Write Place, Write Time

Steve Himmer

About a year ago, my wife and I moved with our daughter from a larger house in a not so great neighborhood to a smaller house on a quiet street beside a saltmarsh. A great move in all ways except one: in the old house I had an office where I did my writing, reading, grading, and thinking. I could close a door and shut myself away. Now I have a corner under an eave in the bedroom, which I will confidently pit against all comers in a competition for “drabbest writing space ever.”I’ve got what I need, though: my laptop, some books, a tiny statue of a polar bear, and a Lucite frame displaying a set of four Canadian postage stamps showing a wide open landscape — mementos of pre-family, pre-marriage, freewheeling travel.

But the truth is that while this corner is my “official”workspace, more often than not I end up at the dining room table or, weather permitting, at the pub table outside on the porch. I have friends and colleagues who rely on retreats, writers’colonies, and the like to get their work done, but I’ve realized that for me the best writing comes when it’s woven into rather than separate from the other roles in my life: father, husband, teacher, mower of lawns, maker of lunch, etc. So while I look forward to some future day when we can bump out the back of the house to create more rooms, or finish the basement, or just get a coat of paint on the walls, the truth is there’s something comforting and powerful in not quite being able to sequester myself. It keeps me honest, so to speak, because that portrait of my daughter on the wall — though out of date now — is a constant reminder of why I still think telling stories is worth it, and so are her occasionally distracting songs about robots and pizza rising up through the floor, and even the Legos I will inevitably step on after I finish the day’s writing and return to the rest of the house.

Steve Himmer is the author of the novel, The Bee-Loud Glade, and editor of the webjournal, Necessary Fiction. He lives in Quincy, Massachusetts.