Where We Live, The Rumpus-Style

By Melanie Yarbrough

I recently started yet another WordPress blog, except this time for my own personal viewing. It’s public and searchable, but I don’t write it with any specific audience in mind, and I have no desire to draw an audience. It’s simply a chronicle of my day-to-day writing struggles, for my own future probably dementia-riddled self.

One of the most common bits of advice I hear flung about between writers is to keep a journal. Write everything down! Never stop writing! Use those writing muscles! That’s what I’m doing, and that’s sort of what we’re doing with the Where We Live series at TTTR. How, when, and where do writers exercise those writing muscles? I always love the “Why We Write” section in Poets & Writers, and I think there’s something to that. We’re not all necessarily looking for the key (or even the location of the fucking lock) to becoming a successful writer, we’re just looking to see our community a little clearer, to ease the sense of aloneness by seeing others alone. Perhaps that’s selfish. Perhaps that only makes it more writerly.

Where We Live: The Behan

This week’s Where We Live comes from Thom Dunn, mastermind behind 5×500. Thom Dunn is a writer, musician, and theatre artist originally from New Haven, CT. His plays have been produced in Boston and in Hollywood. He was once paid $200 to dress up like Spider-Man and sign autographs at Wal-Mart in Lynn, MA, and his life has pretty much been downhill ever since. He currently lives in a sitcom with his girlfriend, gayfriend, and chinchilla in Jamaica Plain, MA. He brews his own beer, enjoys being Irish, and has much better taste in music than you. Visit thomdunn.net for more ways to waste your time.

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5:51pm

I’ll have a Guinness, please.

Brendan Behan was a great many thing – he was a writer, a musician, a brother, a soldier in the Irish Republican Army, and perhaps most famously, he was a drinker. “I only drink on two occasions,” he once wrote, “when I’m thirsty, and when I’m not.” Behan’s prose was renowned for its blunt and brutal honesty, depicting the often difficult truths of Irish life in the 1900s. Like most Irish writers of the era, he spent a considerable amount of time as an expatriate in Paris, and upon his return to Ireland, came to embody the archetypal caricature of the drunken Irish storyteller. He spent his days not in seclusion, but in the comfort of the local public house, drinking and writing and drinking some more, sharing his stories with anyone that was willing to listen. He became a self-proclaimed “drinker with a writing problem,” and reveled in his infamy until the day he died sitting atop his favorite barstool at the Harbor Lights Bar in Dublin.

It’s fitting, then, that the greatest and most authentic Irish bar in the notoriously Irish city of Boston should be named after such a man.

Where We Live: Inside My Head

Today’s Where We Live comes from Jason Blanchard. Jason is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying learning, media and technology. He looks forward to completing his master’s thesis in May so he can read more fiction and start writing on his blog again.

“Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time, English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.”

You know how in the The Matrix Morpheus and Trinity strap down Neo into that chair on The Nebuchadnezzar and hook that thing up to the hole in his neck and email him into the computer program designed to simulate 21st century society in sleeping humans’ minds while the sentient machines consume their bodies for energy? Well, books are kind of like that. (Bear with me.) All 2012 robot apocalypse connotations aside, what I’m getting at is that meaningful fiction allows us to enter a kind of opposite matrix: instead of leaving a “real” world and entering a virtual simulacrum to facilitate enslavement, literature allows us to leave an experience of the physical world dominated by language to access a more viscerally “real” one constructed between our minds and the writer’s. Inside our heads, literature (and probably other creative artifacts) liberates us from the desensitized contentment of the linguistic world by warping us to psychic simulations that we feel rather than articulate.

This is difficult to describe. Paradoxically, the problem with describing is the whole point.

Where We Live: In a pile of snow

By Melanie Yarbrough

The Where We Live series is chance to travel to all the different places that writers and readers live, in a deeper sense than simply geography, but the mental and emotional space they inhabit during their creative lives. Interested in contributing your own Where We Live? Check out previous entries and send us what you got.

I awoke yesterday at 5 am to the sound of snow plows driving back and forth down Cambridge street then fell back to sleep to sad dreams about all of the snow disappearing while I slept. I woke again at 730 and smiled out my window for about a half hour, just watching it fall and understanding the incredible warmth of my bed.

The snow day ended up feeling like any other day I work from home (a capability that is double-edged sword, it turns out) except for the amazing view. This morning, with the streets plowed and the buses back on schedule, I came into the office, half-wishing I could just stay in my PJs and work from home again. But when the train surfaced halfway to Newton, I was ecstatic. Frantically editing a story that is increasingly late to my writing group, I had to keep pausing to take in the untouched white landscape of the suburbs.

I read a Robert Hass poem the other day, “The Problem of Describing Trees,”  and one line in particular struck me:

No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

Aha! I thought. That’s exactly how I feel about language; that is our constant assignment as writers, to push our language, ourselves and our readers. The indelibly late story I was working on deals with snowy surroundings, winter time, animals and nature. Since descriptions of setting are usually something I have to work on during the editing and revising process, those moments of breathtaking views on the train end up supplying me with more than just a nice picture to send to my dad. Can’t describe that person your main character runs into on the train? Go take the train; find them there. Have no idea what hundreds of crows sound like all together? Me neither, which would (attempt to) explain why I sat listening to a YouTube video over and over of just that.

Research doesn’t always happen in a library. Keep your eyes peeled and your pen ready and let the settings describe themselves to you.

Where We Live: Marginalia

Today’s Where We Live comes from J.E. Johaneman, a writer in northeast PA. He is currently working on a novel about the poet John Clare. He is a Contributing Editor at Apple Thoughts, and maintains a blog called I Write in Public. He can be found on twitter under the username dogboi.

Since I was a child, I have viewed books as sacred objects. If I bought a used book, and later discovered writing it in it, I was horrified. It was a sacrilege to highlight, underline, or write in the margins. Even in college, I copied interesting passages from my textbooks rather than writing in them.

Where We Live: Wigleaf, etc.

By Melanie Yarbrough

It’s been a busy week, what with my preparations to go home for the holidays and Shane’s working crazy hours. We’re sorry if you’ve felt abandoned. It doesn’t mean we haven’t been thinking of you, checking up on you, missing you. Have you been missing us? Is this creeping you out?

This week’s Where We Live is a hodge podge, as are our brains at the moment, and we beg forgiveness.

Where We Live: On a Whiteboard

Today’s Where We Live comes from J.E. Johaneman, a writer in northeast PA. He is currently working on a novel about the poet John Clare. He is a Contributing Editor at Apple Thoughts, and maintains a blog called I Write in Public. He can be found on twitter under the username dogboi.

I’ve spent a lot of money on applications for storing and arranging data, brainstorming, and mind mapping. I’ve got DevonThink and Curio, Bento and MindNode Pro, iDatabase and…well, you get the point. They are all pretty great applications, and I highly recommend trying some of them. My workflow, on the computer, includes some of them (Curio and Devonthink) and my writing applications (FocusWriter and Scrivener). Even with all that software power, though, I always seem to go back to the good old analog whiteboard.

The whiteboard was a gift from my partner. I was going through a rough patch(major depressive episode), and he decided that if I could do something productive, perhaps I’d snap out of it. It didn’t work(I still got better eventually), but the whiteboard has become the greatest tool in my arsenal. Whenever a block is staring me in the face, I head to the whiteboard. If an idea takes root, but doesn’t want to grow, I let it flow on the whiteboard. If I’m bored, I play word games on the whiteboard, tracing words out from a word I pick at random from the dictionary. On the whiteboard, I’m not  restricted by any of the limitations that a software product might bring. I can take things to their logical, or illogical, conclusions. I can branch out into areas that seem to make no sense, until suddenly they do. In today’s modern world, it’s even better than ever. I can snap a picture of it with my phone, send it to Evernote, and by the time I sit down at my computer, the picture of the whiteboard is there.

The picture of my whiteboard doesn’t demonstrate, of course, the entire process, but it gives you an idea. I usually start in the center and work my way outwards. Sometimes, though, I don’t. Because I can start where I want. I can end where I want. I can walk away, take a sip of tea, watch dumb videos, and come back. Recently, I’ve been suffering from unexplained neurological problems, so I’m stuck at home more than I would like. Through all of my recent trials, the whiteboard has become the center of a creative process that is keeping me sane. Now if I could just convince myself to work in a notebook…

The Where We Live series is chance to travel to all the different places that writers and readers live, in a deeper sense than simply geography, but the mental and emotional space they inhabit during their creative lives. Interested in contributing your own Where We Live? Check out previous entries and send us what you got.

Where We Live: On a train car

By Shane Solar-Doherty

I’ve been turning an idea over again and again in my head for weeks, that on my days off I should purchase a day’s train pass (I usually ride my bike or walk everywhere), and ride back and forth from one end of Boston to another, my face buried in a book for an entire day. It’s because I haven’t been reading enough books lately. I’ll take in a short story from a collection here and there, maybe start a novel on a Tuesday and bookmark where I left off, knowing that I might not open that book again until Friday, maybe Saturday. It’s unhealthy.

What’s great about reading on a train is that it’s one of the few times as a reader when you can actually multitask. As you become entranced in your reading, the train (or bus) briskly (or not) escorts you to your destination. And there’s all that noise, and it’s coming from the rails, like a bowling ball perpetually colliding with the pins, and it’s a good noise, because it drowns out the sound of the conversation taking place next to you, which would ordinarily distract you from your reading because you’ve been working on that short story for weeks and thus eavesdropping on conversations all over the city just so you can figure out the way to transcend the page and imitate real life. People will get on and off as they please, on their way to work or a matinee flick or the auto mechanic, and you don’t even notice them. And you know when your stop is, you don’t even have to look up, you’ve learned the hurtles and bends in the track, the whine of the rails when the train comes to a stop, the rush of air that pours into the car when the doors open, and you know how it feels when daylight illuminates the car once you’ve finally emerged from underground.

So this is that rare tribute to public transportation. Though we despise your tendency to delay our comings and goings, and your rancid smells, and your short stops, and your fares, and your (often but not always) rude employees, and your less than stable infrastructure, and your inefficient routes — though all of that we could certainly do without, we’ll take you for who you are, simply because you give us time and a place to read.

The Where We Live series is chance to travel to all the different places that writers and readers live, in a deeper sense than simply geography, but the mental and emotional space they inhabit during their creative lives. Interested in contributing your own Where We Live? Check out previous entries and send us what you got.

*Painting courtesy of Edward B. Gordon

Where We Live: The New Yorker fiction podcast

By Melanie Yarbrough

Believe it or not, I only recently subscribed to the New Yorker‘s fiction podcast. I’ve always been a fan of reading aloud, much to my roommates’ chagrin, and this is the Astin Martin of story time: Well-known New Yorker authors reading other well-known New Yorker authors’ stories aloud then discussing the stories. You get to hear authors as readers, and not just readers of their own work in a bookstore or on a stage, but readers of fiction in general and lovers of the genre. It’s a wonderful opportunity as both a reader and a writer, especially to further blur the line between the two until it no longer matters or is capable of existing.

I work outside of the city, and each morning and afternoon I spend an hour on public transportation. The commute has allowed me the limit of distractions I needed to do the reading I’ve always meant to do. Case and point: I read Andrew Porter’s The Theory of Light and Matter in one day of commuting, which felt both good and terribly disappointing to have read that genius collection in such a short amount of time. What do I do when I’ve finished an entire physical book in one day’s commute? I switch to the New Yorker‘s always satisfying fiction podcast. To give you a little taste (Warning: May cause tearing up or abrupt laughter in public places where you are alone and seem to have no reason to be displaying these emotions), here’s the Tobias Wolff classic “Bullet in the Brain” as read and discussed by T.C. Boyle. Feel free to let us know in the comments section which has been your favorite so far, a combination you’d like to hear, or the story and author you’d choose if given the opportunity. I’d read “La Vita Nuova” by Allegra Goodman. A girl can dream, right? So indulge and tell us, who would you pick?

Check out the monthly podcast, featuring stories from the New Yorker archives chosen by a current fiction writer, at iTunes or through their Feeds page.

The Where We Live series is chance to travel to all the different places that writers and readers live, in a deeper sense than simply geography, but the mental and emotional space they inhabit during their creative lives. Interested in contributing your own Where We Live? Check out previous entries and send us what you got.

Where We Live: Highland Coffee House in Cincinnati

This week’s Where We Live comes to us from Jillian Kuhlmann from the quirky chronicle of an “aspiring something,” Return of the Girl.Turns out we’re not the only ones who love coffee shops.

If you like your coffee strong, your sunlight filtered through a clutch of vegetation growing in the windows, and your concentration occasionally and delightfully interrupted by the Duck Tales theme song – complete with a chorus that includes the barista and bar patrons – then please, please, please join me in celebrating Highland Coffee House in Cincinnati, Ohio.