Haunted Space Exploration: Julia LoFaso
Astronauts perform some strange superstitions before they shoot off into orbit to explore the vast expanses of space. NASA commanders play cards with the tech crew the night before a launch, continuing until the commander loses a hand. Russian cosmonauts pee on the right rear tire of their transfer bus on the way to a launch. These are strange quirks, but they are crucial for these space-explorers to feel comfortable before and during a mission.
Writers also have rituals that must be performed in order to shake off bad vibes and get into a zone where they feel comfortable putting words on a page. When we read a great book, we only see the final product, and not the obsessive care put into the work environment that allowed for its creation. In SPACE EXPLORATION, our goal is to demystify writers’ environments and explore the ways in which they’ve been created and curated, and how they affect the mental spaces of the authors who inhabit them.
We asked writers to tell us about their necessary spaces; the physical spaces as well as the desired headspace to write. We asked about their rituals— special meals that have to be eaten pre-writing sesh, only writing in purple ink, lucky pieces of clothing that may have once inspired a particularly powerful passage. We asked them to engage our senses and tell us which aspects of process must be deliberate and what is arbitrary. These are the spaces they shared with us.
This is the one of five features from select authors in our HAUNTED issue, this time featuring Julia LoFaso, whose story “How to House the Wanting” will appear in Issue 67.
Build It/Burn It
It helps to have something hot to drink. It helps to not be hungry. If I write for a long time and get hungry along the way, that’s ok, but I can’t begin there. Hunger is automatic desperation, a failure in advance. I don’t mean to use the word failure in a self-flagellating way, but as a reminder to take care. You have to eat.
This is the way I used to write: type five words, delete five words. Type four more words, delete them. It’s like watching a game of Pac-Man, my partner told me, and I did feel like I was inhaling ghosts, losing my own opacity by the second.
Around the time when the words dwindled to nothing, and I felt like I might also disappear, I lucked into a writing group with two brilliant women. I highly recommend this! We don’t always exchange writing, but we almost always talk about process. Specifically the process of inducing a trance, a meditative state where you aren’t overthinking, aren’t second-guessing everything before it can exit your brain. We ask questions like what if you don’t write from your brain at all? What if you write from some gelatinous place inside yourself that’s molecularly identical to a river? From your genitals, from your appendix, from the scar on your left forearm. What if you write in conversation with a tree? What if you imagine that, rather than performing a human act called writing, you’re just another kind of animal doing whatever thing it does? What if you’re a baby, wailing? Get that baby a snack!
Music helps too. I usually keep it wordless. I like William Basinski, an ambient composer best known for capturing the sound that a stack of old reel-to-reel tape loops made as they disintegrated. He helps me believe there’s beauty in dissolution, that creation doesn’t always have to involve building a solid foundation with walls and sheetrock and framing and architectural permits. Excelsior! Rising action! All that caulking. I mean, it can’t be the only way. I try to reassure myself before I start that not everything has to be so airtight. What if instead of building a house (so HGTV, so Ford Tough), you’re stoking a fire, and it needs that air to stay lit?
I don’t know. Maybe it would help to have a workspace with a roaring fireplace, and one of those cliché floor-to-ceiling bookshelf ladders, but it’s hard to say. I used to write in a Panera Bread franchise a few blocks from my old apartment, and it had a fake fireplace that was never on. I used to write in a coffee shop that roasted its own beans over storm-felled trees. I miss leaving with their burnt smell in my hair.
Right now I’m writing at home, sitting on an Ikea foldout couch with the cushions doubled behind my back and the computer at 17% on my lap. My kid just came in to ask what I’m doing. Did I do something? Is this my workspace now? Is this a piece of work? Here. You decide. I’m too hungry.
Julia LoFaso has work in or coming from McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Conjunctions, Cincinnati Review, Wigleaf, CHEAP POP, Hayden's Ferry Review, and others. She lives in Queens.