Prose Night at The Writing Life, 14 December 2024
A look at where I write and what difference it makes.
Writing spaces are something I’ve discussed before online. They are often treasured spaces, places people who write carve out as best they can in the circumstances they find themselves in. I remember hearing about how Stephen King used to write in the cramped laundry space of the first home he shared with his wife1.
I have an interest in seeing the writing rooms or offices of successful writers. I envy those with spacious accommodations, massive desks, luxurious seating, and all of the accessories. Spaces, in fact, writers would want to spend the majority of their lives in.
I’ve lived in four separate homes and two different apartments during my life as an adult, as well as my childhood home in Muscatine, Iowa. In considering my past setups in all of those residences and comparing them to the writing space I have now, I’m coming to the conclusion this might be the best writing setup I’ve yet to have for my writing. Hope springs eternal I might come upon an equally good space in the future, but this has to be the best setup so far. And it’s a good thing, since I’ve got a lot to get written before I wrap it all up.
Where I Wrote Before
I started out in the basement.
It was probably appropriate for me to start there, since I had hung out in my parent’s basement for the majority of my childhood. Since I was an only child, I had the run of the place to myself, so although I slept in a perfectly good bedroom on the main floor, I hung out in the basement where I could watch television and play video games on the big screen downstairs and read to my heart’s content. So, this is where I started writing.
My first writing instrument (other than pad and pen) was a desktop computer2 on a rolling desktop stand. It was tucked away on the other side of the staircase, between the television area near the stairs and the laundry room on the other side. It was all right. It wasn’t the most spacious of desks, and my memory is there was not a doorway to the basement, so it was not the most isolated of places. It was a good start, even though I had plenty of good starts but not much in the way of good writing finishes back in those days.
I trucked the desktop stand to an apartment where I first set up in my bedroom, and then when I moved into a second apartment I used the spare bedroom for my space. At least those places had a door I could close, although there was a premium on space in both places.
The desktop stand made a last appearance at my first home in Clinton, Iowa, where I perched it in a back room of our house which used to be a porch and had been turned into a fully insulated den with plenty of windows and nice built-in bookshelves which I loved. I’d hang out on the couch, watch television, and then get some writing done. I mean, not a lot compared to recent years, but a little. I did have swinging doors to the place, but nothing that could be locked. The fact it also happened to be the main entrance to our home made it a bit too-well traveled to be perfect. It wasn’t horrific, however. I spent ten years there, but I didn’t write a whole bunch.
New Places and Spaces
My wife, kids and I went back to our hometown of Muscatine when she got a new job there and our instincts told us it would be the right place to raise our kids. Their grandparents were there and I hadn’t had the chance to grow up around my own grandparents. It felt like home to me for sure, so it was comforting. So we went and spent thirteen years there in a four-bedroom, three and a half bathroom house that was the biggest home my wife and I ever owned and is likely the biggest home we’ll ever own. Since we decided to stop at two kids, it was plenty of room for us.
With one master bedroom and one bedroom each for my kids, I claimed the smallest of the four bedrooms (and the one closest to the stairs) for my own writing study. I could close the door, which was a plus. I stuffed bookcases around the walls of the room, drilled space for bookcases on the walls, and tucked a corner desk into one corner and called it my writing space. I even had a futon there where I could curl up and sleep at times. And as you can even see from this pic, this was the peak of my willingness to collect kitschy items and display them.
It was a fine space to work, and I remember it fondly since it was where I finally decided to get serious about writing after so many years of procrastination and false starts. That desk was where I wrote The Holy Fool. It was where I got started on The Yank Striker. It was where I got started on blogging and poetry, two things I didn’t think I’d master. I have good memories about that crowded space3.
Chariton Days
We moved to a totally alien city in an isolated section of south central Iowa due to my wife’s professional advancement. We found a lovely funky three-bedroom, two bathroom, two story home right on a busy Iowa 14 driving through the midst of the city. It was far smaller than the battleship we had in Muscatine, but it suited me, my wife, and the pets we had at the time. At first, I decided to seize the front bedroom of the house for my writing getaway. It was cramped and I had to install some bookshelves to fit my collection in there, but I made it work. However, circumstances required me to make a change4.
I abandoned my cozy bedroom study and decided to improvise a writing space. I found it here (in the photo above) on the landing of a winding staircase up to the attic and a converted master bedroom. This landing had been where a previous owner had a knitting area. It became my new writing space, and I borrowed my wife’s pocket desk5 for my own purposes.
Despite all of its disadvantages, I grew to like the location. As it was at the top of a landing, naturally there was no door to close to keep the outside world away. However, the twisting staircase, although inconvenient to climb, also helped to keep me hidden from sight from anyone on the ground floor. I seemed to enjoy the challenge of having a small space and making use of every cubic inch I could spare.
In the end, I got a lot done there. I finished The Yank Striker on that staircase landing, and I began writing on Substack there, too. More than a few other projects saw their origins there.
Where I’m at Now
This past year, however, my wife’s interest in advancing her career goals, getting closer to our family in Muscatine, and our itching to be in some nice little river town like Muscatine or Clinton brought us to Fort Madison, Iowa. We started off in a three-bedroom apartment located in a former high school and middle school there, and I decided to appropriate one of the bedrooms for my writing den. Space was at a premium in the old apartment, and I had to improvise to find places to put things, but the old desk of my wife’s made the place feel like home.
It wasn’t the best writing space, but certainly nowhere near the worst. To be honest, being a teacher living in a former schoolhouse was an irony I couldn’t resist, and I look back on our time living there with fondness.
Eventually, however, we decided to find a home of our own in Fort Madison and settled on a mid-20th century two-story home with four bedrooms and two bathrooms. It was only slightly bigger than our Chariton home (which we had loved), but we’ve really started to settle into the place and make it our own. For me6, when we first started looking at the house, I cast my eyes toward the basement.
As unfortunate as the world can be sometimes, I have to say my wife and I am pretty fortunate when it comes to our basement. The lady who lived here before us was a quilter, and had adapted the basement to be a fine production place for quilts. By the time we bought the place, most of the basement had been cleared out, but there was a desk left there in the corner that served as a workspace. I ended up returning my wife’s desk for her use and appropriating the existing desk for myself.
As I sit here in my basement, I have to give thanks to all appropriate parties for my good fortune. I’m in a dry and usable basement, with plenty of storage for my books on both the bookcases I brought down here and the existing shelves installed in the walls. I can close a door at the top of the stairs to the basement if I need to work. The Internet is working fine. I not only have a full bathroom and shower facilities within a few steps of my desk, but a fully functional refrigerator and tons of storage space on the opposite side of the basement.
Especially on a day like today when Iowa appears to be coated with ice, I’m grateful for the little things like a peaceful place to write. And for those of you who might have a different passion than I do, I hope you have an equivalent place to call home as well.
Obligatory Panhandling (lol)
Go to the links on the side if you are reading this on a desktop/laptop or the links on my profile to check out some of my other links. For example, in those places, you can find out about my first book, the journalism thriller The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt, as well as the first book in my The Yank Striker series, The Yank Striker: a Footballer’s Beginning.
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I think his current writing space(s) is/are a big improvement over that place.
I’m not going to mention the desktops and laptops I wrote on over the years. As with armored European knights and their horses, I didn’t name them or develop too much attachment to them. I knew one day they’d go down and I’d be hunting for a replacement soon enough.
It got kind of dingy at the end, but that’s what you get when you have carpet somewhere and it’s tough to reach all the little places to clean.
Of course, we found ourselves for about half a year hosting both our children, then in their late teens/early twenties, at our home due to various circumstances.
Which she had used for her own freelance business for a time.
Who isn’t as sensitive to housekeeping items as my wife.
I'm more intrigued at this point about what you're WIFE's profession is that has you relocating all over these little towns in Iowa! I prefer writing with a window, but then maybe that's why I don't get as much done as I could. Thanks for sharing.
My writing space is filled with books, a leather loveseat and ottoman, a fireplace, a kitchen and peninsula where I can eat or sit and have coffee, my dog (Joey), and my pigeon, Noble who flies around from the top of the kitchen cabinets to the fireplace to the top of an loft. Noble also bee-bops around on the floor with Joey. Joey and Noble are good friends.