Where Writers Write: Sue Mell

 Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

 

Where Writers Write is a series that features authors 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 Sue Mell. 

Sue's story collection, A New Day, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, and was released from She Writes Press September 3rd, 2024. Her debut novel, Provenance, won the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Award, and was selected as a Great Group Read by the Women's National Book Association and as an Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, won the Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, was a BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook, and lives in Queens, NY. Learn more at www.suemell.com. You can also find her here: Substack , Instagram , Facebook. 

Where Sue Mell Writes

The bane of a short person’s writing life is finding a chair that allows your feet to comfortably reach the floor, and this petite—and very expensively reupholstered—blue armchair was the preferred seat of my creativity for many years. But then my mom took a catastrophic fall down the stairs of the house in Queens where I grew up, and I wound up moving back home from San Francisco, and becoming her caregiver. By the time I finally gave up my San Francisco apartment and shipped my stuff back east—almost all of it still sitting in a storage unit—I’d grown used to simply writing in bed. The more crucial requirements being quiet and a window where I can see the ever-changing sky and light, the seasons reflected in the trees and attire of people passing on the street below.

 

The space where I’ve been writing for the past six years is what used to be my parents’ and then my mom’s bedroom—which seems like it should require at least some therapy! At first, we didn’t know how well, or even if, she’d survive her fall, and during the many months she was in rehab, I didn’t change anything in what still felt like her room. But over time I slowly moved my mom’s things out and made it my own. Though it still holds a temporary feeling of “for now.” An interim space I’ve carved out for an indeterminable period that only grows shorter as time goes on.

 

My mom’s bedroom is now downstairs in what used to be the dining room, and a month or so ago, when I bent over to change her in the bed, I made a foolish twist, tweaking my hip in such a way that I pinched a nerve. Ice, heat, and chiropractic have helped, but it’s still painful for me to sit for any length of time. So I now work at a “standing desk,” otherwise known as the little riser I bought to bring my laptop’s camera to eye level for Zooms. Besides the physical benefits, standing grants me a more expansive view. Birds and cars zipping past, branches swaying under the weight of a squirrel in the old mulberry tree, and right now a slouchy guy in a white tank top sauntering across the avenue. Maybe he’ll end up in a story.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

A New Day: Stories: Mell, Sue: 9781647427429: Amazon.com: Books

For fans of Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter, a contemporary short story collection that explores the depths of everyday humanity and the universal yearning for new beginnings.

Linked by their personal and professional relationships, the characters in these thirteen stories—all set between 1982 and 2012—struggle to achieve happiness and success. A coke-fueled night with a photographer costs a young woman her job in the display department of Bloomingdale’s, but holds a hidden promise. A sculptor tries to resurrect his relationship with an old flame on the same day her best friend is undergoing a bone marrow transplant. An aspiring actress drifts from house-sit to house-sit until an armed robbery at the restaurant where she works makes her question a lifelong pattern of impermanence.

Moody, elegiac, and full of longing, with ricocheting themes of desire and loss, A New Day’s stories are steeped in the highs and lows inherent in the pursuit of love and creative expression.