Writing in Place

Dreaming of a Writing Room

Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - 09:45

When I flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town and drove to Misty Cliffs, which Google described as a little village that lies on the mountain and on the beach, divided only by Main Road, between Kommetjie and Scarborough, roughly an hour from Cape Town, I had no idea what lay ahead. I was insulated in pain from a break up. Ten days of the sea, walking, and writing healed me. This mountaintop lounge, where I wrote “Sad whale-speak at Misty Cliffs” to keep this dream of a place alive, has been my best writing room, so far.

Arlington House, Maitland, Florida

Vanessa Blakeslee

Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - 09:30

My writing room faces the backyard of my condo, and a steep embankment lined with lush, subtropical vegetation. Hidden beneath the embankment runs a stream—sometimes the water is churning and alive, rushing toward the lake a hundred yards distant. In the warmer months, ibis, herons, and other gawky water birds wade and dive, the stream their hunting ground; through the plantation shutters, I’ll pause from typing to glimpse one of these tall creatures perched patiently atop the bank, surveying its lunch prospects. Other times, the stream shrinks and slows to a barely moving, murky pool, as now: the lack of rain and warm winter has left the stream deserted and shallow. A plastic bag flutters, stuck to a floating branch.

Moment's Notice

Ishion Hutchinson

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - 09:45

My place of fret is not a narrow room, but a room that is short and sort of wide. Poor in natural light, a perpetual bulb’s yellowish wash makes it feel like a cellar, homogeneous, belonging to neither night nor day. This is not a bad thing; the illusion that time is at a standstill helps, but the romance stops there. My desk – solid, coffee black – is directly in front of the only window. Outside of the window is a big green yard with three apple trees at the far end. The daily delight is the family of deer that come at evening to graze. If inside the room time is at a standstill, as I fantasize it to be, the sight of deer outside cast time to a pre-strife world, a Hesiodic world, a world of harmony enacted in the fluid stride of the deer across the yard. The desk, littered with books and notebooks, is my place of second thoughts where I come to arrange and labour through whatever has gestated. A good desk is as important as a good bed.

The Views

Kobus Moolman

Sunday, October 28, 2012 - 22:03

Above all else, as a writer, I need a view. And it doesn’t have to be a view of anything particularly striking. If I think back to all the rooms I have worked in as a writer, and all the different views that each of those rooms looked out on, then certainly there have been no rolling hills or mist-swept vistas. Quite the opposite.

The adolescent room I began my writing in (where I lived with my parents until I got married, too early I’ll admit now) had a large window with a lace curtain and a green blind. The window faced directly onto a busy street. Barely two metres separated the window from the sidewalk.

Where I Write

Nicola Waldron

Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - 03:10

Writing in Place is a column in which authors published in our print and web pages tell us about their writing spaces.

I write in a glass-sided room, an addition to a 1950s brick bungalow, southern style. From the threshold that once led to the outdoors, it’s just one giant stride to my desk: space enough to tap at a keyboard, or lie down; for books and papers to breed, but not for dancing (a tiny tango when someone says yes).The door opens with a ghastly sucking. Then I’m in, most mornings greeted by some spirit helper jumping for cover—kukulcania hibernalis, tiny crevice weaver, or zygoballus sexpunctatus, trapdoor spider. Sometimes, it’s the cockroach, unholy scarab, too parched to outrun the descending whomp of the Gladware, the fatal thwop of the vacuum.