Rain again, not hard, just enough to make it seem okay to stay at my desk. The plants in the flower pots seem weary and having a hard time holding up even the small flowers. Salmon berries, those that haven’t been picked or eaten by the crows, are soft and moulding on the stems. Soon enough the Fireweed will be gone to seed and their fluff will float out over the tideflat and around the yard. My phone still rings unexpectedly with people wanting to talk about the cold case murder that was apparently all wrapped up this week. (it happened while I recording this morning.)
My office is warm and cozy today. I am so lucky to have a place to work. I owe so much to Jan. She used parts of her inheritance to get this built for me. We had an old shed here that was built from salvaged material. The shed was serviceable, but it had begun to leak and the wiring was a bit shaky, so that to work here you often had to choose between heat and lights.
The shack had served as a overflow shelter in a storm for many people in our community. Nels lived here when between relationships. It was sometimes known as Heartbreak Hotel, before we owned it. But now it is solid, warm and full of books and memorabilia.
I had published some 8 books by the time I had a proper space of my own. I had rented a float house downtown on the channel for several years where I did investigations and writing, and I have to say I love having a place to write. My work habits are akin to a frozen up locomotive (as I think I’ve written about before) It takes a lot of warming up to get this machine of my brain thawed out and running. I’m trying to get these blog posts down to two and a half hours. ( I know… that seems like a long time for these little things) But I’m a grinder…. and that 2.5 doesn’t include the set aside time where I have to come back and find the typos. My dyslexia makes it so I cannot see the difference between a misspelled word or a correctly spelled word. Often after a day they will pop out at me so I am proof reading and making changes all week long on the previous weeks entries.
But that’s not the point… this is about my good fortune in having a dedicated place to write. I fill this space with my imagination; My books live in here and my blog and correspondence. I still write letters to a few other writers, just for the physical intimacy of writing letters, sending mementoes, physical objects, ephemera (one of my favorite words) back and forth. I don’t keep a particularly neat office. I did a TV interview once and I spent two days cleaning up and when they came from CBS to shoot in my office the producer and the cameraman, said. “Can we add some clutter? Mess is more interesting.” That’s all they had to say to change my life. I try to keep it clean and organized enough so I can find the things I need when I need them. Essentially, this was Ed Rickets rule for child rearing: “We must have fun every day. To do that we need to eat good food to be healthy and have energy, and we must be tidy enough to find what we need to keep having fun or else we waste to much time looking for things.”
But again… I digress… Although I know I am blessed to have a space like this. (Jan now has an office at the University and one at home.)The point I want to make is that the work fills and space. The space doesn’t create the work.
I have talked with a lot of people who want to write and often it comes back to, “If I only had more space.” or “If I only had an place like yours or an office of my own.” Well… yes. I am lucky and that’s probably why I’ve never applied for residency at a writers retreat. I rolled the dice on my career choices and every move I have made was so that I could come back to this specific spot on the beach near Old Sitka Rocks. But the place didn’t make me a writer. Writing made me a writer. Reading and the ability to take a punch helped. That means listening to criticism and incorporating it into my work by keeping writing no matter what. It is as simple and as hard as that.
I know you have heard it all before: Steven King wrote Carrie on an Ironing board. Marilyn Robinson wrote Housekeeping with one hand while her baby was clawing at her hair. Yadda yada… it’s all hard. But then again, Michael Chabon sold his College essay for a hundred thousand bucks and probably always had a pretty good place to work. But he might just be a one in a million natural, or he just knew who he was and what he wanted to do.
Why am I telling you this? Because someone just yesterday just told me that I’m the luckiest guy in the world to do what I do… sure…I am lucky, but she was implying that she would be doing the same thing but I must have sucked up all of the good luck around here. Listen, no one knows how to encourage good luck really…. we try and we might have some good rituals: like finishishing what we start, or just write a certain number of words a day. But truthfully I know nothing of either talent or luck, I just love the world and want to stay engaged with it. Talking about what I hear, see, smell and think makes me want to stay alive. That’s it and it is a solitary sport that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, and that’s why it’s better that I be sequestered off somewhere by myself so that others don’t have to hear me squawk when it all seems wrong…. or when it goes right and I become unbearable.
Fog so thick the gulls
float like chips of ice on the
surface of the sea.
jhs
The photographs are a 360 of the interior of my office on this rainy day. The two photos are one of Jan the year we met and one of my dad taken in his New York office in the late sixties. I really should put away some books.
Here are two recordings I made from reading two poems of W.H. Auden. I was interrupted by a phone call and screwed up the recording and I’m up against my time limit. Play the top one first, but the two poems are on the bottom one.
The two Auden poems are both about water and I love them both.
