Search results for: Kimberly Mayer

Photo by Paul C. Mayer. Away By Kimberly Mayer My first thought while boating in the San Juan Islands was that if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I am coming here, to the edge of the continent. Later I refined it to: If I were a bird, I would live here. If I were a deer, I would live here. If I were a fish, I would live here. Finally, after numerous sojourns to the islands, it occurred to me, If I were human, this is where I would live, t…

Photo by Paul Mayer. This post originally appeared at Kimberly Mayer’s blog and is reposted here with kind permission. I have my father on speed dial. He said to call any time I need to hear that our country, our world, will survive president-elect Trump. While the nation is going rogue, I am sitting on my island in the Salish Sea thinking this is not far enough away. On election day, I wore ironed white linen in honor of the suffragettes. And Bu…

Photo by Kimberly Mayer. This was the year of the house for me. It has often been the year of the house, but never before as extensive a remodel as this one. At the same time, this was the year of the writing hut. The sweet little shed that came with the house. The shed was what cinched the deal for me, along with the lot: half an acre of old-growth forest, turned the long way along the bay. With that sweet little shed down at water’s edge lookin…

Photo by Paul C. Mayer. I am thinking of the lengths that writers go to, to write. Or any artist, for that matter. We’ve all known places that are conducive to writing, as well as those that are not. Some of them quite toxic. How can we find, or create, environments where we can write? This is, of course, quite personal. I can only share with you the mistakes I have made, and some of the gems I have found along the way. When I first identified wi…

Photo by Paul Mayer. Gertrude Stein did it in her Model T Ford while her partner, Alice, drove the car. Virginia Woolf did it standing up. Saul Bellow stood up as well. Whereas, James Joyce preferred to lie on his stomach in bed. Nude and cold, Benjamin Franklin did it in a dry bathtub. Agatha Christie, in a bathtub filled with warm water. Rita Dove, by candlelight in a cabin. And Annie Dillard, in a tent pitched in her yard on Cape Cod. E.B. Whi…

Photo by Paul Mayer. I don’t need time, I need a deadline. —Duke Ellington With a deadline on the immediate horizon, your writing space can grow wheels and wings and morph into a moving vehicle. That is when I think of my writing space as aircraft, specifically a small prop plane. What do I know about flying, but from having read the many journals of Anne Morrow Lindberg and Beryl Markham’s memoir, West with the Night? Well I know that when the g…

Photo by Paul Mayer. “The country that is nowhere is the real home.” Thomas Merton It was a summer and fall for road trips. Always a long way to anywhere from our home on San Juan Island in the northwest corner of the contiguous United States between the US mainland and Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. On one trip we were riding high to Napa Valley for our daughter’s wedding. A couple months later, our destination was a writing worksho…

Photo by Paul C. Mayer. It is cold and damp, but after a few minutes with the heater turned on, it’s quite comfortable in my hut. Nevertheless I am wearing a hat, scarf, flannel leggings, a faux-fur-lined sweatshirt, and my favorite wearable prop for writing: fingerless gloves, for wearing a pair makes me feel positively Dickensian. “Type away,” my hands want to say. It’s a different kind of heavy lifting now. My back says otherwise. My back woul…

Second version of Bedroom in Arles, Vincent van Gogh, September 1889. The essential question is, ‘Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?’ Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words your characters will speak, ideas—inspiration. —Doris Lessing It was a day in the summer of 1999. Nearly 20 years ago, and yet I can close my eyes today and recall the colors, the l…

Almost a rock dad, waiting at the hospital for baby to arrive. Photo by Kimberly Murphey. About six months into my wife’s pregnancy, I started to feel a sea change in my consciousness and sense of self: I began to feel unmoored, like some other force had taken the reigns and the trajectory of my life was now out of my hands, the direction unknown to me. This proved to be mostly true when my son was born—I felt like I did not know who I was anymor…