Sometimes I sit in front of my computer just thinking about writing. This infuriates me. It feels like wasted time, though somewhere in that mass of matter science calls a brain, I know that it’s not, in fact wasted time. In Iowa, I wasted time. Mostly because of the in-s and un-s: insecurity, uncertainty and unrequited love. Those are things I am good at. And with one phone call on a February afternoon, I’m supposed to be good at writing too. Since I moved to Baltimore, I don’t write as often as I did in Iowa. Life here moves differently, I move differently. The in-s and un-s are still there but they mean different, more urgent things. I still teach for a living but not in the same way I taught in Iowa. That is, I take it seriously but when I speak to my students it feels different. When I stand in front of a room full of ninth graders I become painfully aware that I’m laying down the foundation for what we tell them will be a life of learning. I’m teaching them about comma splices, verbal phrases, and the past participle. Things I had to re-learn over the summer and still, I feel uncomfortable with them (to the point where I really pay them no attention). In Iowa, I taught ideas more than anything. I offered my version of “What fiction is,” that is, I told them what my fiction was as though it was the standard and they believed me. Took notes even, as though they were going to be test later. There never was. But teaching about writing made me want to write more. As if I had something to prove to my students. I suppose I did.
In my apartment in Iowa City, there was more of an affectation to my writing time. I spent an hour preparing breakfast, turkey bacon, two hard boiled eggs, and a homemade latte if I was feeling healthy. I watched podcasts of the previous night’s Rachel Maddow because, of course, I didn’t have a television. When that was done, I sat down at my desk my dingy white macbook in front of me and what was left of my coffee to my right. When I first came to look at the apartment, I fell in love almost immediately. I can write in this space I thought. I can finish here. There was a little open sun porch, just enough room for a desk and a bookshelf. When I moved in I put the desk underneath two windows that looked out onto a little grassy hill where my neighbors often sat sunning themselves when the weather was nice. I lined up my favorite novels and the collection of How-to books on writing and achieving inner peace so I could have easy access to them as I wrote. I even put en empty vase on the left corner of the desk in case someone bought me flowers or I felt the urge to buy some for myself. I received flowers twice, on my 29th birthday from my parents and then again from James Alan McPherson on the occasion of my Grandfather’s death. I never put the flowers in a vase. I liked to sit at that desk and drink coffee, smoke forbidden cigarettes and eat red berries when I felt rich, which was only once a month and always in the first week when paychecks arrived. I even placed the framed photograph of Tina Fey from the writer’s strike in the space just behind my computer. I’m still not sure why.
In Baltimore, I write in coffee shops, usually one in particular, on The Avenue in Hampden where I live. They make a good latte and it’s usually quiet, although today, as I write this, it is unusually noisy. But it’s not working quite like that desk did. For some reason, without it I feel less like a writer and more like a teacher. Not that that is a bad thing. It just is. I loved sitting behind that wooden desk handed down to me from another workshopper. When I left, I did the same. Perhaps that’s the missing link to writing in Baltimore. The desk is still in Iowa.
