Eating and writing

A few days ago I read Mary Rechner’s essay “Why I Hate Food” and I’m still thinking about it.

It begins:

The aesthetics of today’s food culture (jam jars, wire egg baskets, communal wood tables) will soon appear as dated as macramé, but I fear the damage to a generation of women who are tending (and butchering) rabbits and chickens, and raising vegetable gardens (often along with children) has already been done. These activities are obviously more creative ways to spend time than watching soap operas, but urban homesteading and “the home arts” should not be confused with real art-making, which involves challenging the status quo, not feeding it.

The one sentence that really got me, though, was this:

The primary reason I refuse to place “eating correctly” at the center of my consciousness is because in doing so I would lose ground on my essential life project: living a dogma-free existence while maintaining psychic (and actual) time and space to write fiction.

And I thought, yes.

I like to cook.  I like to eat.  I like to cook and eat things that are made with recognizable ingredients (chicken, carrots, lentils, broth, milk, flour, butter, raspberries, etc.) (and no, those things do not add up to any particular/peculiar recipe!) and not things that come out of a package and are placed in a microwave.  But

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Writers’ bedrooms

How quickly I’ve become accustomed to my new writing space!

We moved about a month ago (so perhaps it’s no longer “new”) and I set up my desk in our bedroom in a little alcove facing two windows and a big leafy tree.  It’s much lighter and loftier than the view from my old writing space (in which my desk faced a wall next to a window, but the window had bars on it and looked out at the grey trunk of a tree — not its green canopy).  (I used to call our old place “the asylum” — because of the bars on the windows, although the bars were, of course, meant to keep unwanted people out and not us — however crazy — in.)

I spend much more time here — at my desk, doodling around with various projects, watching the light change on the leaves outside — than I ever did there.  It’s become a hatchery again (and not an asylum!).

One of my doodling-arounds led me to this gorgeous spread in Apartment Therapy — “Literary Style: 15 Writers’ Bedrooms.”  It’s a slideshow of writers’ bedrooms and claims that

nowhere is the essence of the artist more present than in the bedroom. It’s here that one can intuit much about a writer’s process. Is it a hermit’s lair? A sanctuary? A work space? Is it the place where they do all of their best work, or the place that allows them to leave that work behind?

For this writer, the answer is all of the above!

Here are a few of my favorite writers’ bedrooms:

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