Good Morning, Nancy:
Six degrees here this morning, and I’m deep into winter hibernation with book and dog and coffee and, here at my desk, am rereading your last letter. I love this part, especially: “I remember the slant of light across my desk in the morning. The coffee I drank in the big red mug. Opening the computer and turning it on, and opening the file for Life Without Water, my first novel. The desk, the chair, the morning, the coffee, and even the computer took on a sort of sacred quality. Every morning I was there and these things met me and triggered my brain into writing. The scent of coffee took me there.”
You said in a recent post on Facebook that you’re not a Proust lover, but I couldn’t help thinking of that Proustian passage about the taste of a madeleine as I read those lines of yours about the scent of coffee. Because of a taste, Proust recalls “things…broken and scattered…fragile…enduring…like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest…the vast structure of recollection.” That is a much pared down version of a passage I think about a lot. How a taste or a touch or a sound invoke years, especially ones I think I’ve lost. Desk after memory desk came to me after reading about your writing desk in that cabin with its puppy-under-the-floor and its stoned boys in the woods as you wrote your first novel.
My own first novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, took me about seven years and way more desks than that.
When I first began that novel, I was in a writing program and living apart from my longtime lover. I rented two rooms of the upper floor of a house belonging to a carpenter named Jim in the Old Southwest area of Roanoke, Virginia. Jim had a little dog named Billy, and both of them were wooly and fidgety and likely to show up at inopportune moments. I fell in love with another writer in the program that year in Roanoke and was torn between lives. North Carolina lover. Roanoke and a passionate affair of my heart. I had no desk in my rented rooms, but wrote at a tiny Formica table in a tiny kitchen, where Jim kept a closet full of this or that which he’d come to fetch on the spur of the moment. Jim wasn’t a bad guy really, just fidgety and clueless and he’d show up while I was typing away on the Remington electric I had then. By spring, I had my first computer, and I had chosen to go back to North Carolina.
Back in North Carolina I took a job at the greenhouse where my longtime lover worked and we lived together again. I finally had a desk. It was a huge clunker of a desk from the office of a hardware store once owned by his father. The desk was wedged in the corner bedroom of our very small cabin in the woods and the longtime lover used one of the deep drawers for his tools. Early mornings before work at the greenhouse, I’d be in there typing away and he’d be digging around for a hammer or a Phillip’s screwdriver, until finally he got it, that the desk was sacred space. I didn’t get it, though. I was confused about just about everything. My novel, which had begun as a ten page short story, meandered about. It was set in 1970 Eastern Kentucky, but I wrote the histories of everyone in there, aunts and exotic birds, bank president grandfathers and their mothers. That spring, I had a hundred pages I threw out. Somewhere around that time, old lover and new lover converged on the porch of the tiny cabin. I threw a can of wasp spray at new lover.
Old lover, come the next year, left me. By the time that happened, we were in a larger cabin in another neck of the woods, and I had a new desk. This one was many-drawered. I had a file cabinet. I had a basket of scotch tape, a stapler, a printer, even. And I had the biggest hole in the center of my chest I’d ever had. I was deeply and entirely devastated by my relationship’s end, whether I had truly wanted it or not. Days, I worked in a toy store and as an adjunct at the local college. I remember the room with the handy-dandy desk, trying to stay warm over the winter with a kerosene heater going full blast. Once I had my head down on the desk, having fallen asleep at the wheel, so to speak. I woke with a rain of soot from the heater falling down on my shoulders. It covered everything, carpet, clothes in the open-doored closet, my own shoulders, my aimless novel pages scattered across the floor.
I finished Strange Birds at a variety of other desks. I picked my life up and moved away from my heartache. I gave away much of what I owned and wrote at a new desk, a converted antique table in two more rented rooms above a bookstore. Days I was enrolled in a doctoral program in creative writing and American lit at the University of Georgia. Second year in the program, I moved yet again, to a house with a crazy roommate, wild parties, a big yard full of pecan trees, and a built in desk in an attic room. Three years later, I wrote at still another desk, another dining room table, at my first full time teaching job in Lynchburg, Virginia. I wrote upstairs and down, at a desk and again at a dining table at a job after that when I lived in Georgia for nine years.
Desk after desk after desk.
If I look for a common denominator in all those writing spaces, like you, “desk, the chair, the morning, the coffee, and even the computer [have taken] on a sort of sacred quality.” All those desks and times and houses have kept me sane and safe in so many ways. Safe against my own restlessness, my own lost heart, my own seeking—here and here and there—for the right spot on earth to write, to be still and summon the words.
Having come, at last, to a desk of my own (an old, refinished library desk, these days) in a room full of my own things—books, pens, photos of ancestors and sacred objects on the windowsill—I am now at work on another book. Am on page 367, to be exact, of the seventh revision of a novel. We shall see if there is an eighth revision as I undertake, soon, reading all the pages aloud to “hear” them in this manifestation. At this desk, having come at last to a still place in my life, to a home I call “mine,” my life is no longer cluttered in quite the same way it has always been. I am no longer moving from state to state, moving in search of jobs, escaping love gone bad, searching for love gone right. I am at rest.
Or at least I’m rediscovering new clutter. At the library desk, clutter has a whole new definition. Emails. Facebooking. Or the practices I haven’t yet adopted. Tweeting. Linkedin. Goodreads. The temptation to social media in general is enormous. And there I am, old fart that I am becoming, longing for the good old days. Me alone in the silence of the woods, in that cabin, lovelorn, summoning words even while a rain of soot fell down hard.
Love you much,
Karen
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