Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!
Where Writers Write is a series in which authors 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 Nicole Walker.
Nicole is the author of Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited the essay collections Science of Story with Sean Prentiss and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction with Margot Singer. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and is a noted author in Best American Essays. She teaches creative writing as a professor of English at Northern Arizona University.
This is David Carlin.
David is a writer and creative artist based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015), and Our Father Who Wasn’t There (2010), co-author of 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (2019), and the editor, with Francesca Rendle-Short, of an anthology of new Asian and Australian writing, The Near and the Far (2016). His award-winning work includes essays, plays, radio features, exhibitions, documentary, and short films; recent projects include the Circus Oz Living Archive and WrICE. He is a professor of creative writing at RMIT University where he co-directs the non/fictionLab.
Where I (We) Write
The place we
started writing our book together was Fairhaven beach, near Melbourne,
Australia. It is a pretty good place for dreaming up ideas. Not so good for
laptops, so we only wrote it in our imaginations at this point.
David visited
Flagstaff after (or before) one of our reconnaissance missions in Tempe, AZ for
the NonfictioNOW conference. We hiked in the woods behind my house. We even
went for a run! David wore all white because, in Australia, running is akin to
playing tennis. It’s tricky to run in the woods of Northern Arizona. Rocks
conspire to trip. Still we ran. Writing
in the forest is harder than running, even though it is, of course, the nature
lover’s dream to sit under a big tree and write about the way of the world.
Instead, we returned to the house. then showered, then came to my house to
conspire on our own.
Near Fairhaven
beach we are lucky enough to have a small beach house where we could write. The
house is on a hill and surrounded by ironbark (eucalypt) trees. This means that
one’s writing companions are most likely to be feathered. They look cute, these
sulphur-crested cockatoos, but have a penchant for eating wooden railings. He
is just waiting til I look away.
I don’t have an
office so I write at the kitchen table. David and I wrote from here the day he
visited. For dinner, I grilled branzino--the sea bass that’s pervasive in
European restaurants. People don’t think you can get good fish in Flagstaff but
we have an airport. Whole Foods and Karma Sushi fly fish in daily.
More often I
(David) am in the city. We live in inner-city Melbourne. This is the view from
outside one of my favourite local cafes, a sometimes writing spot. Looking over
at the old milkbar on the corner, which is gradually becoming overgrown with a
thicket of graffiti. Down the middle of the street, our beloved Melbourne tram
tracks—we are so lucky they never ripped up the tram lines in the postwar
frenzy when they thought car travel was the future.
I’ve just
received a message that David has arrived in the United States. He is an
intrepid traveler. He cured me, when he invited me to give a reading in
Melbourne, of long flight fears. Still, in the scheme of things, I’d rather be
on my deck, writing in the sunshine than trying to sleep on an airplane. But
without airplanes, this book would not exist.
This is my desk
at home. Hopefully you can’t read my terrible handwriting. The soft southern
light floods in through the window (remember, I am in the Southern
Hemisphere!). Outside there is the sound of construction. Cranes all around.
New apartments blocks, urban infill. Too much concrete, but soon we will be
able to walk to everything, we hope. This is where I sometimes Skype Nicole,
and we compare our opposite seasons and opposite times of the day.
This is my
writing chair. When David isn’t visiting, and no one else is visiting, and when
I have finished with the tuition waiver assignments and the human resource
trainings and the Environmental Certificate curriculum revisions, I sit down to
write.
As all writers
now know, we are not supposed to sit all the time. Sitting is not good for you.
This is a challenge for writers. We are supposed to dream of having those
treadmill desks, so we can both be walking along and feverishly writing away,
at the same time. I have never actually tried one. We couldn’t fit one in, even
if we could afford to buy one. So every now and then, I use my ‘standing desk.’
My standing desk is an old chest of drawers in the hallway. I can write there
for a while (until my feet get sore), under the amused (or bemused) eyes of the
tin toys on the mantelpiece above, who are always happily racing along up
there.
But then, I get
company, which is lovely, but makes the writing slow-going.
In Melbourne
too, there is daytime company for writers. Sometimes we have an adolescent
ringtail possum that will wedge itself into a cosy spot for a long siesta. I
like to think of it as the local spirit-animal for asking questions.
