I’m
one of those people who have great difficulty sitting still. ‘Twas ever thus,
and I know when I was younger that I drove some of my teachers – and fellow
students – nuts.
Nothing
much has changed, I suppose, so sitting down at a desk or what have you so as
to focus on writing is always fraught with difficulties. Since I don’t write
with some particular subject or need in mind, I come to my writing by way of
the line – something I’ve heard (or, more interestingly, mis-heard),
read/mis-read, etc. and build from there, letting the poem take me where it
might rather than the other way around. To me that’s more interesting and thus
more likely to brave the rigors of sitting down before a keyboard and
translating the words in my head into the motions of my fingers.
Over
the course of the summer I’ve been somewhat homeless, boarding with a friend
until I manage to find another apartment. I’m not a horrendous fuss-budget who
needs things organized in a very specific way in terms of a place to write, but
I do prefer a desk. Or a table – something with a surface on which I can put my
notebooks, coffee, and some of the beach stones I keep just to touch and hold
in my hand. And I prefer my desktop computer to my laptop in terms of something
to write on.
Right
now it’s a board – a chunk of wood laid across my lap. And it’s my laptop
sitting atop said board sitting atop my thighs as I sit on my bed. I adjust.
But I can only stand it for so long before I have to throw it all off and get
up and move around, do something involving my body and not merely my head. So
writing proceeds in fits and starts. But it’s always been that way. The only
sustained, intensive periods of writing I’ve ever done, when I was held to my
desk by an idea, was when I was working on Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War,
the book about my father and growing up a military brat. I think best through
my hands, through writing out words and sentences, and I learned years ago that
writing about something is how I learn what I feel about it. It’s a process of
discovery, and writing about my father in a sustained way was how I came to
terms with who he was and how he fit into my life.
It’s
different with poetry, though. It’s a process of discovery, to be sure, but
discovery of something I’m making up as I go along. Does that make any sense at
all? It has a very different feel about it, and it doesn’t root me physically
in place. Sometimes I need to escape it, flee, just get the hell away and be
someone else for a little while.
And
oh yeah: I’ve never had an office, never had a separate room in which I do my
writing. It’s always been a desk somewhere in some corner of some room (bed,
living, etc.). I like it that way. I’ve never considered writing something so
exotic, something so separate and apart from the rest of my life that I needed
to wall myself off in an enclosure so as to do it. That would drive me nuts. I
like being near and very much a part of the rest of my life when I try
and turn ideas and thoughts into something my fingers can yield forth.
So,
for the time being (until the start of October) my wooden board and laptop and
rock will suffice.
(Postscript:
October indeed found me in new living quarters, and my desk (actually, it’s two
set at right-angles to one another) is, of course, in my living room, near my
music, near my books, and right smack-dab in the middle of my life. As it need be.)
Gil
McElroy is a writer and artist currently living in Colborne, Ontario. He has a new chapbook coming
out from Apt. 9 Press.
