Everything in Arm’s Reach

When I think about the pieces I’ve written that feel the most alive to me, and the ones that have connected most with readers, and then I consider the circumstances in which those pieces were written, it becomes clear to me that what made those pieces possible had almost everything to do with what I was reading, or the people I was in conversation with at the time, and practically nothing to do with my physical surroundings. I wrote those pieces on airplanes, standing up between food-service shifts at writing conferences, on the bus home from the bookstore, at my kitchen table, occasionally—though somewhat rarely, if memory can be trusted, which it can’t—at my desk. A certain slope of surface in a certain kind of room can be lovely, yes, but for me, these things will never be more than incidental to writing. Desire and ability come when they come and where; any setting can be ideal, depending on what words need to be written.

That said, I’m a pathologically nosy bitch, and I love to hear about other people’s private spaces and rituals, so it’s only fair I share some details from mine.

Right now I’m writing this to you from the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, on Via Luigi Masi, in a third-floor unit at the ankles of a big hill. I’m looking out through the tops of two pines, toward a sherberty-orange apartment with lots of plants on the roof and a blue sky, seated at a table I’ve pulled up next to the window, which is open, letting in hot air. On the table, scattered around me, are piles of books (Berger’s Ways of Seeing, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a pamphlet from the Musei Capitolini emblazoned with a demurely bathing Aphrodite sculpture); notebooks of varying sizes, including the black unlined Leuchtturm that serves as my regular journal and a large blue Clairefontaine I bought hopefully/delusionally as a place to draft poems; a white espresso cup; used bus passes; a colorful hand fan; sunglasses; pens; sticky notes; and a friend’s manuscript held together with a giant gold binder clip. I love to write at a large table where I can gather lots of things around. My eyes don’t like to be lonely, and it makes me feel more relaxed, to sense that what I need, whatever it may be, is probably there within reach.

A certain slope of surface in a certain kind of room can be lovely, yes, but for me, these things will never be more than incidental to writing.

At home in Seattle, I work at a table of similar dimensions to this one, except it’s made of a richer, warmer wood and has three elegant drawers stuffed with everything from Ruth Asawa stamps and googly eyes to checkbooks and cryptic notes to myself like “NOT lemons, but how?” The surface of my desk in Seattle is covered with an exacting maximalism (my friend Dujie Tahat’s phrase) of feminine detritus: a beeswax candle shaped like a voluptuous torso half-melted into a floral saucer, burnt matches stuck to the pooled wax, stacks of books and literary journals with vases on top of them holding live or dead flowers, dried petals everywhere, and pollen. A letter opener with a horse head holds down a stack of notes from me to me, or from others to me, and photos. A few objects are there for their scents, which used to center me in the mornings before I started to write (cypress spray, pipe tobacco, more beeswax candles, sample vials of Acqua di Sale perfume). When I lost my sense of smell to the plague last fall, it was devastating. I can finally smell a range of things again now, but the sense is still warped and dulled. A ceramic pitcher, a matryoshka doll, and the little broken clock I inherited when both my grandmothers died last year are arranged on the windowsills.

When I sit or stand at my desk on Harvard Avenue, I face the big windows into the courtyard. I live with my spouse on the ground level of a building that’s about a hundred years old, which was built by a butcher. I find this inspiring; I’m not sure why. I guess I like when people change professions and make beautiful things that last. The windows are largely shrouded by bushes and a magnolia tree, but through this foliage I can see, depending on the season, rose bushes, columbine, tulips, wild rabbits, hummingbirds, sparrows, people delivering packages, people stealing packages, neighbors headed out. Hail, sunlight, rain, August, January. The windows are so old that even when they’re closed, I can feel the wind: It moves right through, shuffling the dried petals around my desk, fluttering pages. There’s a lot I don’t love about the apartment (terrible noise pollution from constant planes overhead, leaf blowers, construction, and people yelling; hardly any natural light) but the desk view, and the proximity to the library next door, keeps me there.

Before the plague era, which stretches on, I did a lot of writing and reading in coffee shops, and I traveled as often as I could, but for the vast majority of the last few years, my life has spatially collapsed to one desk in one room in one apartment with one view. Sometimes it feels like too much life for one piece of furniture and a few windows to hold, but there are still moments where the sun comes out, dappling all the beautiful mess I’ve gathered around me, and the sweetness I’ve lucked into hits me in the heart. My desk and I are keeping our romance going, despite everything.

• 0