Where Writers Write: Lynn Melnick

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 Lynn Melnick. 

Her first book of poetry, If I Should Say I Have Hope, is recently out with YesYes Books.

Where Lynn Melnick Writes

My couch looks like hell, with more ink stains than a Rorschach test, and far more problematic stains than ink. It has several tears. A guy from Sears tried twice with all kinds of equipment to rescue it from us, but after $90 it still looked about the same.

Our couch was gifted to us over ten years ago and it was where both my babies napped when they were infants, they’d fall asleep nursing and I’d just shift them off of me and put them down on their little knit blanket on one of the cushions and then I’d try to write.

I live in a small apartment with another poet and two messy little girls. My husband writes on the floor. I write on the couch.

Essays, and anything else expository, I can write directly onto the computer. Poetry goes in a notebook, in the same notebook where I keep frantic lists of things I need to do, and things I’m forgetting, and things I’m failing at.

To write poems I need stillness and quiet, so it usually happens when my girls are in school or in bed. Once I know what’s happening with a poem, I can revise if the room is on fire, or, more likely, if the sound of clanging toys or squealing girls eclipses everything.  Maybe I’d rather revise in the quiet but maybe I don’t even know if that’s true anymore.

I get nervous when I write, my heart pounds, I feel like I’m free-falling so to be always on the couch is very grounding for me. If the poem is going to marry me or slit my throat, at least I’m tied to what makes me me, all those imperfections.

Check back next week to see where Theasa Tuohy finds her inspiration to write.