My column at SleuthSayers this week offers a few glimpses at our new house and specifically at my home office and my wife Tara’s office and even at a little space our son Dashiell has claimed to indulge his own creativity. Here’s a key paragraph from my post:
So…what’s behind the desire to have an office of one’s own? Part of it is, again, the space to work—to spread out a printed manuscript on the desk and look at it or to stare out the window (and I keep the desk facing that way, clearly) or to close the door and just think. Part of it depends on the things in the space: the books that have inspired me and that I keep at eye level on the nearby shelves, for example, and my own works in progress always within arms’ reach too. In the picture of my office above, you might note a brown three-ring binder on the right corner; it holds printed drafts of various stories in one stage or another of needing attention. And the file cabinet on the left, the one with the old typewriter sitting on it? That’s got notes on other stories and the draft of a (failed) novel—or, honestly, two. And the typewriter itself? It’s an old one, of course, and I like to think that some other writer pounded out a story or two of his or her own on it. It’s inspiring somehow, and so too is the artwork on either side of the desk and—not seen here—the framed poster on the wall behind my chair, from an exhibition at Trinity College in Dublin about the great detectives, a reminder of the tradition that informs so much of what I write, so much of how I think about what I write.