When I was researching REST, I discovered that one of the best sources for material on writer’s routines was The Paris Review. (I’ve posted quotes from other Paris Review interviews with Ray Bradbury, La Carré, Isaac Bashevis Singer, J. G. Ballard, and Martin Amis.) Today I came across this interview with Francine du Plessix Gray, which has a lovely description of what being in her writer’s studio is like, and why it’s important for her:

the most important aspect of coming to this room for several hours a day is a talismanic one—it’s here, for the past twenty years, by creating a presence of words alongside me, that I’ve slowly become something I can begin to call myself, and traveled away from that “ocean of gibberish” that menaces us throughout life.

For all my love of mobile work, I still admire those book-lined retreats that writer’s make for themselves, or that co-evolve with them over the years. And I really appreciate her observation that it can take years of work to “become something I can begin to call myself.”

I think it’s easy to underestimate just how physical and material a writer’s life is; it is portable– those pictures of writers at cafe tables or Hemingway on safari aren’t lying to you– and of course it’s very interior and cerebral, but it’s also very material: you can’t get away from the fact that if you writer, you’ll live surrounded by books.

Perhaps if the act of writing is one that requires us to spend so much time roaming and living elsewhere (if only in our imaginations), it’s good that we’re anchored to the world by books.