Archived Rooms

Previous Rooms:

Lee Henderson

Here's my space. Out the window: a cherry blossom tree. Out the other window: raccoon family tree. My chair is comfortable but broke, it suddenly pitches forward. My little table is bust, the leg out-of-view has been held together with duct tape for about eight years. But look at that shelf beside my broken table and broken ergonomic chair, isn't it amazing? A terrific friend named Mike Kennedy made that for me from scratch, all joinery, no screws, no nails, just pure unbeatable wood. Amazing. I love this bookshelf. What a gift! Mike is now into carving tobacco pipes and building pipe shelving units for other avid tobacco pipe collectors.

What you see on the shelf Mike built is a mix of old and new books. Dictionary. Gaddis's novels. Stuff about Duchamp. The diaries of Joseph Cornell. Popeye. Girard. Bible. Oh, look, there's Shakespeare. My books are constantly moving around my house from place to place as I try to think up new places to store them. Anyway, you can also see the Browning Hi Power single-action 9mm semi-automatic I keep on that shelf with the custom handgrip, and there's that bright blue brand-new copy of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf bought at Duthie Books after being choked by a sudden need to read Act One. Stacked above Girard and some graphic novels—Maus and Louis Riel—are a few skinny Roberto Bolano books (holy fuck) that I bought this summer at the recommendation of Montreal writer Jack Goldbach, some Anne Carson books of poetry, James Purdy, Joseph Roth, the new Vollmann book about hitchhiking, Kenneth Patchen reprints...I don't know. The pieces of framed art are by Jason McLean and Javier Pinon.

Biography:

Lee Henderson is the author of the award-winning short story collection The Broken Record Technique and a novel titled The Man Game, recently shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. He is a contributing editor to the arts magazines Border Crossings in Canada and Contemporary in the UK. Henderson has published fiction and art criticism in numerous periodicals and co-organizes Father Zosima Presents, a monthly night of sound performances in Vancouver, BC.

Jordan Scott

Spit litters Pitt Lake’s syllables. A space of work and wordmongers, of word lore and work ethic. Here, I work the oracle, work word of mouth into passages. Here, I eat my way through lake and bloat the colours left in after devour.

Lake spit litters syllables pitt. Pitt titters towards a room. A room that silts at low tide. A room that stilts the lake’s posture: of one thick forearm, clenched and severe. Each tendon burrows towards the fisted palm which holds nothing but the chill of pause.

Lake syllables. Pitt spit litters. This is a space of frayed marionette twine and drifters clotting between booms. This is a space where furniture is left to the cavernous outside and naps faucet the drool of vultures. This is a space where “direction” welts under lurching fiords, where you try for “center” and your esophagus grunts till swallow.

Syllables spit pitt: litters lake. Somewhere my pen echoes in gorge – pins species in wriggle and flail. This crumpled audio globs the valley. All song: storms trundle. All voice: strains diesel in low water, my twin-engine tonsils careen across the page.

Biography:
Jordan Scott lives in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver. Jordan’s first book of poetry, Silt (New Star Books), was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In the fall of 2006, Jordan worked on the final sections of his second book, blert, while acting as a writer-in-residence at the International Writers’ and Translators’ Centre in Rhodes, Greece. Jordan spends the spring and summer slinging canoes at Pitt Lake, the largest freshwater tidal lake in North America.

Janet Marie Rogers

To begin, I want to point out that my computer, my keeper of words, is off to the side (to the left) of centre. This is significant as my writing is only part of what I do to earn a living. Other writers, you feeling me? I am also a drum maker, a teacher of drum making, a radio host of two shows, one paid, one volunteer, and as one of my writing mentors pointed out, “You’ll make more money as a writer than you will writing,” so yes, I do public readings and get paid for that too.

“Writer” comes second when describing me. Mohawk/Tuscarora comes first. Thus the significant False Face mask in the centre of the wall, which was purchased in Ottawa while doing a Canada Council literary jury, another means of sporadic income. The paintings on either side of the “crooked-nose” are more reminders of my eastern native heritage. The left-hand painting, over the computer, was done by a Toronto-based, Ojibway artist, Richard Bedwash, who recently passed away. The painting on the right-hand side, which I titled "Geronimo," was done by a Vancouver-based Cree artist, Gerry Whitehead. These paintings and other art objects are very meaningful to me as they represent my unique perspective: an Eastern Woodland person living on the west coast. This perspective has fuelled my writing and has provided much inspiration in both my personal and creative life ever since I took up residence on this bit of unceded Coast Salish territory fourteen years ago.

My space, with the word machine and the art, is very Indian. Our words and visuals are married together. Our cultures are born from the things we value and our words help define what those values are. If we can claim it, we can name it. Historically, this has been the case, yes? So I want to explain: although my writing space is adorned with “object de art” what I’m really surrounding myself with is “medicine,” memories of home and who I am. The Northwest Coast carvings are there too, and they too, are medicine, west coast medicine. These items are presents of honour gifted to me by the artists who made them, providing evidence that I have come here from another place and have done some good—good enough to be gifted anyway—and I am very honoured by that.

I am Mohawk/Tuscarora, of that there is no doubt. It is my culture, my energy and my attitude. I am also west coast, in the sense that this land has embraced me and in doing so has granted me permission to live out my life’s purpose here as a writer. I was born in British Columbia and have made a promise to this land that I’ll live out my days here. My writing space is a little nest in a huge forest.

Biography:

A Mohawk writer from the Six Nations territory in southern Ontario, Janet Marie Rogers was born in Vancouver British Columbia. She began her creative career as a visual artist and started writing in 1996. Her literary passions are her native heritage, feminism, historical territories, human love, sexuality and spirit. Janet has many anthology credits as a writer and receives many invitations to share her performance poetry all over North America. Her first collection of poems, Splitting the Heart, was published by Ekstasis Editions in 2007. Her most recent accomplishments include the creation of a video poem entitled “Rightful Place” and hosting Vancouver Island’s only native radio program on CFUV 101.9fm in Victoria called “Native Waves Radio.”

Linda L. Richards

I’m not about the place where I write. I’m not about the space. I don’t know why this should be so, but it is.

I’m one of those people: I can write on a plane. I can write in a hotel room, a café. A bus. And I work on a laptop—though longhand works in a pinch—and so even when I’m home, I often grab my computer and go someplace else. By the hearth in the winter—I like things warm—in the garden in summer, where my greatest concern is keeping the dragonflies and direct sunshine off my monitor. Life is good.

I don’t need silence. Or special music. Or chattering. Or noise. I need a moment—a heartbeat—to slip into the world where my story lives. It’s an odd sensation: like coming home. And it can happen any place, any time, anywhere I put my mind and heart to the task. Sometimes it feels like a magical power; this ability to transform noise into silence, or the present into the past. It feels like a gift. One to be cherished. And I do.

Now all of that said, I need a place to keep all my stuff: the place where my printer lives and my computer sleeps while it recharges. I have a beautiful studio that my partner, David, made for me a little over a year ago. He customized a huge, mid-century modern teak desk so it fits snugly into an alcove by a window. The window overlooks our big front garden—we have 10 acres on a Gulf Island: it’s like living in a forest park. The view always changes. Sometimes I see sunsets and sunrises. Feral rabbits cavort across our lawn. And deer. The occasional raccoon. And I can peek out and see our long driveway if I think anyone is approaching. But mostly they’re not. Mostly it’s just peaceful and emerald and fine.

At my desk is a very good chair in a colour I adore. Chartreuse. I even like to say it. A suspended shelf in front of my desk holds copies of my novels—for those times when questions come up—as well as basic reference: Gage Canadian and American Heritage dictionaries; a 1931 facsimile edition of The Joy of Cooking; Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Necessary texts. The same shelf also holds some things that are precious and beautiful: one of David’s paintings. Lovely brass votive holders. Things I like to have around.

The studio itself is not a big space, but it’s a good one. When viewed with detachment I realize I’m proud of it. It speaks of a life spent immersed in books. Their creation. Their evaluation. Their contemplation. It’s enough.

Biography:

Linda L. Richards is the co-founder and editor of January Magazine, one of the most respected book-related magazines on the Web. She’s also the author of five novels, including Death Was in the Picture, which will be released by St. Martin’s Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books in January 2009. She lives in the Gulf Islands with the artist David Middleton and their crazy dog, Jett.

Teresa McWhirter

I'm a binge writer, always have been. I'll write ten hours a day for weeks at a time, then won't type another word for five months. It's impossible to know when the creature will appear (I think of it in the same way that my Irish boyfriend describes alcohol, as in, "He's been into the crrreature for three years now!"). When it does come around I try to give it what it needs. Everything else gets neglected. Phone calls go ignored, friends are barred at the door.

The kitchen table is my desk. I live in a house full of generous musicians and one dancing cat. On a writing binge I wake up at dawn and, so as not to disturb anyone, I'll sit in the dark and type, unwashed and wild-eyed for hours. The tools are a minimum: laptop, the dictionary/thesaurus combo, recent journals of scribbles, hot tea with cream, utter silence, and at least one marijuana doobie. The writing comes until hunger forces me to stop, or I'm driven from the kitchen like a feral child.

There have been points in my life when I've lived alone, had a desk and my own computer, a printer, shelves of books around me. Other times it's just been me and my journal. It would be lovely to have an entire room for writing. But all you really need is a pencil.

Biography:
Teresa McWhirter attended the University of Victoria, receiving a BA with a double major in English and Creative Writing. Upon graduating, she taught English in Korea, spent time in Thailand and Costa Rica, and traveled extensively throughout Canada and the US. Her first novel, Some Girls Do, was published by Raincoast in 2002. Her latest, Dirtbags, was published in 2007 by Anvil Press.

C.C. (Chris) Humphreys

‘Writer’s Rooms’ for me. My outdoor ‘office’ is only in use during the summer. The uncomfortable looking garden chair is actually not, and I enjoy sitting in my ‘orchard’ in Kitsilano, Vancouver, under the pear tree, the apple tree behind. You can see one of the French-made notebooks I like to use, and my Lamy ballpoint pen. I read here, research, sketch ideas and sometimes blast out scenes when my poor typing skills cannot keep up with my racing brain!

The other photo shows my main office, in the basement of my house. It is pleasantly cool in the summer—you can see the open garden door—and bloody cold the rest of the time! This is where I do most of my writing. When I descend (usually in the dark about 7 AM), I bear a vat of coffee, put on an electric-oil radiator and huddle in a blanket. I have not quite resorted to fingerless gloves a la Bob Cratchit but I can see the day coming. My chair is relatively ergonomic and the box the computer is raised upon to eye level is filled with proofs, bits of press, reviews – a box of relics. My feet rest on a chess set from Damascus.

It has been nice, after all the wandering, to gather the paraphernalia from a life spent travelling, acting and writing – touchstones to run to when inspiration fails, or words have become too treacherous. The poster of my YA book The Fetch covers up the fuse box. The jar on the table is for assorted sweets – a vital indulgence! There are photos of my wife and family, a friend’s pencil sketch of my favourite place to write – a 300 year old cottage in Shropshire. Books everywhere, of course, some my own (to remind myself that I can do it!), mostly research. There’s a bric-a-brac shelf with treasured items, amongst them: a perfect shell from teenage snorkelling in Spain, a slingshot from my action-hero days, a sliver of brick from Dracula’s remote castle. There are sticks and swords – often in use when envisioning a fight. The shepherd’s crook is the one thing I would grab in a fire. I will hammer out the odd tune on the guitar when blocked. I have theatre posters from plays I wrote or acted in. And a wall of ancestors: my acting/writing family, grandparents and parents, staring down, willing me on.

Biography:
As C.C. Humphreys, Chris has written five historical fiction novels, all of which have been published in the UK, Canada, the US and translated into Russian, Italian, German, Greek and Czech. His latest: Vlad: The Last Confession—the true history of Dracula—is published in Canada September 1. As Chris Humphreys, he has written a trilogy for Young Adults ‘The Runestone Saga.' A heady brew of Norse myth, runic magic, time travel and horror, the first book in the series The Fetch was published in North America in July 2006, with the sequel, Vendetta in August 2007, and the conclusion, Possession, was released this month. They are also published in Russia, Greece and Indonesia.

Chris lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife and young son.

Heather Burt

When I started this project, I considered cheating and taking a carefully staged photo of the hand-carved writing desk I acquired in Thailand many years ago. It graces a corner of the living room, all teak-scented cubbies and drawers, with a heavy, drawbridge-style writing surface. It’s the kind of desk I like to imagine myself working at on summer afternoons, with the sun cutting through the venetian blinds and a gin & tonic close at hand. But the truth is I’ve scarcely written a thing there. Thanks to my husband’s generous accommodating of my distractable nature, I have a room of my own, and this is the place where anything resembling work gets done. Kitted out on a budget at Staples, Ikea, Kitchen Corner, and the Apple store down the street, it’s terrifically generic and utilitarian (and the beverage in the mug is decaf coffee).

The L-shaped desk configuration allows me to move back and forth between hard-copy drafts (that’s my second novel in the open binder on the desk to the left — 383 manuscript pages, the first 68 of which have been marked up with satisfying scribbles and scratchings-out in different colours of pen) and, over on the computer desk, the latest Word version, which I update every few pages as I work through the hard copy.

My desks are usually cluttered with unwriterly bits and pieces, and I’d say the amount of clutter that appears in this photo is just about right. Any more and the junk would become too distracting. Much less and my awareness of the contrast between the tidiness of the space and the stubborn scruffiness of my work-in-progress would become paralyzing.

There are a few objects of interest amid all the generica. One of my favourites is the framed diploma over the computer desk. It’s my grandmother’s National Conservatory diploma in voice and piano, dated June 1915. I’ve inherited none of my grandmother’s musical talents. I can barely play Chopsticks, and I couldn’t sing in tune if my life depended on it. But when I was working on my first novel and creating a character whose existence does, in a sense, depend on musical expression, I would glance up at the diploma and imagine I was channeling the spirit of Granny Burt.

Biography:
Heather Burt’s first novel, Adam’s Peak, was shortlisted for the 2008 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Both Heather and her partner, novelist Paul Headrick, teach English and creative writing at Langara College, Vancouver. Heather is currently at work on her second novel, Driving, the story of a man whose attempts to live an authentic, self-contained life end up backfiring in ways he never anticipated.

Nancy Lee

Like everything else I create, this photograph is a work of complete fiction, and the result of compulsive redrafting, though in this case, the “drafts” consisted of intensive periods of sorting, filing, tidying and culling. Had I been brave enough to show the desk as it first appeared (the puke draft, as I like to call it) you would have been privy to stacks of unpaid bills, crumpled receipts, bulging teaching files, and my own disembowelled novel in the form of index cards, scrawled, tea-stained legal pad sheets and orphaned manuscript pages. On most days, my desk is a treacherous intersection: obligation t-bones intention and the unpaid job of generating that day’s words crashes headlong into the reality of my dwindling bank account.

This photograph exemplifies how I wish my desk looked: wide open space without the honking congestion of everyday life. Still, even amidst this sparse, traffic-calmed ideal, there are things I can’t live (or write) without. Talismans from my husband: a roaring panda badge (for courage), a carved stone heart. The generosities of my family: the replacement laptop my mother gifted me after my clumsy elbow and a glass of red wine ruined the one I had, a blown-glass paperweight from Wales, the place of my birth, given to me by my Auntie Monica and Uncle Dave. The memory of a faraway journey: a seashell plucked from a stormy beach on the Orkney Islands, and a motto to write by: “Do not pray that the load be lighter, pray that your back be stronger.”

Even though I’m not a morning person, morning is still the best time for me to write, before anything else, in pyjamas and socks, before teeth brushing or even that first sip of tea. Faced with the blinking cursor, I force myself to ignore the slag-heap of paperwork, the unfinished course prep, the lure of overnight emails. I push aside thoughts of this being my first novel or my last novel or no novel at all. What I try to do, I suppose, is disappear, leave everything behind (yes, even the unpaid bills,) and sink into the world of my own making.

Biography:

Hailed by the Globe and Mail as "a masterwork of revelation," Nancy Lee's collection of short stories, Dead Girls, was named a best book of 2002 by the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun, and Book of the Year by NOW Magazine. Nancy is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia Creative Writing Program, Program Director of the Booming Ground Online Writing Studio, and an instructor at the Simon Fraser University Writing & Publishing Program. Nancy has served on numerous prize juries and panels, and was selected as the first Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the prestigious University of East Anglia Writing Program in the UK.

Aislinn Hunter

I’ve moved and travelled so much this past three years that my little black notebook has become my desk. I put everything in it—whole drafts of poems, notes on the novel, simple observations—and carry it everywhere. This is my new desk here in Vancouver. I like the dark brown wood though it’s usually covered with stacks of paper, reference books and stray notes so it’s not always visible. I keep odd things about mostly because they amuse me (the paper doll of the philosopher Nietzsche) or because I think they’re beautiful: a wood cut from Indonesia, a globe, and some jarred roses that Glenn gave me which still—years later—smell amazingly like roses-plus-berries on those rare occasions when I open the jar. The laptop is new, the dog whose photograph is on my screensaver (Cooper) is also new as are the shelves above on which we’ve put photos of my University of Edinburgh graduation and a vineyard Glenn and I cycled through in Burgundy last year. The old corkscrews and antique cameras are Glenn’s. The ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster I bought in England after seeing it in Sarah Water’s Guardian desk photo. I met Sarah once and quite liked her and was having a difficult time in my novel so, inspired by why she had the poster, I bought one and now dutifully use it as a reminder to just work and work (and work) away.

In Edinburgh our flat was on the Royal Mile and my desk window looked down onto a lovely medieval courtyard and onto a window where the philosopher Hume once lived and wrote. The desk and chair were awful and I typed so much I sometimes got back spasms but what a view! This fall I’ll be writer-in-residence at Memorial University in St John’s Newfoundland. I’ve sublet a seismology professor’s condo right in the city-centre and even though I’m there to write I have no idea about the desk or the view. So much moving about means a desk like this one: one that waits for me every morning along with good ole Nietzsche in his plaid pants (an odd choice really, because I’m a Heideggerean) is a luxury. I love its stability and its size (so much space on which to scatter the writerly bits!) but for now a pen and a notebook and somewhere to plug in the Mac will have to do.

Biography:
Aislinn Hunter is the author of two books of poetry and two books of fiction, all of which have been shortlisted for, or have won national awards. She currently divides her time between Vancouver and Edinburgh where she is is doing her DPhil at The University of Edinburgh. In the fall 2008 she will be writer-in-residence at Memorial University in St John's Newfoundland—working away on a new book of poems.

Steven Galloway

For a long time I had a small office in downtown Vancouver, in the Dominion Building at Cambie and Hastings. There was something very satisfying about getting up in the morning and venturing out into the world, braving a short commute, riding the elevator and sitting at a desk in a room next to lots of other people who were probably hard at work. The sign on my door read “Roy’s Poodles, Poodle Training and Poodle Related Services” and from time to time I’d advertise a job opening. Once someone from the Government of Canada’s Human Resources division put their card under the door in response to a posting for a fully accredited canine acupuncturist. Good times.

I now live in New Westminster and have become too lazy and misanthropic to leave the house to work. In service of this I’ve built a small shed in the back corner of the yard, which I am currently turning into an office. It turns out I’m not nearly as competent or efficient a carpenter as I’d thought myself. But at the end of this surprisingly expensive, labour intensive and, frankly, emasculating project I’ll have 96 square feet of office bliss. The large piece of wood you can see in the photo hides a Murphy bed—naps are important. I like to make odd outlines and charts, and I also tend to pin up various photographs and maps and scraps of paper, so one whole wall will be cork board and another will be covered in acrylic plexiglass to make a sort of dry erase board system. Shelves for books, a nice big table for writing on, a comfortable chair and presto! My next book should pretty much write itself, provided I can finish the wiring without electrocuting myself.

Biography:
Steven Galloway is the author of three novels: Finnie Walsh, Ascension and, most recently, The Cellist of Sarajevo. His work has been translated into over twenty languages and optioned for film. He is currently the Cliff Writer in Residence at the UBC Creative Writing Program and a mentor at The Writers Studio at SFU. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in New Westminster, British Columbia.

Timothy Taylor

I rent an office on the edge of Gastown. It’s in an old tower built in 1910. I like the building. It’s a sort of contemporary Vancouver rendition of A.J. Leibling’s Jollity Building. Lots of one-man bands and good causes. Artists, theater troupes, a scamster or two no doubt.

The building has a famous staircase which runs from the 2nd floor to the 14th, which is actually the 13th. Story has it the architect fell to his death down these stairs shortly after the building was completed. Lots of people said they saw his ghost around the building during the first years I was here. The ghost would hijack elevator cars and stop them on the second floor, right where the architect died. The doors would clank open and you’d wait for a second. Then the doors would close and you’d carry on to wherever you were going. It happened to me numerous times, but it all stopped after they replaced the old elevators.

I’ve been down here 12 years, a long time. I had a room on the 7th floor first and wrote most of Stanley Park between that office and a bench across the street in Victory Square. I moved up to the 12th floor maybe five years ago. Lots of room and light, harbor views. I wrote Story House in this room and up at the public library, which is just a few blocks away. During that book the place was stacked with plans and architectural drawings. It’s actually a lot tidier for the book I’m working on now.

The neighborhood around here is troubled, but still full of life and community. I received hate mail when I wrote about this area in the Globe and Mail not long ago. Some people really don’t like the idea that there is anything other than poverty and addiction here. But there is. Among other things, the streets are exploding with art. Not just graff writing, but posters and photographs, random screeds. Somebody’s been writing a book in installments in the alley between Pender and Hastings. I’ve seen some of it, hundreds of words written on any surface available. It’s compulsive and strange, intensely compelling. You can’t explain it in terms of any calculation or profit motive, which tends to startle the contemporary man.

Biography:

Timothy Taylor is the author of Story House and Stanley Park, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize, and was selected by the Vancouver Public Library's "One Book, One Vancouver" program. He is also the Journey Prize-winning author of the short story collection Silent Cruise. He lives in Vancouver.

Matt Rader

I’ve moved more times than I care to remember in the twelve years since I left my parents’ home on Vancouver Island. Recently—as in last week—I returned to Vancouver with my wife and daughter from two years in Eugene, Oregon. The desk I’d used for the last eight years did not survive the trip. This was less a problem for my writing habits than for my habit of producing piles of random paper which all week have been shunted from my kitchen table to my bookshelves and back again as I sort out what piece of existing furniture will step up to fulfill the role of junk station in my new home.

Currently, I have my laptop, my printer, my Oxford Concise English Dictionary, Oxford English Thesaurus, a notebook, a small lamp, several pens, and yes, some scrap-paper on a birch coloured card-table I am using as a desk. This small station occupies the north-east corner of our living-room. Next to the table I have a filing cabinet I’ve never used, a printer, and the Korean Fender I’ve been abusing since my sixteenth birthday. To the right of where I sit and just behind me, two decent sized energy-star windows look out on the quiet residential east Vancouver street I now call my own.

But none of this is particularly important when it comes to writing. I like to have a window nearby, sure, but it’s not necessary. Perhaps more necessary are the dictionary and thesaurus, but even these I could do without in a pinch. The guitar? Not so important to the writing I suppose, but a critical relief valve for those moments of intellectual fatigue and frustration. All of this is to say that my writing habits have less to do with any particular room, or even any particular arrangement, than the idiosyncrasies of my personality and body. I need to be able to get up and pace, to crouch upon my chair like some kind of weak-backed gargoyle, to let my legs unwittingly tremor. Though the clock some times disagrees with me, I cannot sit still for long. It’s almost as if the more my mind retreats into a composition the more my body is compelled to move. In extreme moments even my body has been forced to retreat and I will find myself curled up under a blanket in a dark room trying to collect myself. Please repeat this to no one.

Biography:
The author of two books of poems, Miraculous Hours (2005) and Living Things (2008), Matt Rader's poems, stories, and non-fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies across North America, Australia, and Europe and have been nominated for numerous awards including the Gerald Lampert Award, the Journey Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes.

David Chariandy

I do almost all of my writing in the main branch of the Vancouver Public library, or in the library at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (pictured here). I’d like to say that I choose these spots because I’m a believer in public institutions, and in the relatively open spaces for reading and creativity that they cultivate, but it’s probably more to the point that I have two young kids, and I need to get the hell out of the house in order to accomplish anything constructive. I do have a day-job office in Burnaby, but I feel that it’s too far away for me to visit on dedicated writing days. My brain never seems to survive a two-zone bus trip…

I guess that I genuinely like the idea of people working or reading around me when I’m writing. I usually focus as intensely as possible when I get the chance to work (those kids, that day-job…), and so I don’t usually strike up conversations with people around me—although I have asked a guy in the carrel in front of me to turn down his iPod. (I can’t quite decide what irritated me the most: the volume of the music or the fact that he was listening over and over again to ‘Mad About You’ by Belinda Carlisle…) The librarians in both places are usually friendly, and, at the VPL, I like to keep my eyes on a few interesting regulars—quiet types, likely without money at hand or too many worldly responsibilities, who have somehow decided to spend most of their time surrounded by books. I know that some of them are probably very hard up, and that I’d be naïve to romanticize their situation, but I still find it inspiring, in a strange way, that they’ve ended up reading deeply and freely for hours every day.

Also, I’ve got an eye thing. For some reason, I need to look out at distances every once in a while when I write, and the views from my carrel at the VPL or Emily Carr do the trick. When I lift my eyes from my keyboard and peer out of the window, or else down a floor or two at the VPL (which has this extraordinarily ‘open’ architecture), I’m not drawing inspiration from the scenery (even though some of the librarians are quite attractive), but simply giving my eyes a break. I’ve heard of many accomplished writers drawing inspiration from beautiful natural environments, but I guess that doesn’t really turn me on. I need physical distance from both my personal life and day-job, near quiet (or at least rigorously controlled levels of 80s pop music), and anonymity in an otherwise social space. I need a source of electricity for my laptop and a source of coffee for my brain.

Here’s a tip. If you’re writing at the VPL, and you want to treat yourself to a good but cheap hot lunch, stroll on down to the Vancouver Community College cafeteria, where you can get a plate of stuff for six bucks and change. The lunch is prepared and served by aspiring chefs, and it’s really not that bad at all, although I always get a kick out of the fact that the servers never seem to know what the meat is…

Biography:

David Chariandy lives in Vancouver and teaches in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. His first novel, entitled Soucouyant, won the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award for independently published literary fiction. Soucouyant was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for several other prizes, including the Governor General’s Award, the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean), the Ethel Wilson Prize (BC Book Prize), the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the ReLit Award.

Brendan McLeod

I work on the sixth floor of the downtown library. My writing environment is largely a product of circumstance; my girlfriend and I recently moved into a little 500 square foot carriage house on Main Street. It’s cute and quaint but... small, so we’ve recently implemented the rule that there will be no writing allowed in the house. All in all, it’s been a fantastic tenet. Not only have we saved ourselves from having to stare at guilt inducing piles of research sitting imposingly on our living room tables, but we’ve also stopped going stir crazy and throwing various pieces of stationery equipment at one another for fun.

Trekking out each day to go write in public is kind of like a modern take on being a hunter-gatherer. Your lone goal is to find a place with proper sustenance (coffee, muffins, and water fountains) and shelter (air conditioning, wireless internet access, and good lighting). The downtown library has most of these amenities, though the best thing about it is the quiet. The place leads by example; it’s very large and teeming with people, yet so silent you can only assume that everyone inside it must be working. This is a solemn realization, always directly followed by this thought: “Everyone’s working so hard. How can they work so much? God, I feel horrible about myself. I should get to work too, otherwise they’ll all have accomplished so much more with their day. I’ll be the biggest failure ever. In fact, I am the biggest failure ever. Did you know Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises when he was 26 - stop thinking about it. Get back to work. Okay, I’ll just check Facebook one more time...”

The book I’m currently writing is set in contemporary East Vancouver, so sometimes I also find it helpful to work in coffee shops in and around that area. This way, the sights and sounds that should be in my book are right there in front of me and I don’t have to imagine anything, thereby saving the best of myself for writing procrastination induced emails to long lost friends who will never reply. Shout-outs go to Turk’s, Caffee Rustico, Re-Entry, Theresa’s, and The Grind—all locally owned businesses with great coffee and friendly baristas who don’t mind me sitting in their shops all day, suffering heart palpitations from excess caffeine.

I’m a big junkie for books by authors who talk about their writing process. It boggles my mind that someone could write numerous novels over decades and decades and not end up in a sanitorium. This is a serious problem for me, as I do hope to accomplish the former and avoid the latter. I think the key might be found in some advice I received recently, which was to write each day without hope or despair. Since I’m prone to monumental fits of both of these states, their eradication from my life has had a mellowing effect. The procrastination, however, remains a problem. So if you’re ever up on the sixth floor of the downtown library come say hi. I’ll be happy to see you.

Biography:
Brendan McLeod is a former Canadian SLAM poetry champion who was also runner-up at the 2005 World SLAM championships. As a novelist, he beat out over 500 original entries to win the 2006 International 3 Day Novel Contest for his book, The Convictions of Leonard McKinley, which was recenly long-listed for the Re:Lit Award for independent Canadian fiction. He has performed all over the world, at over 200 poetry readings, and is a touring member of The Fugitives music group, who were just nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award. He has an MA in Philosophy from the University of Waterloo.

Brendan invites you to visit his MySpace page.

Anne Giardini

I work in a reclaimed storage area in the basement of the house. My husband found the bookshelves at a salvage yard and we had someone build them into the wall. The other furniture is second hand from offices and friends. The room is mostly my own, but my husband has a practice putter in here too, just out of sight on the right. He doesn't practice when I am working but when I am walking around upstairs I sometimes hear the click when his club contacts the ball, and the ringing rattle if it lands in the cup. This is an aural representation of what I strive for when I am writing.

I keep on my desk a photograph of two young women leaping into the air. This image helps me to make a start when the screen is blank. The women are sisters, in their early 20s, the daughters of a close friend. I find their exuberance always inspiring and sometimes heartbreaking. The heartbreak relates to my strong and constant sense of loss of each moment that has just past. I don't know if there is a word for this. It is a form of nostalgia, but for the relinquishment of the immediately completed, not the long ago. I think that part of my desire to write is to arrest or at least record this loss.

I am starting my third novel and so am collecting books and stories and poems about one of its central themes, which is death. These are starting to accumulate on the right side of my desk. Bills and untended correspondence tend to pile up on the left side. The work of writing gets done in the middle on a laptop.

Sometimes I work on my computer on the couch upstairs. I get less done there, but it feels more as if I am at the centre of the house, which is where I most like to be. Going to my office feels like penance sometimes, unless the work is going very well. Then it feels as if I have made a leap and the air is holding me suspended above the ground.

Biography:
Anne's first novel, The Sad Truth About Happiness, was short listed for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 2006 and for an Audie audio books award. Her second novel, Advice for Italian Boys, is scheduled for publication in early 2009. She has started work on her third novel, which will deal with death, loss and relinquishment. To find out more about Anne and her work please click on this link.

Mary Novik

I write in a large room overlooking a stream that runs down into MacKay creek. Books and papers are everywhere. I'm blessed with a generous space and the quiet to go with it. It's a deeply personal study that is a refuge from the world. Nothing much has changed about that stream for centuries, except that fewer fish inhabit it. When I was writing about Izaak Walton in Conceit, I felt connected to rivers that he fished in England in the seventeenth century.

I keep binoculars on my desk to check out nuthatches, creepers, and hummingbirds. It's amazing how many birds you can spot while you're waiting for an idea to flit by. Once, a bear attacked our squirrel-proof bird feeder. I threw a paperweight and a three-hole punch out the window, then winged some books, but the bear kept trying to get at the seeds. Finally, I ran into the yard and pitched garden furniture at it.

In spite of having the perfect study, I have trouble getting started some mornings and drive to a coffee shop or library to turn on the ignition. The best ideas arrive when I shut off the busy side of my brain—when I'm driving, emerging from a deep sleep, soaking in the bathtub, or eating a peanut butter cookie. I cling to the hope that this is legit, like Alice Munro's wool-gathering and Gail Anderson-Dargatz's feeding the muse.

When I despair of writing a single worthwhile sentence, I console myself with tales of real writers with real office woes. Sometimes I stare at the building in Dundarave where Munro rented space until she was driven off by an interfering landlord—a trauma fictionalized in "The Office." During the seven years I was writing Conceit, I treasured a newspaper photo of Susan Swan who locked herself in her car to revise her first novel while her kids lay on the hood pressing their noses against the windshield. "The novelty wore off eventually," Susan recalls, "and I had to come out of the car."

Biography:
Mary grew up in a large family in Victoria and Surrey, and now lives in North Vancouver. Her debut novel Conceit (Doubleday 2007) is about the family of the poet John Donne. It was longlisted for the Giller, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and was chosen as a Book of the Year by both Quill & Quire and The Globe and Mail. Mary welcomes you to her website.

Charlotte Gill

I adore working in cubby-like environments, preferably with just enough room for a desk to squeak in between the walls. I think it’s a security thing, the way dogs like to hang out under coffee tables. My room has a big window, but it’s totally unnecessary. My dream office would be one those bunker-style rooms built into new condos. The closets between the front door and the boiler where the washing machines go—“flex spaces,” I believe they’re called. One of those would be divine.

I like to keep things around that remind me of real life. Above my desk is a wall hanging from Gujurat, India. Nearby, a flyer from a Bloomsday reading I attended in Sydney, Australia many years ago. Some cedar carvings from Alert Bay, B.C. In the background is a painting lettered with the quote: “It is possible to be too concerned about oneself.” That was written by English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips whose On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored is one of my favorites books. In the corner I keep a very politically incorrect Golliwog doll, given to me by my sister.

Draped over the back of my chair is a wool pashmina acquired in Mumbai. I’m usually wrapped in it, since I’m cold when I write, even in the middle of summer. My husband tells me it’s because of my frozen, hunchback posture. He’ll come in and say, “You know you been sitting like that for four hours.”

I must also admit that my workspace is never this tidy. Usually my desk is so strewn with books and magazines, accretions of dishware and junk mail, it overflows onto the floor like some kind of terrible glacial wave of paper detritus and procrastination. It trails out near the door in punch-hole confetti. I guess I must love it that way. It’s permission to be sloppy and free.

Biography:
Charlotte Gill was born in London, England and raised in the United States and Canada. Her work has appeared in many Canadian magazines, Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and has been broadcast on CBC Radio. Her first book, Ladykiller (Thomas Allen), was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award and won the Danuta Gleed Award and the B.C. Book Prize for fiction. She is the 2008 Markin-Flanagan Writer-In-Residence at the University of Calgary.

Gillian Wigmore

I have a nomadic existence in the suburban house I share with my husband and two small kids - I move to the place with the least mess at the end of the day and that's where I set up shop. Once the kids are asleep I can get to work.

Most often I write in the dining room, so I have room to spread out. I work under a painting by my mother-in-law, Colleen Couves, observed by whichever toys I missed in clean-up - here it's a trio of playmobil dogs. Off in the corner is a wool wall-hanging my husband hates but that I insist on hanging because Mrs. O'Meara of the Nechako Valley made it and in it are two geese and Sinkut Mountain, both of which say 'home' to me.

Sometimes, if the dining table is covered with essays and my husband is bent over it marking his millionth essay on Lenny and George, I go down to the basement and set up my computer on my sewing table. This is cozy, but very distracting, as the sewing wants finishing and the mending basket is overflowing.

Wherever I write, I'm grateful to have the means to do it - when I was given my computer, I was given a room of my own, no matter where I set it down. It's not a fancy room and sometimes it's a bit of a hodge-podge, but when my eyes are on the screen and the story is pumping out of my fingers, I'm able to forget about the homemaking and the housewifery for a while. Provided everyone stays asleep, I get to be the me I am in the off-hours, and write.

Biography:

Gillian Wigmore grew up in Vanderhoof, BC, graduated from the University of Victoria in 1999, and currently lives in Prince George. She has been published in Geist, CV2, filling station, and the Inner Harbour Review, among others. Her collection of poetry Soft Geography (Caitlin Press) was nominated for the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Andrea MacPherson

My office is an anomaly in our house. It’s more cluttered, more feminine, more sentimental than any other room. I spend long, unbroken hours here, staring out the two big windows. There is a park across the street, which makes for a nice distraction on days when the muse doesn’t touch down and I am not feeling inspired. On those days, I see small birds in the hydrangea bushes in our front garden, children across the street riding yellow bicycles.

My actual desk is made up of various elements, including my parents’ old front door (painted creamy-white) and a slab of glass as the desktop. It’s large, sparkly and impervious to spills (tea, water, wine, ink, depending on the day). I have an affection for doors, and I try to surround myself with things that inspire or comfort me. Other things that appear here, in this same vein: a geranium that I have (somehow) managed to keep alive for two years, straight through the winter, a photo of Arbroath Abbey and another of Advocate’s Close in Edinburgh, places I’ve visited and written about. Alongside these are notecards to remind me of all things important: words, friendship, laughter. There is also a small statue of a girl curled up that I found in Greece; some people think she seems sad. To me, she is contemplative.

The other side of the desk houses a large clock decorated with palm trees that has never kept time, a green pottery fish plate that I use for paper clips and a blue bowl used for larger clamps. There are also photos, one of a Grotto of the Virgin in Venice, and two of my grandmother who passed away a few years ago. In one, she wears a glamorous black party dress and in the other she’s kneeling down, smiling up at the camera. They remind me of her and, somehow, myself and the stories I want to tell.

What you can’t see? Bulging bookcases, a found lamp of Grecian women, a green velvet slipperchair, and a corkboard of thoughts and possibilities. And my chair. It is white, padded and comfortable enough to allow me all the long hours to find those stories.

Biography:
Andrea MacPherson is a poet and novelist. She has written four books: two novels, When She Was Electric (Raincoast, 2003) and Beyond the Blue (Random House, 2007) and two poetry collections, Natural Disasters (Palimpsest, 2007) and Away (Signature Editions, 2008). When She Was Electric was listed No. 6 on CBC Canada Reads: People’s Choice. Andrea holds an MFA from the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia, where she was Editor of Prism International. She is the Reviews Editor for Event Magazine, and teaches Creative Writing with University of the Fraser Valley and Douglas College.

Spider Robinson

I love my office.

My Jeanne, who took this photo, found it for me. It was one of the deciding factors in our home purchase: a former pottery studio, about 15’ X 7’, which lies only eight steps across the sundeck from the house. Three large windows let in lots of light, and air in summer, and every other square inch of the walls is covered with ceiling-high bookshelves full of paperbacks, trade paperbacks, CDs and DVDs. (The hardcovers are in the house. Everywhere in the house.)

It’s snug and dry even in British Columbia deluges, cheaply heated in our mild winters. It’s acoustically “flat” enough to make an ideal home recording studio for my free weekly podcast, “Spider On The Web." My computer setup is the best I’ve ever had, with surround sound and both colour and b&w printers.

But I’d love that office if it leaked like a birdcage and contained only a manual typewriter.

It’s my sanctuary, my eyrie—the first I’ve had since I started writing in 1972. Before we moved here a decade ago, my “office” was generally either a desk in a corner of the bedroom, or the dining room. Now I can enter my Fortress of Solitude, and close the door, and nobody else can come in unless I let them. Because I write from midnight until well past dawn, and must hear music while I do, I spent twenty years with flattened ears from wearing acoustic-seal headphones. Now I can blast Mingus’s Epitaph or Mahler’s 1st Symphony at 3 AM without waking Jeanne or the cat.

And now when I look up from my keyboard, instead of dressers or a china closet I’m surrounded by framed photos of all my loved ones, present and absent, by the works of most of my favorite authors and musicians, and by some of the awards I’ve been given for my work. I can gaze out the window at 100-foot-tall trees, blackberry bushes and a stand of bamboo—and I grew up in an apartment in the Bronx.

Some of my very best writing has been done in that office. And even those hours spent staring at a blank screen until beads of blood form on my forehead are easier to take, there.

Thank you, Jeanne.

Biography
Since he began writing professionally in 1972, Spider Robinson has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and countless other international and regional awards. Most of his 36 books are still in print, in 10 languages. His short work has appeared in magazines around the planet, from Omni and Analog to Xhurnal Izobretatel i Rationalizator (Moscow), and in numerous anthologies. The Usenet newsgroup alt.callahans and its many internet offshoots, inspired by his Callahan’s Place series, for many years constituted one of the largest non-porn networks in cyberspace.

For more about Spider, visit his website.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Today is Mother's Day and anyone looking at my office can tell I'm a mom. The window of my writing room overlooks my children's play area inthe backyard, so I can work in my office while keeping an eye on my kids as they play. My desk is covered in the "gifts" my children bring me every couple of minutes: dandelions and forget-me-nots, rocks, leaves, dead beetles (and a few lives ones), scraps of paper that say "I love you" or, from my four year old, scribbles that, alarmingly, closely resemble my own handwriting. Many of their drawings and notes make it to the bulletin board I keep in my office for this purpose. Right now, among the Mother's Day cards, there is a scrap of notepaper that simply says "mom." This is the first word my four year old learned to write by herself, and she accomplished this feat just this week.

Once upon a time, before I had children, my office and library encompassed the entire upper floor of my home. I thought that I couldn't possibly write without the luxury of an eight hour work day, free of distractions. Now my office is a reflection of my changed life: we have four kids, and we need every room, and so my office is in a hallway at the back of the house. The children slip in and out of the backyard to their rooms through my office, so to say my writing day is full of interruptions is an understatement. I now write whenever I can snatch five minutes. Does it drive me crazy? You have no idea. But now that I'm used to it, I wouldn't have it any other way (well, most days). The kid clutter outside my office window, the kid interruptions, the kid stuff that covers my desk as I write just serves to remind me of what - who - I really do this for.

Biography

Gail Anderson-Dargatz, whose fictional style has been coined as "Pacific Northwest Gothic" by the Boston Globe, has been published worldwide in English and in many other languages. A Recipe for Bees and The Cure for Death by Lighting were international bestsellers, and were both finalists for the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada. The Cure for Death by Lightning won the UK's Betty Trask Prize among other awards. A Rhinestone Button was a national bestseller in Canada and her first book, The Miss Hereford Stories, was shortlisted for the Leacock Award for humour. Her latest novel is Turtle Valley, a national bestseller. She currently teaches fiction in the optional-residency creative writing MFA program at the University of British Columbia, and lives in the Shuswap, the landscape found in so much of her writing. Visit her website and forum at: http://www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca/

Billie Livingston

I can’t be counted on to write in the same spot every day. Right now I am writing on a friend’s couch in Laguna Beach, California, for instance. She doesn’t mind. She’s in New York. At home in Vancouver I might be on the couch, or smooshed into a corner on the floor, stuffed with pillows. It is unlikely that I’d be at my dining table/desk but I might hole up in bed. This picture shows the closest thing I have to an actual writing room. It’s at my sweetheart’s apartment in LA where I was two days ago and where I’ll be again tonight. Tim says this picture is a fat-arsed lie because I have shoved the chair much closer to the window than it normally is. The chair is normally situated across the room where I can look at the light streaming through those translucent floaty curtains. I’m okay with this sort of lie because I’m fiction writer and a poet and in my line of work, one often has to take elements that might not hang out together normally and shove them into close proximity. In doing that one is able to illustrate a notion, a situation, a state of being with more brevity.

What I need most are quiet, light and comfort. But I will briefly give up the two latter elements if I can have a little of the first. In my old apartment, I lost my quiet for six months when the clods across the street knocked down their house and began rebuilding. I have never imagined a more gruesome revenge scenario involving a nail gun and a jackhammer before or since. I went on daily hunts for quiet. This was when I found out what big blabbermouths people have become in Vancouver public libraries. I tried cafés but I don’t like yappy music when I write. I tried churches only to discover that most of the time, every church in the neighbourhood kept its doors locked. Few things feel quite as soul-slapping as a locked church door. In the end I wrote a story where the protagonist was besieged by the noise of construction workers only to be assaulted by a lone gunman at the library. This is when I discovered that in one way or another I can’t help but shove chairs into places that they do not normally reside.

Billie Livingston

Billie is the author of two novels: Cease to Blush and Going Down Swinging (both Random House Canada). Her poetry book, The Chick at the Back of the Church was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Livingston’s shorter work has won numerous awards and appeared in newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and city buses. Visit Billie's website.

Madeleine Thien

In recent months, my writing spaces have been rudimentary and wild and beautiful. This particular space is in the town of Kampot, on the southern shore of Cambodia. I am staying in Room Number Six, in a guesthouse called Little Garden, and my writing space is on the roof.

Each morning, I carry my pot of coffee on a silver tray up three flights of stairs. I re-arrange the wicker furniture to my liking, then I pour small puddles of water around the legs of my chair and table to prevent the battalions of ants from attacking. Morning rises over the river, legions of fishing boats push out, but, far from being serene and tranquil, my rooftop gathers the cacophony and bustle of Kampot town: ice vendors, gas delivery trucks, chattering birds, the hammering and drilling from the construction site next door, children playing 'kick sandal', moto-remorques laden with passengers, and, always, music. Song--chanted, recorded, karaoked, hummed, blasted--pervades Khmer life. Sometimes, when I'm working, every sound fades away and I hear nothing but the story I'm writing. The coffee grows cold, worlds fade into and out of each other. I'll look up from my laptop to see a man pushing a wagon piled high with jackfruit, pumping a child's squeaky toy to herald his arrival. This is the hot season when green mangoes flourish in the leafy trees; the season when, with each passing hour, the heat and humidity grow ever crueller. At midday, when the hammering ceases and the construction workers lay down their tools, I, too, cease my writing.

This writing space allows me to live in my head while, at the same time, tethering me firmly to the world. In the afternoons, I pedal my bicycle out to the surrounding countryside where life is harsh and unforgiving and full of stories. When Khmer New Year arrives in mid-March, I learn to dance the ramvong, I attend the temple rituals and join in the teasing hilarity of the Khmer year-end games. In the villages of my friends, I make my peace with the days that have passed and I, like them, tend my hopes for the coming year.

The buildings of Kampot are a haunting remnant of the wars that have torn Cambodia apart. Many are gutted or blackened by rockets, mortar and artillery fire. The old market, closed since the Pol Pot years, is a rusted, rotting heap. Like elsewhere in Cambodia, a great many people survive, precariously, from day to day; and many, too, grow prosperous and hopeful as the years of peace add up, slowly, into nearly a decade. In this writing space, there is no escape from the world. The world only draws one deeper into itself, its beauty and contradictions, its suffering and its offerings.

Many times, during this season, electric storms come and splinter the sky. I love these moments. Sometimes you can hear the thunder hours before the storm arrives. Sometimes the storms swerve away and leave the land dry and thirsty. Some days, I turn the tap and the writing comes and it feels miraculous. Other days, nothing arrives, but then I'm happy to shut my laptop, put away my books, and venture out into the heat of the world.

Madeleine Thien
Madeleine was born in Vancouver in 1974. She is the author of Simple Recipes, a collection of stories, and The Chinese Violin, a children's book written in collaboration with artist and filmmaker Joe Chang. Her most recent book, Certainty, won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. Madeleine's work has been translated into 15 languages. She lives in Montreal.

For more information about Madeleine's books visit McClelland & Stewart.

Elizabeth Bachinsky

The furniture you see in this room belongs in a pressroom. It is also the furniture you’d see if you walked through my front door. These are typecases and they are filled with lead type. In the foreground, you see the paper cabinet, which is full of broadsides and paper for current and future printing projects. And that’s my press, a 1921 Chandler & Price, languishing in the far corner. What you can’t see: my desk, bookshelves, comfy chair, dining table, bed, dresser, sofa. You’d see these if you pulled-back-to-reveal. That’s because I live in a one-room studio in Vancouver with my husband of ten years. We are very close. I choose to show you my typecases because, technically, I should set type in this corner of the room but really I begin writing here. I like to work standing up and this furniture is perfectly slanted, like a drafting table, and exactly the right height. I learned to work this way while working as a printer’s apprentice at Barbarian Press in Mission BC. At first, a printer’s apprentice is made to stand for hours on end, day after day, as she disassembles text and puts it away. So I stood, for months, taking apart and putting away and turning to the notebook beside me to write (by hand) lines, notes, and what-have-you. It’s a very good way to work, especially since the act of writing can be particularly sedentary. Which is to say, I also work on more expected surfaces as well.

I have a desktop computer (Mac) onto which I copy my handwritten notes and lines and continue composition. I also use a laptop computer that I take with me whenever I’m away from home or just need to get away from the studio. I have always carried a notebook with me wherever I go. Now I try to carry a notebook and the laptop. I am hoping this will shorten the amount of time between note taking and composition. At a certain time when writing, let’s call it revision, I find it better to work in an electronic space. The work I do there is a lot more like sculpting than writing. It is a process of taking away and moving around and mucking about. Sometimes you get lucky and a piece presents itself to you but, more often than not, the work requires revision. Some writers I know are very into spontaneity and the lack of artifice spontaneity can bring. Sometimes I’m that writer, sometimes not. I don’t know if I could tell you where or how.

Elizabeth Bachinsky

Elizabeth is the author of two books of poetry: Curio (BookThug, 2005) and Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood Editions, 2006) which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. Her work has appeared in anthologies, literary journals, and on film in Canada, the U.S., and abroad, and has been translated into French and Chinese.

Jen Sookfong Lee

When I started taking pictures of my home office, I took a whole series of shots that weren’t very interesting. After all, my office houses all the usual things: a desk, a computer, some books and a very ugly filing cabinet. Then, I started taking pictures of more specific objects, the things that make my office unlike anyone else’s, like, for example, my grandfather’s Head Tax certificate, without which I could never have written The End of East. But still, this wasn’t good enough. I wanted to show people something more unexpected.

Incidentally, the thing you should know about my office is that it’s in my narrow townhouse in southeast Vancouver. The window looks out into Everett Crowley Park, which borders my backyard and in which I spend far too much time trying to keep my dog from eating mud. Yes, that’s right, she eats mud. When I’m sitting at my desk, all I see out my window are trees and bush, finches and hummingbirds, and this tricks me into believing that I don’t live in a big city and am writing from a cabin on Cortes Island.

This is the picture I finally decided on. This is a corner of my desk on which sit a bowl that my friend’s husband made for me out of salvaged wood, some pens with woollen finger puppets on them (that’s a dolphin and a hippopotamus in red overalls, given to me by my sister), a pants-less Babar doll who somehow lost most of his clothes during the wild years of my childhood (perhaps I had him attending too many keg parties with my paper dolls, none of whom survived, so he should count himself lucky) and a Barbapapa stress ball that my friend sent to me from France. Apparently, I need to relieve stress, but only with a shape-shifting, French-speaking blob.

I keep these things with me because writing is a very solitary business. I spend most days alone and, since I come from a big family, this is a great challenge. I’m in danger of becoming an eccentric at the best of times, but now that I’m by myself so much, I could very well turn into Joan Collins and begin swanning about the house in a mink tuxedo just to amuse myself. The bowl, the finger puppets, the Babar and the Barbapapa remind me that there’s more to the world than just my office. Every one of those objects was given to me by someone I care about and it makes me feel that I’m part of the greater human community, even when I haven’t spoken to anyone except my dog for ten hours. This is important to me because once a writer loses perspective on what the real world actually is, then that writer has nothing left to write about.

Jen Sookfong Lee

Jen wrote her first short story at the age of 10, and has since published her poetry, fiction and articles in a variety of magazines. She was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Poetry, and has also freelanced as a food writer. Her debut novel, The End of East, was published in 2007. She is currently working on her second novel.

Visit Jen's website: http://www.sookfong.com/