Where Writers Write: Leah Umansky

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Leah Umansky. Her first book of poems, Domestic Uncertainties, is out now by BlazeVOX [Books.] She is a poet, a writer, a collage-artist, a teacher, a mad-men enthusiast and a concert-junkie. She is a contributing writer for BOMB Magazine’s BOMBLOG, a poetry reviewer for The Rumpus and a live twit for the Best American Poetry Blog. She also hosts and curates the COUPLET reading series in NYC. Read more at: http://iammyownheroine.com

Where Leah Umansky Writes

I love reading about the life of writers. I always have, but seeing where they lived and where they wrote is the most exciting.   I’m one of those people who love to visit the homes of writers when I’m on vacation and one of my favorite parts of visiting London is actually roaming around the streets and looking for those blue plaques that indicate what famous author lived, or was born, in a certain house.  Next to visiting Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, my favorite writer’s house is naturally that of the Bronte Sisters at the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth, England. 

I’ve always been that person that rips things out of magazines, takes cards from restaurants and stores and quickly sticks it somewhere with a magnet or a thumb tack. (Both sides of my refrigerator are also much like this pegboard.) This is a photo of the pegboard that sits above my desk. It makes me happy to look up from my laptop and relive some of these memories.   I have photos of my sister and I, some of my best friends, my old cat from childhood, and old birthday cards.  One of my favorites is a photo I took of Jeanette Winterson, in Edinburgh, Scotland back in 2001 when I studied in London.  I I like surrounding myself with the things I love.  It makes sense that eventually I’d make start making real collages on paper, like the one on the cover of my first book of poems, Domestic Uncertainties.

This is a picture of some of the books I keep on my desk. I also have a stack on my night-table. They fluctuate between books I love to re-read, books I need to review, and books I use for inspiration.

Here’s a photo of my desk.  The chair is from an old schoolhouse that I found at a garage sale. It  has carvings from previous students in the wood.   I do all of my writing at my desk. I need a laptop. I take notes all the time in my notebooks (at readings, museums, on trips) but I always write at my desk on my laptop. I’m very old-school in that I love “real”  books, and I love annotating them.  When it comes to the actual writing process, I need to type. I like utilizing the whole “page” of the computer screen when I write a poem, which is tough to do elsewhere. I was a teenager when people began using email and the internet, and well, as a result, I’m a very fast typist. Sometimes my fingers move faster than my mind. 

I love my little british box. It’s perfect as I’ve filled it with my notebooks and my stationary.  The big red notebook in the back, is what I use in writing workshops and what I often take with me to readings.  I love the red moleskins the best.  Behind the box are my folders – my attempt at being organized – some of these folders are:  Book Two, Acceptances/Rejections, Prompts and Feedback.

I live in an old building with wall moldings and so I have a little bit of “shelf” above my desk and my memory board. Most are postcards I’ve received from my best friend, Louise, in London, and the middle one is a little painting a student of mine made me a few years ago with a Robert Frost quote.

I hope I always have a cat walking around my library; though, I’d barely call this a library.  I have two more legs of this bookcase in my parents’ garage, along with many books that I just don’t have the room for right now. All are waiting for a bigger home, but such is NYC living.   Most books, behind the horizontal stacks, are organized by author and genre.

My #bookdress (made by Joseph A.W Quintela -- www.footknots.com) hangs above my "library," and is made from five copies of my book. This gives me constant inspiration.

Check back next week to see where Scott Elliot writes. 

Book Giveaway: The Taker

Since July 2010, TNBBC has been bringing authors and readers together every month to get behind the book! This unique experience wouldn't be possible without the generous donations of the authors and publishers involved. 

I'm excited to to bring you next month's 

Author/Reader Discussion book!

We will be reading and discussing The Taker 

with author Alma Katsu

In order to stimulate discussion, 

Alma has agreed to give away 

10 paper copies

to residents of the US and Canada only

Here is the Goodreads description:

True love can last an eternity . . . but immortality comes at a price. . . . On the midnight shift at a hospital in rural Maine, Dr. Luke Findley is expecting another quiet evening of frostbite and the occasional domestic dispute. But the minute Lanore McIlvrae—Lanny—walks into his ER, she changes his life forever. A mysterious woman with a past and plenty of dark secrets, Lanny is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. He is inexplicably drawn to her . . . despite the fact that she is a murder suspect with a police escort. And as she begins to tell her story, a story of enduring love and consummate betrayal that transcends time and mortality, Luke finds himself utterly captivated.

Her impassioned account begins at the turn of the nineteenth century in the same small town of St. Andrew, Maine, back when it was a Puritan settlement. Consumed as a child by her love for the son of the town’s founder, Lanny will do anything to be with him forever. But the price she pays is steep—an immortal bond that chains her to a terrible fate for all eternity. And now, two centuries later, the key to her healing and her salvation lies with Dr. Luke Findley.

Part historical novel, part supernatural page-turner, The Taker is an unforgettable tale about the power of unrequited love not only to elevate and sustain, but also to blind and ultimately destroy, and how each of us is responsible for finding our own path to redemption.

This giveaway will run through May 8th. 

Winners will be announced here and via email on May 9th.

Here's how to enter:

1 - Leave a comment stating why you'd like to receive a copy of the book. 

2 - State that you agree to participate in the group read book discussion that will run from June 15th through the end of the month. Alma Katsu has agreed to participate in the discussion and will be available to answer any questions you may have for her. 

 *If you are chosen as a winner, by accepting the copy you are agreeing to read the book and join the group discussion at TNBBC on Goodreads (the thread for the discussion will be emailed to you before the discussion begins). 

 3 - Your comment must have a way to contact you (email is preferred). 

GOOD LUCK!

The Indie Ink Runs Deep: Pat Pujolas

I've been tossing around the idea of blogging a tattoo series for nearly a year now. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. 

After hoarding the photos and essays I've been collecting from these guys since July of 2012, and with the promise of spring peeking its deliciously sunny head out through all of this winter gloom, I decided there was no better time than now to finally unveil THE INDIE INK RUNS DEEP mini-series!

Today's indie ink is from Pat Pujloas. Pat is the author of “Jimmy Lagowski Saves the World” (Independent Talent Group, 2012) and frequent contributor to ManArchy magazine. He lives in Akron, Ohio, as well as on Goodreads.

I have three tattoos; this one is the smallest but the most meaningful; it was also the most painful. There are more sensitive areas on the body (genitals, feet, eyeballs), but the inside of the wrist is a pretty good place to gauge human sensitivity (and no doubt why new mothers test warm milk here). It seems fitting, because this tattoo represents my commitment to being a writer. As any artist will tell you, there is a constant, almost daily struggle between occupation (making a living) and passion (practicing your craft). In July of 2001, with three unpublished books and enough rejection slips to wallpaper most of Seattle, I found myself ready to give up on my passion and focus on occupation. And so I had this star affixed to my wrist, as a daily reminder to keep writing. Because if I ever do give up, I will have to stare at this damn thing every day and wonder, “What might’ve happened if I had just kept going, kept writing, one more word, one more sentence, one more story?” And that is the sort of pain I refuse to endure. 

The Audio Series: Donald O'Donovan

Our new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, we are treated to an excerpt of Night Train,  read by author Donald O'Donovan. O'Donovan, author of the picaresque autobiographical novels Night Train, Highway and Tarantula Woman, was born in Cooperstown, New York. A teenage runaway, he rode freights and hitchhiked across America, served in the US Army with the 82^nd Airborne Division, lived in Mexico, and worked at more than 200 occupations including long distance truck driver, undertaker and roller skate repairman. His newest novel, Orgasmo, will be published in June 2013, along with a collection, Twenty Thousand Years in Disneyland. Donald O’Donovan lives mostly in Los Angeles.

Click the soundcloud link below to experience Donald O'Donovan reading from Night Train. 






The word on Night Train:

Fast, furious, unforgettable and set against the backdrop of a crumbling civilization, NIGHT TRAIN follows arch-outsider Jerzy Mulvaney in an audacious account of what it means to be homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.
*lifted from goodreads with love

Where Writers Write: William Luvaas

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is William Luvaas. William has published two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown and Going Under (Putnam)--reissued as ebooks by Foreverland Press–and two story collections, A Working Man’s Apocrypha (Univ. Okla. Press) and Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil).  His essays, articles and over 50 short stories have appeared in many publications, including The American Fiction Anthology, Antioch Review, Confrontation, Epiphany, Glimmer Train, Grain, North American Review, The Sun, Thema, The Village Voice and The Washington Post Book World.  He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein and Edward Albee foundations, and has won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s Fiction Competition, and Fiction Network’s 2^nd National Fiction Competition.  He has taught creative writing at San Diego State University, U.C.-Riverside and The Writer’s Voice in New York and is online fiction editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.  He lives in Riverside County, CA with his wife Lucinda, a painter and film maker.

Where William Luvaas Writes

Where we write at once raises another question: how we write.  What are our writing habits and idiosyncracies, one could say “necessities”?   I believe it was E.M. Forster who couldn’t get to the desk until he saw a car with a certain combination of letters and numbers on its license plate pass by his flat.  Toni Morrison is said to light candles before taking up the pen.  I have a California  friend who can only write in Mexican cafes.  I myself must take a cup of coffee to the desk with me, morning or night, my writerly addiction.  If we ever have a coffee drought I am finished.  Are these just silly talismans or do they help us establish a comfort zone?

My studies are always cluttered places: books, files, computers, magazines, notes, wall charts, a manuscript closet stacked floor to ceiling with drafts (and too many unpublished novel manuscripts).  My desk is a chunky, hand-made six foot slab fashioned of an antique door covered by a sheet of shellacked particle board.  I favor windows looking out on nature, reminding me that I am part of a bigger whole.  From my current study I can see the San Jacinto Mountains through lacy foliage.  I once built a study in the attic of a house in the Adirondacks and cut a window to look out over farmlands below and hills opposite, opulently green in summer, snow covered mid-winter (20 below zero outside).  I was always cold and felt intimidated sitting on top of the world in my icy aerie, but got lots of work done.  Only while living in Brooklyn did I turn my desk from the window to stare dumbly at a wall.  (Though walls can be useful; Faulkner wrote notes for A Fable on a wall of his study at Rowan Oak.)

I don’t write well outside of my sanctum.  The desk is too small, the light isn’t right, I don’t have a scrap of paper I scribbled a note on and I am lost without it.  The smell is wrong.  The strange bare room doesn’t speak to me–or speaks in a stranger’s voice, while my own whispers away through the floorboards.  Public spaces are out of the question.  Solzhenitsyn requires “peace and space” to write, and I suppose I do, too.  My study is my adytum, my small, isolated, wholly individuated space away from the world which helps me find the perspective and confidence to write about that world.

The Indie Ink Runs Deep: Katherine Scott Nelson

I've been tossing around the idea of blogging a tattoo series for nearly a year now. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. 

After hoarding the photos and essays I've been collecting from these guys since July of 2012, and with the promise of spring peeking its deliciously sunny head out through all of this winter gloom, I decided there was no better time than now to finally unveil THE INDIE INK RUNS DEEP mini-series!

Today's indie ink is from Katherine Scott Nelson.  Katherine Scott is the author of the Lambda-nominated novella Have You Seen Me, published by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Hir work has also appeared in Fiction at Work and Confrontation. Ze is bowing to peer pressure and writing about hir gender.

The words came first: SEI ALLEM ABSCHIED VORAN. Let me warn you right now, if you are going to get a phrase in a foreign language tattooed on you, you had better have an easy-to-grasp translation handy. I spent six months trying to explain to strangers in bars and parks and grocery stores just what "Be ahead of all parting" means, who Rainer Maria Rilke was, and what it had meant to have someone tell me to be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings. I started whipping out my phone and looking up a translation of Sonnets to Orpheus 2.13 to hand to curious people, because it was often faster. Now I just tell people that it means "Quit your job and be a writer."

A year and a half later, my first book, Have You Seen Me, was getting published. I'd kept the faith and done the work, and it was finally paying off. Since this was only going to happen once in my life - this momentous movement from "unpublished writer" to "published writer" - I decided to add to the tattoo to remind myself that I had done it.

I took the idea of a quarter-sleeve focused around a burning antique typewriter to Jason Vaughn at Deluxe Tattoo in Chicago, who does incredible things with color and line and composition, and who I could not recommend more highly. Did it hurt? C'mon. I sweated way more blood writing the book.

I love this tattoo. I plan to add to it every time I have some major success as a writer, so that when I'm 80, my left arm will be covered in a full sleeve of authorial bad-assitude.

However, there has been one unintended consequence to getting this tattoo: people have started giving me antique typewriter parts as gifts. My dad even snagged me a real Underwood at the Tempe Swap Meet.

He thinks it still works. He thinks I'm going to disassemble this oily mess in my 300-square-foot apartment to find out.

The Audio Series: Michelle Muckley

Our new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, we are treated to an excerpt of Escaping Life, read by author Michelle Muckley. She decided that she was going to be a writer from a young age.  Apparently, she also decided to be a procrastinator, and waited twenty years before she finally wrote Chapter One.  In the meantime she studied science and started working in cardiology.  she loved this job, but there was a creative need that remained unfulfilled.   It was at this point that she began to write her first book.

Six years later, having uprooted from England and having settled on the southern Mediterranean shores of Cyprus, the dream to publish is now a reality. She is still working as a part time scientist, but is also writing daily. When she is not sat at the computer you will find her hiking in the mountains, drinking frappe at the beach, or talking to herself in the kitchen in the style of an American celebrity chef.  Just think Ina Garten.  

Click the soundcloud link below to experience Michelle Muckley reading from Escaping Life. 

The word on Escaping Life:

It’s beautiful here. It’s a beautiful place to die.

Since the accident claimed her sister’s life, Haven has been a sanctuary for Elizabeth Green.She has finally found some of the tranquility that she thought had been lost long ago to the past.Homicide cop Jack Fraser is running away from his miserable life too.But when the discovery of a body on a local beach leads him directly to Elizabeth’s front door, it seems her past might not have been left behind her after all. Together they must face their demons, and in the process expose the dangerous secrets that cloud their lives before it’s too late.

Running from reality is sometimes more painful than discovering the truth.

*lifted from goodreads with love

Where Writers Write: Sofia Samatar

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

Photo by Adauto Araujo

This is Sofia Samatar. 

Sofia is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria(Small Beer Press, April 2013). She wrote the first draft of the novel in South Sudan, but she did a lot of revision and rewriting in Madison, Wisconsin, where she lives and writes now. 

She is Nonfiction and Poetry Editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and blogs at sofiasamatar.blogspot.com.

Where Sofia Samatar Writes

There’s day writing, and there’s night writing.

During the day, I often write at Café Zoma, around the block from my apartment.

I’m always there on weekend afternoons. I like the feeling of being with people and alone at the same time, and I like the soup. Here’s my favorite table:

I write in cafés because I read Ernest Hemingway in high school and never got over it. I will always believe that it is dashing and romantic to write in cafés, even though, unlike Hemingway, I live in a well-heated apartment. You know in A Moveable Feast when he’s writing and drinking rum and café au lait, and that girl comes in with a face like a newly-minted coin, and he finishes the story and orders oysters and white wine and thinks he’s written something really good? This is basically my ideal of the writing life, and it’s what I have at Café Zoma, minus the booze and the oysters and creeping on some girl and Hadley at home alone in the cold apartment wearing all her sweaters.

At night, I write on this chair:

I curl up to write. I can curl up with my laptop, which is very small. It’s terrible for my back. I have to figure out something else.

The mess all over the floor is because you never know what you’re going to need. It’s best to keep everything where you can reach it.

Next week, check back to see where Bill Luvaas puts the pen to the paper.

The Indie Ink Runs Deep: Vanessa Veselka

I've been tossing around the idea of blogging a tattoo series for nearly a year now. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. 

After hoarding the photos and essays I've been collecting from these guys since July of 2012, and with the promise of spring peeking its deliciously sunny head out through all of this winter gloom, I decided there was no better time than now to finally unveil THE INDIE INK RUNS DEEP mini-series!

Today's indie ink is from Vanessa Veselka. Vanessa has been at various times a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, and a mother. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Tin House, The FSG anthology Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, and Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll with work forthcoming in GQ and Zyzzva. Her debut novel, Zazen, is a 2011 finalist for the Ken Kesey Prize in fiction.

My lion tattoo is of Fortitude, one of the New York Public Library lions. The number below it is my library of congress catalog number. When I got the tattoo, I’d just spent a few awful months in an MFA program where the pressure to hide your victories and celebrate your fear was everywhere—the whole thing was like a misery factory with a golden apple on top. It shook me up pretty badly until I remembered that I didn’t need a secret handshake from anyone and quit the program. Later that week, I got the library of congress catalog number for Zazen, which was about to debut. I was already going to get a tattoo in honor of my first novel, but it was going to be small and cryptic so that no one would know what it meant. After my MFA experience I decided to get a big-ass lion on my arm as a reminder that art isn’t improved by shame or insecurity. Moreover, pride is essential. It’s what makes you go after more than you can actually get, which is the only game in town. Shoot me, I thought. I published a novel. Shoot me. I’m proud to be in the library. In fact, it’s a goddamned honor.

And thus the lion was inked.

The Audio Series: Matthew Salesses

Our new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, we're treated to an excerpt of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, read by author Matthew Salesses. He also wrote The Last Repatriate , and two chapbooks,Our Island of Epidemics and We Will Take What We Can Get . He was adopted from Korea at age two, returned to Korea, and married a Korean woman. He writes a column about his wife and baby for The Good Men Project. His other essays and fiction appear in The New York Times Motherlode blog, Glimmer Train, The Rumpus, Hyphen, Koream, Witness, American Short Fiction, and others. He has received awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, PANK, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, The University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. He did his MFA at Emerson College (2009), where he was the Presidential Fellow and editedRedivider, and now serves as Fiction Editor for the Good Men Project.

Click the soundcloud link below to experience I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying as read by the author:





The word on I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying:

I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, a novel in flash fiction, is a raw, honest look at parenting, commitment, morality, and the spaces that grow between and within us when we don't know what to say. In these 115 titled chapters, a man, who learns he has a 5-year-old son, is caught between the life he knows and a life he may not yet be ready for. This is a book that tears down the boundaries in relationships, sentences, origin and identity, no matter how quickly its narrator tries to build them up.
*lifted from goodreads with love

Christoph Paul's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Books & Booze is a new mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC that will post every Friday in October. The participating authors were challenged to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist. 

Boozey, Baby....

If The Passion of the Christoph was to reflect an alcoholic beverage it would be a special Central Floridian drink called a 'Moonacolada', basically, you use moonshine instead of rum in a fruity drink that will leave wondering what the fuck is going on. 

With all the porn store stories (I managed one in DC for two years), the satire pieces involving Book Tips from the Ol' Dirty Bastard, and non-fiction about military school crazies and the french girl I met who really really liked birds. 

Only a Moonacolada could leave you with an experience like reading The Passion of the Christoph. 

Christoph Paul is a former porn store manager and singer/guitarist of the rock band The Only Prescription. He graduated from the Wilkes University with an MA in Creative Writing. 

"The Passion of the Christoph" is his first book of non-fiction and satire being released April 1st 2013 with Swift Ink Books. He is now working on a YA book called "Joey 'The Art Film' Caldo" and a collection of poetry with the working title "Buy This Poetry Book So I Can Afford Therapy."

Where Writers Write: BJ Best

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is BJ Best. 

He is the author of three books of poetry: Birds of Wisconsin (New Rivers Press), State Sonnets (sunnyoutside), and most recently the video game-inspired prose poem collection But Our Princess Is in Another Castle from Rose Metal Press. He teaches at Carroll University and lives in the Wisconsin countryside with his wife and son in the house in which he grew up.

Where BJ Best Writes

Several years ago, I fell in love with typewriters.  I’ve written a whole essay about my quest to collect them, available online (link: http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/best.html).  About seven years ago, my wife and I repainted and recarpeted a spare bedroom in our century-old home for use as my office; we bought some shelves, I displayed my collection, and it has hence become formally known to my family (including my two-year-old son Henry) as the Typewriter Room.

I used to love pounding on keys, fiddling with ribbons, and x’ing out wrong words—it was so counterculturally anachronistic.  I’ve written with typewriters in dining rooms and bars; on decks, picnic tables, and boats; in my office at school and in the middle of a river.  The very first poems of my recent book were written on typewriters.

And then I stopped.  It began to feel like I was prizing style over substance, attention to the act of writing rather than to the words written.

But still I had a room full of typewriters, and had slowly begun to accumulate flotsam that would mark me as twee, pretentious, and hipsteresque.  Antique cameras.  A vintage microscope.  A menagerie of Mold-A-Rama figurines from the Milwaukee County Zoo.  A transistor radio from the sixties, a silver dollar from 1881, a fossilized fish from the Middle Eocene.

There’s still a part of me that wakes up every morning a bit amazed I’m a poet with several books and that I teach college English for a living.  My undergraduate majors were actuarial science and finance.  I suppose I’ve outfitted the Typewriter Room like the scene of a play:  this is what I imagine a writer’s studio looks like, so I guess writing should occur here.  Henry’s favorite typewriter to bang upon is a Oliver #9 from 1916, but he prefers racing Hot Wheels, which began as ironic showpieces from my childhood and are now his bona fide toys.

We learn what matters, again and again.  Now I write first drafts longhand in a journal, and tap them into a laptop thereafter.  My actual view while writing is more or less a blank wall.  I’ve given my various talismans their power, their position, and their say.  Thus established, I can move past them and get to the real subject, to the unglamorously fundamental pen and page.

I write in a museum, ultimately, so I can ignore it.

Check back next week when Sofia Samatar shows off her writing space.