The ultimate in writing spaces seems to be the writing shed, a spare, distraction-free room set in some verdant landscape, where, in fertile solitude, the writer may create worlds out of nothing. Roald Dahl had one, so did Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf. Perhaps one day, we’ll each be writing in our own. Until then, as our Millions staffers share in their illustrated entries below, we’re making do (often happily!) with offices, studio apartments, coffee shops, and guest bedrooms. Share a photo of your own writing space using the hashtag #writespace on Twitter and we’ll repost some favorites on our Tumblr.
Michael Bourne: That’s right, I write in bed. I used to have a desk, one of those hideous pasteboard rolling-keyboard-drawer deals, but this being Brooklyn, when we adopted our son five years ago, my “home office” became his bedroom and I was relegated to the guest bed. But now I wouldn’t trade it for the world. The big stack of paper in the foreground is my recently finished novel, which I’m now reading one last time before sending out. The yellow legal pads are where I take notes for my reported pieces (yup, I do most of my phone interviews in bed, too). There’s also some old New Yorkers and a Toy Story comic book that I read to Luke before he goes to bed. (Also, I now see peeking out from the Thomas the Tank Engine blanket, a big black motorized toy car, whose provenance I cannot fully account for.) What the photo doesn’t show is the built-in bookshelves that cover the far wall and the prints of Impressionist paintings on the other walls. It also doesn’t show the cats – one ginger tom and a silver-and-black girl cat – who snuggle around me as I write. I thought about cleaning it up, but that would not only present me as a neat freak, which I am not, but more importantly it would convey the wrong impression. This isn’t a work space so much as a work nest. Like a lot of writers, I write a ton of bad stuff. Really bad stuff. Embarrassing bad. But here, behind closed doors, in my messy bed in my son’s bedroom, with the big wall of my favorite books smiling down at me and the cats curled up in purring puddles at my side, I can be my fraudulent self and no one will ever have to know.
Sonya Chung: I live in a studio apartment with one other human and two dogs. It’s pretty crowded. I work at a long table that is divided from the sleeping/TV area by bookshelves. I straightened up a little for this photo, but generally, I work, and think, in piles. Writing pile; teaching pile; life administration pile. On the far right end of the table is the miscellaneous crap/mail pile (and, of course, dog biscuits). I included my knitting-in-progress in the photo (a scarf) because it’s a strategy I’m trying out, i.e. I’m teaching myself to knit and hoping (as many people have told me) that it helps to de-stress and focus scattered thoughts. The kneeling chair recently replaced an exerball-as-deskchair (which gradually deflated) — back pain, anyone? The lamp is a Kmart special that was originally all-white, but we spray painted the shade hot pink, couldn’t tell ya why…
Garth Hallberg: This probably isn’t the messiest workspace you’ll see, though the handprints I’ve left in the laptop grime are pretty gross. Still, when I behold The Desk objectively like this, any pleasure I might take in the externalization of my own mind loses out to my chagrin at all the work remaining to be done. Atop the compact O.E.D. are six books I’m currently supposed to be writing about – one of them a three-novel omnibus, another a year past deadline. To the left of that, bits of my wife’s dissertation have drifted down on top of the desk references (Shakespeare, Hobsbawm, Trucker’s Atlas, Complete New Yorker). Multiple drafts from my own work in progress lie atop books unread (Juan Jose Saer) and un-reread (Joseph Mitchell), because there’s no open space on the desktop. To the front right looms…well, the less said about that, the better.
The picture of my son is for inspiration. The knife is to be used against hostile invaders. The envelope of inspirational quotations has yet to be unpacked, a year-plus after we moved. The coffee right now is what is keeping me going. If you look closely in the glass of Amos’ Ab/Ex masterpiece, on the wall, you can see me shadowed against the awful pink bathroom tile, camera to eye, heavily caffeinated, but, for a moment at least, no longer quite so hard at work.
Kevin Hartnett: Whenever I start focusing on the less desirable features of where I work I remind myself of this: It’s an upgrade.
I started as a freelancer three years ago. At the time, my wife I were living in Philadelphia in a one-bedroom apartment. We got on all right in our small space. Then we had a kid. And another kid. By the end of our time in Philadelphia I had to move two piles diapers and a changing pad just to find a place to put my laptop down.
Now we live in Ann Arbor. I work on the second floor of our house, at an antique secretary, in a room with sliding glass doors that lead out to a deck in our backyard. It’s not strictly speaking “my office,” but from 9am-2pm everyday, when my wife is at work and our kids are with their nanny, I have the space all to myself.
My idée fixe of office spaces is a clapboard shed that overlooks Buzzard’s Bay on the front lawn of a friend’s house on Cape Cod. My present situation is a far cry from that. The sliding glass doors face west, which means I work in dimness. And the view out my window is just a boring suburbanish backyard. Occasionally a scrum of kids will burst into view, toting sleds or soccer balls. More often it’s just me and the squirrels who are so obviously fat and healthy it’s off-putting.
But overall I try not to fetishize where I work. All I really need is quiet and enough light to see by. When I find myself longing for a New England sea breeze I try to remind myself of this: The most consequential feature of any potential office is that I’ll be the one sitting in it.
Lydia Kiesling: Before a friend moved and bequeathed us the coffee table, the workspace was just the couch, where I sat with computer perched on lap and fretted about irradiating my womb and/or femurs. Now that we have the coffee table, my womb and femurs are presumably okay, but my back suffers. For now, this is where I do everything that I routinely do–homework, writing, cat-hugging, facebook-creeping, school reading (I prefer to read novels before bed, in bed). Most important: My betrothed, knowing this to be the lint-filled navel of my universe, pried the leftovers from my hands and proposed marriage in this very spot.
Edan Lepucki: Last summer I wrote about my workspace for the deliciously voyeuristic Tumblr site, Write Place, Write Time. The photos show my desk at home, which is my preferred place to write. Since having a baby, though, my apartment and the desk within it are far less calm and tidy, and I’ve had to go elsewhere to work. Most days I write fiction at my neighbors’ kitchen table while the baby plays and eats furniture next door. (Don’t worry, someone is watching him.) Since it feels weird to post a photo of my neighbors’ place, I present you instead with a picture of their dog, Saul. He is my muse. He understands only Spanish. His mohawk is growing out. Que lindo, no?
I write most of my essays for The Millions at Paper or Plastik Cafe, the coffee shop down the block from me. The place boasts excellent coffee, friendly baristas, beautiful high ceilings, and internet access, which I need for all these damn links. Here is a shot of my most recent camp-out. Mine is the only Toshiba on the block, but it’s proud not to be a fancy-pants Mac. Who cares if the bottom is duct-taped together?
Emily St. John Mandel: I’ll be the first to admit that my workspace is looking a little strange these days. It used to be much less eccentric, but then I decided that I wanted a standing desk, and, since all the standing desks I saw online were either hideously generic or too expensive, I made some improvisations involving a couple boxes, an unused Ikea shelf, and a two-volume dictionary. It isn’t beautiful, but I like it, and I find that I much prefer to work standing up. Other details: that’s Ralph in the desk chair, the papers taped to the wall are notes for current and future projects, and the window looks out on rooftops.
Nick Moran: My desk is full of nomads, and much of its population changes regularly. To wit: the five different histories of Russia. Though I minored in the stuff as an undergraduate, and I’ve always been drawn to the place, those are only visiting until I finish something I’m writing. (I don’t always use Red Star Over Russia as a mouse pad, either.) The rest: the asthma inhaler, the little wooden box from an Amman bazaar (labeled, adorably “Cofee”), and the Real Housewives-noise-canceling headphones are permanent residents. So, too, is the stack of aborted articles beneath the VQR. And the computer, of course. There’s also a Qur’an left over from a recent trip I took to visit my mother in Jordan. An exercise in immersion, that was, and a longtime desk resident it’s become. Finally, there’s the art on the wall above, a relic from my AP art class in high school. My theme was “breakfast.” That one you see is a diptych of a pig turning into a slice of bacon.
Bill Morris: I like a short commute. So I made an office out of the second bedroom in my apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. Normally the place is not such a pigsty – honest! – but at the moment I’m working on a long magazine article about the future of my hometown, Detroit, and my notes, tape transcripts and drafts have taken on a life of their own. In case you’re curious, that Royal manual typewriter is not a prop. I still write on the gorgeous beast, then use the Mac for editing and sending my stuff.
Looking at this picture reminds me of the beautiful simplicity of the writing life: all you need is a table, a chair, a writing tool, a stack of blank paper (optional), and an idea. How much less could anyone ask for?
Mark O’Connell: My desk is normally a lot more cluttered than this, but I didn’t want to let the side down, so I did a little spring cleaning before taking the photo. I work in Trinity College Dublin, where I’m doing a postdoctoral research fellowship; I’m in an open plan office in a snazzy new building dedicated to interdisciplinary research in the humanities. On the right, my desk overlooks an atrium where book launches and wine receptions for academic conferences are often held. As a result, I’ve become a connoisseur of awkward standing. I also get to see a lot of surreptitious lunging (for plates of sandwiches) and timid but determined sidling (toward established clusters of interlocutors). That can be fun to watch, and is often a reason in itself to work late.
On to the desk proper: the obvious centerpiece here is the nifty set-up with the elevated laptop, wireless keyboard and trackpad: this discourages slouching and does wonders for the lower lumbar region. Those books lined up at the back are mostly by or about Walter Benjamin, who might have something to do with something I might end up writing (that’s about an average number of mights for me). A lot of them I haven’t so much as opened, but I feel significantly smarter just having them there in front of me. In that sense they’re like a sort of bibliographic mascot or talisman. On the right of the laptop is a hybrid pencil sharpener/rubber I picked up earlier in the week. I probably paid more for it than I should have (€3), but you’ve got to spend money to make money in this business. I don’t mean for this to turn into a bragging session, but I do also own an electric pencil sharpener. It’s a very high-end machine. I keep it at home, though, because in an academic work environment, a thing like that can be viewed as a vulgar display of status.
Janet Potter: Four minutes after this photo was taken, I started packing everything pictured into boxes. I’m moving this month, so my work area will soon be reconstructed in another Chicago apartment with a bigger kitchen and walk-in closets. I can say with some confidence, however, that it will look a great deal like this, because the iterations of my work area in each of my post-college apartments have been built around the following, horcrux-esque elements:
#1 – The Big Blue Desk. How great is that desk? It’s royal blue! It’s a solid wood secretary desk (with the flip-up thing for a typewriter) that I bought on craigslist for $30 in 2005.
#2 – The Posters. The signed cover prints of On Beauty and Ghostwritten were going away presents when I left my old job at Brookline Booksmith, and the signed print of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was a gift from a friend at Random House.
#3 – The Chair. That stool with the ugly green cushion was the bench to my grandmother’s vanity.
#4 – The Formative Books. The bookshelf that sits to my back holds only the best of my childhood, teenage, and college reading. The Hedgehog and the Fox, Cloud Atlas, The Harry Potter series, Proust, Natasha’s Dance, Banvard’s Folly. Only the best.
#5 – The Presidential Biographies. Each time I finish another biography in my project, I add it to the ranks lined up on top of the bookcase, supported by Abraham Lincoln bookends that used to be in Conan O’Brien’s New York office (long story).
Show us photos of your writing spaces using the hashtag #writespace on Twitter!
Emily: With presses like Dover, Everyman, the Library of America, Broadview, NYRB, and the Persephone Press (not to mention Oxford and Penguin classics series) doing excellent rediscovery and reprinting work of all kinds, I don’t often find myself longing for a new edition. The one great—nay, I would go so far as to say glaring—exception is the work of Ogden Nash, perhaps best know for epigrams like “Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker” and “The Cow”: “The cow is of the bovine ilk;/One end is moo, the other, milk.” Yes, there is a “best of” anthology arranged by Nash’s daughters and printed by Ivan R. Dee, and, yes, he’s in Library of America’s American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse, but what I long for is a chronological, scholarly “complete works” volume: I want America’s great comic poet to be taken seriously.
Garth: This year, a panel at the PEN World Voices festival prompted me to explore the work of an author who was barely on my radar: Andrey Platonov. I devoured The Foundation Pit in one gulp, on a plane, intoxicated by the discovery of a sensibility as potent, distinctive, and hard to describe as Kafka’s. I’ve since moved on to the stories in Soul, in an impressive translation by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson. A certain novelist friend of mine, who’s also a reputable critic, assured me that Platonov’s other major novel Chevengur, is even better than The Foundation Pit, and that a Chandler translation already exists…in the U.K. Apparently, the unreconstructed character of Platonov’s socialism makes Chevengur a tough sell for U.S. audiences. His response to Stalinism was not to abandon utopia, but to turn it into an organizing principle for his art. Still, this is one of the major stylists of his age. We deserve to have his work in print domestically, no matter how undomesticated it may be.
Max: I was introduced to Vasily Aksyonov via his epic Generations of Winter. Here is the twentieth-century Russian analog of the multi-generational epic, tracking the Gradov family through the tragic and tumultuous decades spanning 1925 to 1945. It is a historical period deserving of the weightiness of the once exiled Aksyonov’s novel, and yet the book is not widely known or read. But at least it is still in print. The rest of Aksyonov’s books are unavailable in the U.S.
I would love for them to publish some Marcel Ayme–his work is all but unavailable in English, and I’ve wanted to read some since falling in love with the musical version of his short story Le Passe-Muraille.
“Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead” by Barbara Comyns is unbelievably great. NYRB has already done “The Vet’s Daughter” so “WWCaWWD” would be a natural addition. A strange and beautiful book that reminds me of equal parts Nabokov, Woolf and Powys.
Seth, Aymé’s Beautiful Image is available in a handsome edition from UK-based Pushkin Press, translated by Sophie Lewis.
The Shorter Pepys. For the love of God.
The Tattooed Heart by Theodora Keogh. A lovely book by a terribly underrated writer.
I would like to second the vote for Barbara Comyns and add Uwe Johnson’s Speculations about Jakob and also his unbelievably gorgeous mega-novel Anniversaries, which was published in English in two greatly abridged volumes (only one of which is currently in print).
There is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset. A great novel to return to in the age of Obama.
Dance of the Dwarfs – Geoffrey Household
Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche – Ben Macintyre
The Bitterest Age – Raymond Kennedy
The Birds Have Also Gone by Yasar Kemal. A very moving novel.
Susan – It’s great to see a comment from someone herself responsible for getting some great stuff into print. (Run out and read Robert Walser, everybody.) I second your appeal for the Uwe Johnson. I read about it at The Complete Review, and am kind of dying to read it. Also, what about Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons? A Nazi, I know, but NYRB’s already done Ernst Junger, so why not? (Or is it already in print…with some of these things, it’s so hard to tell.)
P.S.: Speaking of twentieth-century multiple generation Russian epics…Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows is due out from NYRB Classics in December…and is considerably shorter than the great Life & Fate, for those on the go.
Yaakov Shabtai–both Past Continuous and Past Perfect.
I’d vote for von Doderer’s The Waterfalls of Slunj. (I haven’t tackled the 2-volume Demons yet…). And I just make a lengthier case for Fernanda Eberstadt: http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/11/omni-daily-crush-when-the-sons-of-heaven-meet-the-daughters-of-the-earth.html.
I love Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle so much, I (and possibly every female I introduced the book to) would kill to read her other novels – The Town In Bloom, It Ends With Revelations, The Girl from the Candle-lit bath.
Also, My Name Is Rose by Theodora Keogh.
The Colour of Blood by Brian Moore. So many of Moore’s titles deserve to be brought back into print, but this one is my favorite. It works as a thriller; it works as an exploration of faith under duress; it works as a character study. Really, any way one looks at it, it works.
Neither the Sea Nor the Sand by Gordon Honeycombe. A haunting gothic romance. And zombies are all the rage these days. Cash in, NYRB Classics. Cash in!
Either The Burning Court or The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr. I believe there are a handful of Carr titles still in print, but I’m pretty sure neither of these are.
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, the great Brazilian novel by João Guimarães Rosa, is long out of print. This book is a watershed of language and longing. It deserves to be rescued from the cult to brave the flow of the mainstream.
A new translation, by Gregory Rabassa, was supposed to be in the works(?). But a republication of the old translation will be welcome rain.
They’re bringing out Bengtsson’s _The Long Ships_, which would have been one of my picks. In the same vein, I would suggest Holt’s _Goat Song_ / _The Walled Orchard_ as an omnibus volume, just as it was last published in the UK.
Elkin.
I think a lot of Elkin is available through Dalkey (home, currently, of the $65 for any 10 books sale). I did see Pieces of Soap looks to be out of print.
Dear Shryh,
I’m also an admirer of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. When you mentioned her other work, I hoped perhaps the Persephone Press, a London boutique publisher that puts out gorgeous editions of lesser known books by and about women (with a particular focus on C20th British women’s experiences) might have reprinted some of S’s other titles titles. I checked and sadly, no luck there, but Persephone does have quite a bit in the DS ilk–if not the thing itself,
Emily
The Very Model of a Man by Howard Jacobson. He’s widely acknowledged as a great novelist (in the UK, if not the US), and this is his most ambitious – and I think best – novel. But it went very quickly out of print. Where is the justice?
I seconded “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.” This book GENUINELY deserves a place in being published, specifically by NYBR, a place I know will do it justice. NYBR is renowned for publishing foreign, “lost” classics, and this is the one that everyone has missed. If they do this one, they will be doing all of the American speaking world a favor.
One that I have been searching for and apparently has fallen out of print is The Marx Family Saga by Juan Goytisolo. Such a talented writer this is one that I will continue waiting for.
One of my favorite out of print books is a masterful work of non-fiction. Love Of Beginnings by french psychoanalyst J. B. Pontalis talks passionately about words in this gem of an autobiography. The following review sums it up.
http://www.fabooks.com/book.php?id=200
Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows is due out from NYRB Classics in December…and is considerably shorter than the great Life & Fate, for those on the go.
I just read it; you can read my brief review at the Library Thing page for the book. Even briefer summary: it’s powerful and well worth reading, but not really a novel.
My own nominations: Jim Quinn’s American Tongue and Cheek (a superb work of populist linguistics), the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names, and The Penguin Book of [language name] Verse (I have Greek, Russian, German, Latin, Italian, and French; they’re well-chosen bilingual editions that no adventuresome poetry-lover should be without).
How about The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis, by Humberto Constantini? I heard Deborah Eisenberg read from this at a PEN event, and was bowled over.
Pretty sure ‘I Capture the Castle’ is still available as a Vintage classic (in the UK), so surely you can get it in the US?
My vote for the novel that most deserves to come back into print is ‘Children of the Arbat’ by Anatoly Rybakov. It is outrageous that it is not currently available, though I believe Random House still holds UK rights.