A few months ago, I started renting an office. Not really an office, more like a desk in a house of desks. Years ago, a woman in Los Angeles turned a large, two-bedroom cottage in her backyard into a house for writers. Maybe a dozen of us have found our way there and pay for the privilege: a key to a gate, a place to work that’s not home. There’s a kitchen, bathroom, covered porch, hammock. A few people pay extra to keep one of the bedrooms as their private office. The rest of us show up and take one of the desks scattered around other rooms. There’s a table outside for lunchtime, several citrus trees with lumpy fruit. Rarely more than two others are in the cottage at any time, so it feels private, purpose-suited, homey but impersonal. No one says hello to each other. No one steals your Diet Coke.
For years I had a fantasy of working out of a storefront on a main drag. My business would be just another shop on the block, no one knows what I do, they know me as the guy who eats lunch at the diner. Or it was something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie – a room in a skyscraper, a receptionist next door – or something more commercial, a Quonset hut in an industrial park, a large bunker where my desk is in one area, a few lamps in another, a couple couches, a bar cart, maybe I purchase an old Jaguar E-Type and park it, never drive it, just have it under the roof for inspiration.
Of course, in these fantasies I’m also rich, fawned-over, a recluse patting himself on the head while the world waits for whatever I do next. I mean, it’s extraordinary, the bullshit I absorbed at an early age.
A friend, a young parent, told me recently she’d been inspired, hearing about the cottage, to find office space of her own. For pretty cheap, a few miles from where she lives, she found a large room with a window, housed in an office park that’s desperate for tenants. There’s air-conditioning, wifi. She mostly uses it for reading, time to herself, she said, but soon she’ll get back to writing the book she’s been putting off for years.
In the cottage, I like a desk by the living room window, where the view’s obscured by a flowering bougainvillea. The feeling is a little like being at home in someone else’s house. You’re a burglar, you snuck in for a reason; and it may not be the dream you desired, but it’s the one in front of you.
In tomorrow’s Sunday supplement: Examples of artist workplaces; one of the more remarkable things I’ve seen on the web; ecstasy and ecstasy at the Newport Jazz Festival.
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What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a micro-essay published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful, with a longer essay once a month for subscribers, written in the woods.
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Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of a 2022 California Book Award. It’s now available in paperback from Bookshop, Amazon, and (preferably) your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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