Space Exploration: Cameron Finch
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.
Our fourth feature was written by Cameron Finch.
Confession: I’ve always been eager to spy on the lives of other writers and their rituals (here’s looking at you, Writers’ Fridges). Not for competitive purposes, but for pure curiosity and wonderment. Interviewing authors is just one way that I get a glance into the messy process of another’s creative life. And yet, the thought of reflecting on my own writing space and obsessive quirks had never crossed my mind and was, dare I say, frightening to even begin to approach. What shadowy darkness would I discover about myself when I stopped and really looked at my self-created patterns? We are so introspective in our craft—how foreign of an idea to zoom out and remember the artist’s body sitting in a room. Why is it that we so often find other people’s lives so much more interesting than our own? Saying this, it really shouldn’t surprise you that I identify first and foremost as a fiction writer.
Recently, my writing space has been in flux as I was living in a box of a dorm room at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier and in July, I moved to a box of an apartment in New York City. It turns out that I am quite fond of small spaces.
These room-boxes are both my living and writing spaces (maybe those are one in the same?). As you’ll see, I’m a bit of a homebody when it comes to actually putting words on a page. No coffee shops, no libraries. I get very distracted by all the interesting people I see in those public spaces and transform into this horrid eavesdropper. I also like to read my work out loud while I write, and terrible hypocrite that I am, I very much do not want anyone eavesdropping on that.
Most of all, you should know that I’m interested in things. The small items and tchotchkes, the junk that artists hold on to. In Ingrid Schaffner’s book, Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World), you can find the full inventory of all the objects included in Kalman’s 2010 curated installation for The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The gallery space was furnished exclusively with “many tables of many things.” All are pieces from Kalman’s own extensive collection: fezzes, bobby pins, balls of string, a list of names from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, things fallen out of books, rubber bands, found mosses, buckets, onion rings. This gallery is proof that any “thing” can be interesting because behind every “thing” is a history, a story of humanity. Maybe it’s the collection of many “things” in one place that helps us see and appreciate the diversity in our life, much like the mystique of walking through an antique shop.
That being said, I invite you to this tour of some of the “things” that make up my writing life.
Writer’s Debris : An Inventory of My Writing Desk
#1: Cup of pens and pencils. Six or seven years ago, I found a knock-off “We are happy to serve you” cup - one of those blue and white ones with the Greek-style font, the ones you never see real people drinking out of, the ones that only exist in movies and gutters. Instead of strong street coffee, this cup holds an embarrassing amount of unsharpened pencils, a stolen highlighter from a confidential location, and a rainbow array of my favorite Paper Mate felt pens (though it’s a gamble which ones are dried out and which ones are not).
#2: Post-it notes. Mysteriously, I came into the sudden possession of at least ten pads of sticky notes. I use sy notes for everything: grocery lists, words I like, questions for my characters, random events that happened in such-and-such year, quotes from the latest book I’m reading, what I should eat, a poor remembrance of a dream. I admire how easily these small square notes can proliferate and take up so much space.
#3: A day planner (mostly empty). Right next to the planner is a small grid notebook which has the same To-Do lists written down as you’ll find on the sticky notes, only in a slightly more organized fashion. Note: My To-Do lists are most often not actual To-Do lists...a more apt name would be “in a perfect world with ultimate time and brain energy, here’s what I would like to do” lists. This is why I often write down the same To-Do lists several days in a row.
#4: 3D printed anatomical heart. A gift from a friend. Fits nicely in the palm of the hand like a stress ball—only less squeezable.
#5: A plastic toy fly. Yes, as in the winged bug. I won it at an arcade in Vermont and traded it in for exactly one ticket. Proof that cheap things can have a mighty store of emotional value. The fly has become a deep symbol in my life for a kind of never-ending state of recovery, and the insect’s incessant nature sparks the question: Is there such a thing as recovery? Can physical and mental recoveries align, and if so, how long does that alignment take? Over the years, I’ve found it important to keep these little remnants of life, these little fly corpses curled up around me in my creative space. It keeps me grounded in the humanness of what I’m writing.
#6: An unwashed coffee mug (with Hamlet pun). The writing/editing day (or frankly any day) can not properly begin until I do my daily stretches, drink a cold glass of water, and then promptly and thoroughly dehydrate myself with at least two cups of Nescafe. It is not the caffeine itself so much as the act of drinking coffee which has now become a vital part of the morning ritual. The steaming mug signals a new day, new thoughts, new experiences, new feelings of doubt and joy and jealousy and disappointment and insecurity and heartache and desire to be consumed by; to me, coffee signals life.
#7: Loose oats. I envy people who can write on an empty stomach. I cannot. See these uncooked oats sprinkled like birdseed around my room? In a bleak period of my creative life, I was eating only a bowl of oatmeal and peanut butter twice a day. (Because are you really a writer if you don’t have some strange eating habit?) I still start my days with a bowl of oats, but now I eat other stuff too. Nevertheless, all these past oats keep haunting me—much like when you end up wearing a bit of glitter one wild night and then months later, the glitter is practically paying rent, it’s been living with you for so long.
#8: Desk lamp. One of those faux library reading room lamps with the pull chain and a moody green hood that casts everything in a glow tint of mystery.
#9: Laptop. I find that I do my best bullet-pointed thinking on paper and my best cohesive sentence building on my laptop. I am not particularly proud of this fact.
#10: A paddle fan that says “WRITERS ARE HOT.” A point of irony in the room because I am constantly cold and dressed in sweaters and blankets while I write.
#11: The inspiration wall. It was Julianna Baggott who told us on our first day of graduate school that we should tack photos of the artists we admired most above our desk. I did that for a time, staring deeply into the eyes of Jackson, Rankine, Woolf, and Plath before I fell asleep each night. Now, I’ve moved on to a more abstract method of inspiration. You’ll find my wall plastered with color schemes, freeze frames from my favorite films, my cat, album covers, flowers, a photograph of paint splotches on hardwood floor, Jupiter. “A look book for the inside of my brain” I call it.
#12: Window blinds, open.
#13: Empty yogurt tub. Set your phone in the cleaned-out yogurt container, turn on Spotify or Pandora, and you’ve got yourself a pretty stellar DIY amplifier. For bigger projects, I create book-specific playlists, made up of songs that either transport me to a specific time period, geographic setting, or state of mind. Otherwise, I’m usually listening to Emancipator or The Village soundtrack if I really need to concentrate.
#14: Essential oil diffuser. Makes the room smell less like coffee and peanut butter, and more like smoky, musty underground cafes.
#15: Wood floor, no rug. This is where you’ll find the good stuff—the dust and paper and books and me. That’s right, I like to sit on the floor to write, surrounded by a crop circle of particularly inspiring books. I sometimes have a terrible fear that I won’t remember how to write. So I often need to be able to reach for a favorite book, or better yet, a previous draft of my own piece to remind my doubtful spirit of what my mind is capable of. The desk is just a place to store everything else.
I’ve been reading a lot of Patti Smith lately. In M Train, she cites the smattering of “writer’s debris” that has taken up shelter in her space. I like this term: debris. I’ve cultivated my own creative space to feel “littered” or “cluttered” with stacks of objects that other people might consider recyclable or even unwanted.
I guess I need my space to be imperfect; there needs to be a lick of chaos just inches from me on the floor. A bundle of old notebooks and purple-penned drafts, a shoe, a tangle of cords, a brown box that was delivered last month but I just can’t bear to recycle it, a book I’ve been meaning to return to its rightful owner, a list of character names, a receipt for another jar of instant coffee and peanut butter, feathers pulled out from pillows, paper paper paper.
Maybe writing is my way to begin to organize or make sense of the disorder around me.
#16: The outside world. I do not have a writing body. What I mean is that my body often has too much excess energy in it to fully be able to sit down and type for more than half an hour at a time without feeling uncomfortable. I do it of course, especially if there’s a deadline or say, I’m working in an office. But my body craves movement always, and so in this last line of my “debris,” I have to claim the importance of “writing while not writing” or “writing while walking.” Some might call it “pre-writing;” others “soft writing.” Whatever you call it, this is where I flourish as a writer. The pavement, the grass, the fall and rise of feet, the sweat at my hairline and under my arms, the sunburn on my collarbone, the sunflower, the cats, the sudden strength of a headache, leaf prints shadowing sidewalks, a graffiti conversation on an electrical box, succulents spilling out of a mail slot, the stooped man with an accordion, two sisters jumping rope, the smell of mud and peanuts and rain and chamomile -- out there, that is where my writing space begins.
Cameron Finch’s writing has appeared in Entropy, Windmill, Glass, and Queen Mob’s Tea House, and her interviews with authors and small presses can be found in The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, and The Adroit Journal. She is the Associate Editor at Atmosphere Press and the Administrative Assistant of the Brooklyn Book Festival. Find out more about her at ccfinch.com or on Twitter at @_ccfinch_.