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 Wendy J Fox.
Wendy is the author
of The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories (Press 53,
2014) and the novel The Pull of It (forthcoming, 2016,
Underground Voices). Her fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in ZYZZYVA, The
Tampa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Pinch,
among others. More at www.wendyjfox.com.
Where Wendy Fox Writes
Between 1996
and 2009, after never moving once as a child, I changed house on an average
pace of a little over once a year, getting me to 16 moves. It was a combination
of the volatility of roommates and relationships, heading oversees and coming
back, a pit stop at my mother’s, the influence of employment (or lack thereof).
It does get
easier, when you move constantly; you have less stuff, you can do almost all of
it in a hatchback, you become less attached to anything you can’t lift on your
own (pro-tip: put your books in liquor boxes, small and sturdy and very
stackable.)
Then, I
thought I would settle, and I bought a townhouse in Seattle. Yet, less than a
year into my 30-year mortgage, I was packing again—I had fallen in love with
the man I would eventually marry, and life was taking me to Denver.
Even at the
17th time, the sound the strapping tape made as it came off the roll
gave me a particular feeling, some combination of hope and queasiness.
Always,
because of moving and later, because of frequent travel for work, I was a
flexible writer in terms of space. My writing nook was opening my laptop or surrounded
by hard copy. I wrote on airplanes and kitchen tables and on the occasional
camping trip; I squeezed it in where I could, both physically and in terms of
time.
Relocating
to Colorado marked, in the beginning, the destruction of my social life.
Thousands
of miles away from friends and finding it hard to make community outside of my fiancé’s
circle, I was in a new era of writing productivity, and the dawn of what I have
come to think of as Patio Writing.
I do have a proper
desk at home, and in all the homes I have been in, but I also have a desk job,
so I don’t really like to sit at a place that feels like an office. I will do
it if I need to print a lot, or if the weather is very cold. My desk is very
typically messy and is nothing interesting to look at.
In Denver, my
fiancé turned husband and I were not as transient as I had been in Seattle, but
we still bounced a little.
Our first
move together was to the loft, which was an amazingly large apartment and
essentially one big room. It was a fantastic place to throw a party. However,
we started to feel like closets might be useful as well.
In the loft,
I wrote from the upper or lower patio.
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A double rainbow over the Gold
Star Sausage Factory, est. 1936, where the whistle still blows at break time,
Denver,
CO, Summer 2011 – Upper Patio
|
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Spring snow looking towards the Colorado
Rockies,
Denver, CO, March 2012 - Lower Patio
|
I like to
write outside because I feel very connected to physical space and to
landscapes. All writers are good at imagining, but for me there is also
something to the experience of the body. Patio Writing helps me get to a
clearer feeling of the seasons. Writing cold, when I am cold, for example, or
writing heat in the blare of summer. Writing rain. Writing wind.
I also prefer the
action of outside. I grew up rural, where there are wells and springs for
water, but also the slaughter of animals and fire. I have lived exclusively in
cities since the late 1990’s. I miss the open space, but not the hardness of
country life.
 |
View
from porch of the home I grew up in, where I first learned to love to write.
Tonasket, WA, June 24, 2016, 8:34PM.
|
Unlike being
out in the sticks, there are a lot of things to see from the vantage of an
urban patio. Breakup and makeout sessions, car accidents and kindness. There
are sirens, many sirens. Light pollution and noise pollution and the sheer
evidence of humans.
By 2013, we
were in a downtown neighborhood, with a lot less space than the loft, but I had
just changed jobs and my hours-long commute suddenly became a walk, and we were
also in an apartment with a more ordinary structure. When a cousin stopped by
after we first moved in, he said, Ooh!
You have walls!
Yes, walls.
And a patio, where for several years I worked on two novels and a collection of
short stories.
 |
View
looking north. My first book of short stories was almost issued, but I was also
waist deep in writing one novel and revising another. It was a good year for
manuscripts and the weather was mild.
Denver, CO, October, 2014.
|
In April of
2015, we moved again, taking me to 20 house changes. My book of short-stories was out, one novel had just gone under contract.
(The second novel is still looking for a home)
We painted
our new walls in colors named Velvet Curtain and Cajun Shrimp and Wings of a Dove
(shades of dark blue and pinkish orange and platinum gray), but still, I spent
most of my time on the patio, hacking along.
 |
View
looking northwest, just before the weather stops cooperating,
Denver, CO, June
2016 – Top Patio
|
In support of
the environment of Patio Writing, I grow food and flowers in pots (we don’t
have a yard), because it makes me happy to have some green around. Because
there is a satisfaction in sprouting plants. Because when bees land in the
lavender and butterflies on the sunflowers and there’s one lonely grasshopper
lurking in my peppers, it feels a little like home.
 |
Squash
and sunflower blossoms on the current writing patio,
Denver, CO, July 4, 2016.
Growing is a
lot like writing–you plant, you try, you hope.
Sometimes, I
am demoralized by hail or frost (rejection), or I am are singed by heat
(rejection), or I am are pelted by rain (rejection).
Outside, I
wipe my pages dry, blot the moist from my laptop or my pages. Tarp the pants.
Manually sex (rejection) the peppers if there are not enough pollinators. I put
out a bee wash because I am concerned.
As much as
possible, in life or writing life, you look for places where you can bloom.
When I move
again, which feels bound to happen, again I will take what’s important: the
hard copies and drives, the scraps for novel ideas, the seeds I have collected
from the columbines and the peony, the volunteer tomatoes and celosia that
sprang from the compost. And of course, I will be looking for a new patio.
