WRITE ABOUT NOW

I’ve been writing for 48 years now, and in a way I’ve come full circle. There’s a lot of procrastination and ritual involved in the lead up to putting pen to paper. Rather like the twitchy stuff baseball players engage in when up at bat, readying for that 95 mph ball to come hurling at them: spit in the hands, look at the bat, pull the shirt away from the chest, scuff the ground, twist the helmet, then start the routine all over again until you can no longer put it off…freeze the pose, eye on the ball and hit the damn thing out of the park…or not.

I was 21 and in a mental institution when I first started writing. I wrote because for the first time in my life I felt safe and therefore was free to observe others in a way that had nothing to do with me. The inmates were my first cast of characters about whom I made up stories based more on their physical behavior than anything they said; the physicality of others being far more believable to me and therefore more trustworthy that the devious way we humans have with words. I wish I still had the pages I wrote during those three months, because it strikes me now that they were the only pages I’ve ever written that were entirely from a place of no self. While I had a great need at that time for ritual in order to feel safe, I had no need of writing in order to write.

Writing, the actual act of it, has, for me, always been associated with safety. So that when I was eventually released from the hospital, I continued to write on an almost daily basis. However, once I was out in the world again and therefore, like all of us, unsafe, ritual became attached to writing as well as to survival.

In the nomadic decades of my life, the daily hunt for a “safe” place to write became a ritual in itself; whether choosing the right table at an outdoor café, ordering a black coffee and if spare change allowed, a snifter of Remy Martin, the Camel cigarette lit, and then the broad-nibbed pen uncapped. Every space I’ve ever entered in the last 48 years I’ve immediately cased out for my writing spot. Once, in L.A., I searched for a cushion that would fit into a tiny clothes closet that had a low window facing out to a garden.

After that, windows became a must in the ritual. Perhaps there was a safety to felt by looking out to the world knowing I was inside. But I also believe that being able to look up and out to the world is the antidote in those moments during writing when I feel the limitations of the closed space of my mind. And so then it became important as to where exactly to place the desk in relation to a window in order to get the view I most connected with, always taking into consideration that I didn’t want to sit with my back to a door.

Over the years, as I, and therefore my life, became more stable, I was able to refine my choices. 23 years ago in my study in the West Village of New York City, I had a beautiful old oak desk placed perpendicular to the window overlooking gardens and just in front of the French doors to our bedroom, a win-win situation where I could look from the novel, play or short story I was writing and experience the tranquility of my home or the grandeur of a magnolia tree.

On Cape Cod I had a 6’ x 8’ shed built in a corner of the garden, its small window looking down the garden path to the sea with no other building in sight, even though there were many in close proximity. My desk there was leather covered George Nelson from the 60’s. Valued at $5000, I picked it up for $5 at a garage sale I spotted while biking into town for a coffee break.

In Manhattan, my desk is one that I designed, doubling as a dining table when needed.

Over all those years it never occurred to me to write anywhere but at my desk. It was an intrinsic part of the ritual. Then in March 2011, Joel and I rented a house in Provence in order to begin work on a commissioned book on that region. The house was not a rental but the home of a friend of a friend. I was filled, everywhere you looked, with furniture, mementos, and photos of 40 years in the lives of the family. There was absolutely not way of clearing a space and no possible space to set up a desk.

I remember pacing around for a day, feeling incredibly unsafe. How was I going to begin work on the book with out a place to write? Without the right/write space there was no safety net and it freed me from ritual, freed me from the need for the illusion of safety and freed me to become part of the 21st Century as a “blogger.”

I wrote on the couch, I wrote in the garden, I wrote at the kitchen table. I wrote on a rocky hillside, on a beach, in a field, in the car, and in bed. I wrote wherever I damn well wanted to and I wrote to all of you.

Yet we are creatures of habit. Over the past year and a bit that we have made this barn our home, I have split my writing in it between two places: the novel and its revision were done at my desk. The blog I wrote from my cantuccio (nook) by the fireplace from where I could look out the big glass door to the garden, the stone steps and the gate, while once in a while turning to the fire for a few moments of mesmerization.

Until yesterday, we had Joel’s daughter, Ariel, our son-in-law, David, and their 6 year-old pistol of a daughter, Sadie, visiting us for 2 weeks. It was a visit that was deep and easy and joyous and too close to its ending to write about yet. In preparing the bedroom for Sadie it was necessary to remove a small armchair in order to make room for a little dresser. I had long been eyeing a tiny corner by my desk upstairs as a sweet place to sit when I might want to take a break from writing, to just sit and gaze out the big window to the green world, the sheep, or the cows moseying down to their afternoon watering hole. And so that’s where we put the chair, temporarily I thought.

But since coming back from seeing the little family off on Sunday, the house has echoed with their absence. For two weeks my role was Nana, the word embedding itself deeper into my heart each time dear Sadie called out to me. It was clear who I was and in the simple clarity of being Nana I found a surrender, the sort of surrender one experiences when feeling safe.

Looking around the house earlier I felt no safety. My cantuccio didn’t call out to me, nor did my desk, and it’s way too hot to write outside. And then I heard Sadie call to me across the Atlantic, “Nana, the armchair!” And here I’ve sat for an hour, writing to you, safe in myself. 

photo by Joel Meyerowitz

NB. ALL PHOTOS ON THIS BLOG SITE ARE TAKEN BY MAGGIE BARRETT UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.