Writing Space

A while back, one of my former journalism students asked if I would consider sharing where I do my writing, to give a sense of my “study/office.”

I’ve given his request time to percolate, but now is as good a time as any, I guess, to share that I don’t really have an office. The office room in our house is used by my wife, Terrie, who works from home. I have my own old desk in there, a beautiful, circa-1940s piece that was my father’s work space in the loft of his dry cleaning store until, buried under an avalanche of junk, my mother suggested he bring it home so I could have a desk when I was about 10.

There’s a story behind that desk. Not only did my father have to haul it in a cab home from his store in Manhattan (along with a perhaps-even-older solid wood chair), but I have no idea how he got it up to our fourth-floor apartment other than knowing, somehow, he managed to have it moved into my room while I was sleeping.

The desk has followed me throughout adulthood. I took it (along with my childhood piano and an old TV cabinet) when my mother moved to Florida in 1989. All three pieces remain with me today, and none look like the versions I grew up with. I refinished the piano and the desk, while Terrie did an amazing makeover of the cabinet, which has found a second calling, perhaps its true calling, as my dresser.

But back to the desk. The problem, once my old computer station was removed from the office and Terrie’s huge work station moved in, was I found my old childhood desk too small to actually work on. Yes, I can certainly use my laptop on it, but there’s not a lot of space to, as Moe Howard used to say, spread out.

So these days, I write wherever I can and whenever I can. Most frequently, especially with fiction, you can find me writing either on my living room couch or at the bistro table in our kitchen. Or, as luck would have it with this blog post, one of my counseling clients cancels and I am at my big old desk at work with time to spare.

To my old student, I would say don’t worry about the writing space you have. Head space is more important than physical space when it comes to allowing the creative juices to jangle.

And, as my father might have said, “10 points to anyone who knows where the phrase ‘juices jangling’ originated.”