My Workspace: Kathleen Alcott

“I can see the modest garden I’ve planted, as well as the veritable highway of squirrel traffic.”

We asked our instructor Kathleen Alcott to share a snapshot of her writing space. She talks about squirrels, her grandfather’s portrait, and how she has let her office change gradually.

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I refused to hang any blinds in my office. This place to write was the first I’d ever had that did not serve another purpose, and I believed I would want every view this window afforded me, would relish every bit of light and weather. From where I sit I can see the modest garden I’ve planted, as well as the veritable highway of squirrel traffic that runs along the telephone and cable wires above it. All spring I watch them drop down to dig up the bulbs and seeds I’ve buried, to alter the plans I’ve made about shade and color. The analogous nature of my work as a novelist, the vision that is every day undermined and reimagined, does not escape me. Only recently have I stopped knocking on the glass, trying to scare them away.

Previously, I had taken compulsory pride in being able to write from anywhere. I wrote on marble stoops at pulsing San Francisco intersections, in smoky Southern pool halls where I was the only woman, from cheap-ticketed back rows of airplanes, in tents along the California coast, on the pilled couches of friends who somehow did not begrudge me for refusing to set up a home for myself. Having grown up poor, sliding in and out of rented apartments, transferring few belongings from one to the next, I saw a certain danger in ever really attaching the self to a place. A place, after all, could be taken away, and how would one emerge intact? The merger of identity and environment seemed an imperfect science, a risky surgery with probable complications.

When we moved into our home in Brooklyn and I set up this office, I kept it spare, installing only a desk and a spider plant atop an aslant library ladder. I finished my second novel that way, sometimes napping on the bare floor, more and more grateful for the quiet. Slowly I have allowed the room to house evidence of my life and work: first only research texts for my next project, then shelving to house them, then a few novels whose style raised rich questions in my head. Above my desk is a framed portrait of my grandfather, a newspaper editor for decades, at his. Though I never met him, I recognize his look, the focus required to train life onto a page, where it quarrels and eludes us and doesn’t wish to be captured.

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There are still a couple of seats left in Kathleen Alcott’s fiction workshop, Choices and Concision in Short Fiction. Apply now.