the comments.

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Fictionaut has announced a new blog feature, Writing Spaces, “dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.” The first featured writer is Stephen Stark, whose writing space appears to be a tiny barn.

Those of you interested in writing spaces might want to check back every now and then to see what goes up. Should be a cool time over there.

(via Monkeybicycle)

Here’s a rumination on pancakes from Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist. The context is that a man is trying to convince his consciousness to fly out of a pancake house but is having trouble separating his mind and body, possibly because he just ate delicious, destructive pancakes…

We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes form feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake– Pancakes! Pancakes!– that we never learn to respect. We promise ourselves that we will know better, next time, than to order pancakes in any size or in any amount. Never again will we we tempted by buckwheat or buttermilk or blueberry flapjacks. However, we fail to learn; and the days go by, two or three weeks pass, then a month, and we forget about pancakes the domination over us. Eventually, we need them. We crawl back to pancakes again and again.

One of the writers’ houses/flats that I visited in Russia was that of Maxim Gorky, born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (b. 1868), who would later become a significant influence upon Soviet Russian literature and socialist realism. I had not read any of Gorky’s writing before visiting his house; however, I had become familiar with his name in the other books I had read before the trip. I recall reading, for example, that Gorky had intervened on Yevgeny Zamyatin’s behalf, convincing Stalin to allow Zamyatin to leave Russia after the publication of We, which saved his life. Ronald Wilks, the translator of my edition of Gorky’s book My Childhood, writes in the introduction: “As a close friend of Stalin, he had immense influence on the progress of literature and arts in Soviet Russia and there is no doubt that he was the driving force behind the creation of a modern Soviet literature.” Gorky’s house, then, to me, was an important landmark, and I’m thankful that my wife’s family tolerated my insisting we visit the place.

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Elizabeth Ellen is the author of Before You She Was A Pitbull (Future Tense Books 2006), and has work featured in two chapbook collectives: A Peculiar Feeling Of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press 2008) and Fox Force 5 (forthcoming from Paper Hero Press). She is a Deputy Editor at Hobart and edits Short Flight/Long Drive, Hobart’s books division. Stories/poems of hers can be found in print issues of Hobart, Sleepingfish, Keyhole, Opium, and online in Waccamaw, Dogzplot, ActionYes, Juked, and 3AM.

I wish I had met Elizabeth at AWP. I think I spoke to her once, but I never found the courage to introduce myself. I don’t really have a rational explanation for my being timid, and I realize how silly of me it was to worry about that sort of thing. I think, though, it had to do with my feeling awe, maybe, in her presence. Elizabeth Ellen’s was one of the first names I remember seeing everywhere when I began to discover that writers had made their way onto the internet.

So it makes me really happy to post Elizabeth Ellen’s word space/essay for you.

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Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (featherproof) and Museum of the Weird (forthcoming from FC2). She recently won the FC2 Fiction Prize. I’ve linked to a page on her website that lists many publications online that you may read over. Also, here’s an audio recording of Amelia’s reading from AM/PM in Tucson for a reading thing at Congress, I think.

Various information about her and her work can be read here:

AM/PM reviewed at Literary License

Interview w/ Ryan Manning

AM/PM reviewed by PH Madore

Amelia Gray’s favorite novellas

Below is her word space. Enjoy.

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Lily Hoang is the author of Parabola (Chiasmus Press) and Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press) and has an ebook at Lamination Colony titled The Woman Down the Hall. She is an associate editor at Starcherone Books.

Lily Hoang once visited Houston. She was impressed with Houston’s public transportation, which is basically a light rail train that travels up and down a few blocks, but costs lots of money to maintain. She gave a reading at UH-Downtown and then shared a cigarette with Gene Morgan at Poison Girl.

After the jump: Lily’s Word Space.

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I met James Scott at Sewanee last summer. He was my suitemate. He is from Boston, but I don’t hold that against him; one of the first things he told me was a story about how he had gotten into a bar fight a few weeks earlier. This frightened me. Our rooms shared a bathroom, so I was careful to lock my door that night.

James Scott is a former fiction editor of Redivider, leads workshops at Grub Street, and has stories published in American Short Fiction, One Story, Saint Ann’s Review, online at Lost Magazine, Flatmancrooked, and other places too.

The following is his Word Space with text and photos.

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