AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
There's something about a famous writer's room that draws us in. You can drive up to Massachusetts to see the house where Louisa May Alcott wrote "Little Women" or head down to Florida to visit the home of Zora Neale Hurston. But what is it about these rooms that captivates us? A new book titled "The Writer's Room" goes deep into that question. Here's NPR's Andrew Limbong.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: There's a three-story house in the western part of Baltimore that looks kind of imposing. Before you even get inside, you have to climb up these stone stairs, then up onto the porch. And then you enter the house, and you're greeted with a case of literary awards.
JOEL DIAZ: So this is the entry way.
LIMBONG: It's Lucille Clifton's house. The National Book Award-winning poet lived here with her family, starting in 1967 until it was foreclosed on in 1980. Since then, it's become a hub, a place that hosts artists and writers and readings and workshops. Joel Diaz, the executive director of the Clifton House, is showing me around.
DIAZ: She wrote 10 books while she was here, and that includes children's books, you know, volumes of poetry.
LIMBONG: It was a busy and bustling place back then. Lucille and her husband, Fred Clifton, had six kids running around. Neighbors were in and out. Artist friends were over constantly. But Lucille Clifton managed to carve out time and space to write.
DIAZ: She wrote on the dining room table. She wrote in the family room.
LIMBONG: And while she made do with every nook and cranny of the house, there was one room that felt special.
DIAZ: This is Fred and Lucille Clifton's bedroom.
LIMBONG: Every morning, Clifton would wake up, walk over to the desk by the window and write. Here she wrote poems which tapped into something beyond the walls of the room. Here's Diaz reading one of them.
DIAZ: (Reading) We are here between the lines. You reach through us to raise your morning cup. You have assigned us countries of the dead, but we are neither dead nor immigrant. We are just here where you are.
LIMBONG: Sometimes writers' rooms are places of ineffable magic.
If you're drafting up just, like, an email or text, does it feel different when you're doing it outside versus in this house?
DIAZ: Yes. For sure.
LIMBONG: Other times, it's just a room. Katie da Cunha Lewin is the author of the new book "The Writer's Room." She's a big fan of Virginia Woolf, and on her way to visit Woolf's summer house in Sussex, England, she'd dreamed of seeing Woolf's desk, of retracing Woolf's steps and imagining what her creative process was like.
KATIE DA CUNHA LEWIN: It's actually a little bit disappointing because it's behind glass. You feel a little bit of a distance from it.
LIMBONG: And yet she still wanted to get into the romance book lovers feel about these spaces.
LEWIN: I think that there is something about the possibility of a recipe, right? - or a formula.
LIMBONG: This idea that if I could position my desk just like my favorite writer did, or if I could also sit in a chair like theirs, maybe some of that greatness could rub off on me.
LEWIN: As if writing is a kind of magic thing that just happens rather than actually labor.
LIMBONG: Lewin's book is, in a lot of ways, a debunking of the myths of these writers' rooms. She writes about the types of writers who could lock themselves in an office for hours on end versus the ones who had other things to tend to. She breaks down which writers' rooms are preserved and which have been lost to time and new real estate developments. And yet you can't write a book like this without still being a little in love with the myth of the room.
What's your writing situation like? How do you work?
LEWIN: In the flat that I live in, I had a writer's room that I very proudly guarded...
LIMBONG: But reality always comes.
LEWIN: ...Until an interloper, my son, was born, and it's now his room.
LIMBONG: Now she mostly writes in the library.
Andrew Limbong, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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