Places that Writers Write

     

My Study, Lucey Bowen, 2010                    

     My study is in half of our garage, and it has taken 15 years to tame its peculiar feng shui. You reach it by a curved path around the house, and it was not until my children were grown and gone and I unplugged the phone, that I've used it properly. Still, I periodically take my notebook down to our independent Cafe Barrone, next to our independent Bookstore, Kepler's, and take in local humanity.

     Do writers all feel a  tension between having a quiet place to work without interruption, and the desire to be interrupted?  The New Yorker gave its writers office space, rather spartan and smelling of pencils. I remember that smell from a single visit to my father there. In our suburb, Chappaqua, he had a study off the front hall, with built-in bookshelves. At some point, to limit distraction, he borrowed office space from a realtor in the Village. After he moved back to Manhattan, he had a typewriter table and a partner's desk in one corner of his shabby-elegant apartment on the Upper East Side. 

     One of the most attractive writer's spaces I've known belonged to the late Henry Allen Moe in Sherman, Connecticut. Set in an old workshop, 25 yards from the main house, he could work there and still observe the family swimming in the mill pond. He'd had to mouse-proof it to avoid his manuscripts becoming lining for mouse nests. North of Sherman,  Malcolm Cowley's son Robert put painter Peter Blume's old studio to use as his study, with floor to ceiling bookshelves, and high windows that let in light but no distraction.

     The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay had a little cottage built for her at a distance from her house Steepletop, in Austerlitz, New York. I visited it on my Hudson River peregrinations last summer. I thought about it when I read Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own. The two structures seem to share the geomancer's wisdom of place.