Haunted Space Exploration: Lauren Gilmore
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 Lauren Gilmore, whose story “Clotting” will appear in Issue 67.
I’m one of those people who can fall asleep—or write—basically anywhere. To me, these seem connected.
I once fell asleep, mid-conversation, in a crowded frozen yogurt shop. I have slept on floors and in the backseats of cars and on strangers' couches.
Writing is like falling asleep in that you can do it anywhere and anytime if you’re open to whatever kind of dreams might come to you.
My writing process is basically chaos. Industrious, incessant chaos. I write a lot. I write when I don’t want to. I write things I don’t want to, and things that I want to write so much that it makes it impossible to put one word in front of another. Getting words down is the only consistent factor. Everything else is play, experimentation, and neurosis.
When I was still living at home, my mom set up a writing room for me with a desk, lamp, and bookshelf. I used it often, but would almost exclusively sit on the rug, hunched over notebooks and scraps of paper. I have written poems on napkins at coffee shops, receipts at music festivals, and in the notes app of my phone while waiting for a plane to take off. To me, the more deliberate a “writing space” feels, the more uneasy I get about actually using it, like a leather-bound journal that’s so beautiful that writing in it feels like a trespass.
There are chunks of time where I’ve gotten into fairly regular routines. At our last apartment, I had my desk pushed into the corner of the bedroom where two windows came together. They looked out at the garage doors of the complex and the dumpster. I got up every morning and sat there and wrote. For some spells, I’ve written at 4 am every single morning. Other times, I’ve written at night with a bottle of red wine. Sometimes, I will see what happens if I force myself to write a draft of a novel entirely by hand. For a few years, I listened to the same album everytime I wrote. It was Them vs You vs Me by Finger Eleven, and I never listened to it under any other circumstances. Right now, I have a playlist of four different albums: Mama Acoustic Recordings by Emily Wells, The Monitor by Titus Andronicus, MY WOMAN by Angel Olsen, and Girlhood by Girlhood. The last novel I finished, I wrote to Mulberry Violence by Trevor Powers.
I don’t believe in bad writing headspaces or environments. Instead, I find it interesting to realize how my writing habits fluctuate.
Right now, I spend a lot of time writing on the couch. I turn one of the tall cushions to the side and set it up like a desk splitting the couch in half and my dogs curl up and sleep around me. Incidentally, I have also been taking a lot of naps in the same place where I write.
Maybe one day I will settle into a normal routine. I’ll set up a space with an ergonomic chair and I’ll have a faithful practice. For now, I just focus on my present obsessions, time restraints, and assignments.
Lauren Gilmore writes essays, stories, and poems. She lives with her partner, two dogs, and unfortunately, mice. Her first collection of poetry, Outdancing the Universe, was published by University of Hell Press in 2015.