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 Joyce Hinnefeld. Her work has appeared in a
variety of literary and scholarly publications, and her short story collection,
Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (University Press of New England,
1998), received the 1997 Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction.
Her
novel In Hovering Flight was the Booksense/Indie Next #1 Pick for
September 2008. Her novel Stranger Here Below was published in the fall
of 2010. She is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellowship
and is the Cohen Chair in English and Literature at Moravian College in
Bethlehem, PA.
Where Joyce Hinnefeld Writes
The subject of where I write is a fraught one for me. I seem to
be perpetually dissatisfied with my writing space, wherever it is, and not for
particularly good reasons. Here’s a photo of my main workspace, which occupies part
of a room in our house that we refer to as my study--though it’s also the guest
room.
You can see that there are two windows looking out on a lot of
green, some photos of my daughter, bookshelves, files. On the wall are
photographs from Mexico by a photographer named Ron Terner and a nice
black-and-white portrait of my husband by photographer Karen Tweedy-Holmes.
Behind that big Dell monitor is my beloved MacBook Pro. I set up the monitor,
and the Apple keyboard on a lower tray, and the chair with the back cushion,
two years ago, when I had an unhappy incident with a herniated disk and decided
I needed to create a workspace that would be easier on my back.
So what’s to complain about, right? Well, I wrote a blog post on
this topic, or sort of on this topic, last spring (see http://strangerherebelow.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-writing-process-and-my-beautifully.html).
Actually, that post was about giving writing advice, and specifically about my
own “writing process.” In discussing my own writing space, I referred to my
inability to keep my desk cleared of
notes
about my daughter’s camps, school field trips, acting and dance and music
classes and lessons and performances and recitals; printed email messages
(because I’ll never remember them otherwise) and so on from people I need to
write to, etc., as part of promoting my novels; receipts; bills; more printed
emails, etc. related to my teaching; recommendation letter requests; coupons;
publishers’ flyers about books I need to order; tape paper clips a phone nasal
mist a camera old printer cartridges notebooks files and a ridiculous number of
books, most of which I looked a little something up in, six months ago or more,
for the novel I’m working on and which I can’t bring myself to return to the
library because what if I need to check one more thing?
I’ll confess that I cleaned the desk up a bit for the photo
above. But a lot of those things I mention in that breathless list are still
there.
For a while I wrote at this little table in our tiny enclosed
porch during the warmer months:
Eventually, when I felt like I couldn’t bear the clutter of my
desk any longer, and that I had to have a clearer space for writing, I
reclaimed a little alcove in “my study” (I forgot to mention that for a while
my study/the guest room was actually my study/the guest room/my daughter’s play
room). This alcove had been filled with my daughter’s toys and drawings--mostly
things she’d outgrown some time before. I moved those things out, and at first
all that I had in that alcove was a nice, empty table. But now it looks like
this:
My husband Jim, daughter Anna, and I spent a sabbatical semester
in Santa Fe, New Mexico back in 2005, and I wrote a good bit of my novel In Hovering Flight in the reading room
of the Santa Fe Public Library. I wish I had a picture of that room, with its
old leather chairs and its lifesize horse statue and the homeless guys dozing
over newspapers. I love libraries. Here is my local public library, in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania . . . just because:
 |
| (Guys! I know this library! I hit their book sale every other month!) |
When the clutter, or the noise, at home gets to be too much, I
sometimes write in a study carrell at Reeves Library, the campus library at
Moravian College, where I teach. I’ve been fortunate to share this small,
enclosed study with my friend and colleague Theresa Dougal for many years now.
I don’t think we’ve ever been in there at the same time; when Theresa’s not
there, sometimes I peruse her various books on Mary Wollstonecraft. Here’s a
picture of my delightfully spartan study carrell desk in Reeves Library:
As I get older, I’m realizing something about myself. For a long
time I thought that what I wanted and needed was a space in my life that was
free of clutter, someplace clean and white and vaguely buddhist, with nothing
to distract me from the purity of my own work. But I’ve noticed that no matter
how many times I try to create such a space, I always seem to end up filling it
with more stuff. I’ve also noticed that, instead of cleaning up my old spaces,
I just keep adding new ones. Eventually I’ll run out of spaces to fill, of
course. And I’ll have to follow my own advice in that blog post, where I
admonished anyone who was reading it just to “shove the crap out of your way,
and get your ideas down.”
In other words, learn to write wherever you are. I think I’m
getting there, slowly.
Check back next week when we take a peek into Robin Lamont's writing space.
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