What a privilege to spend two months living and writing in the Historic Joy Kogawa House, a space imbued with literature. The house is of course a significant presence in Joy Kogawa’s own books, and today its display areas and bookshelves amplify and pay tribute to the work of many artists and writers. My own practice has been deeply influenced by this environment, which enriches the writing even as it humbles the writer.
The window in Joy’s childhood bedroom looks out at the famous Kogawa Cherry Tree. Placed in front of that window is a modest wooden desk, four feet wide and a foot and a half deep. (Yes, I measured it. I’m a writer; I procrastinate. If measuring a piece of furniture counts as “research,” I’ll gladly step away from the keyboard to do it!)
But this isn’t just any old desk. It’s the desk at which Joy Kogawa wrote Obasan. And apparently more than that: a note on the desktop, handwritten by Joy herself, tells us she used it to write “many poems, a couple of novels.” That’s a rich haul for one desk! Her note includes a generous wish for us writers who find ourselves in this room: “Hope it serves you as well as it served me.”
Has the desk “served” me, in the sense that Joy intends? Well, no—but maybe yes. I’ve never sat at it to write; my legs won’t fit into the 1.5-foot gap (yes, I measured that, too) without creaks of protest from an aging knee. But in a metaphorical, psychological sense, this desk has served me very well indeed.
Writing is a step-by-step process. (Or word by word. Or, as Annie Lamott’s classic book puts it, bird by bird.) Writing a novel, which is what I’ve been doing here in this house, taxes patience and defies impulsivity. I am naturally impatient and impulsive—building novels seems an absurd vocational match with a personality like mine.
And I’m prone to a particular misstep: at my laziest, I’ll get ahead of myself and daydream about how deeply moving and irresistibly hilarious the novel might be when it’s finally done. Once I actually, you know, write those somehow moving and hilarious passages. I might imagine effusive praise from readers or the lucrative approbation of prize juries. Such hypothetical glories are, of course, unreachable unless I set aside the fantasy and put in the actual work.
In this daydream mode, I’m metaphorically seated behind a massive, ornate desk crafted of gleaming mahogany, the sort of desk you’d sit behind to hire or fire top execs, its surface loaded up with icons of pretension: fountain pens in their inkwells, maybe one of those pendulums where a rank of silver balls hangs in perpetual collision.
What I need to do instead is sit down, as Joy did, at a modest desk, and simply grind out sentences and paragraphs and scenes. A shelf in that same bedroom holds her books, the great wealth of material that she bestowed on the reading world; it seems improbable and daunting that my own work might someday fill such a shelf. But there’s only one way to find out. I need to get down to it. I need my fingers on the keyboard, actually moving. One word, then the next. The only way it’s done.
The parallel with office furniture is not new (Stephen King, for one, famously used it in On Writing), and I won’t belabour it here. But as I churn out new chapters or thrash through existing ones, editing machete in hand, Joy’s desk is a huge help. Every morning, I see that simple wooden structure. Turning to the shelves, I see the bounty of books pieced together on its surface. I sit down, albeit at a different desk, and open my laptop.
And I get to work.
Peter Norman is the author of four poetry collections and a novel. His first book, At the Gates of the Theme Park, was a finalist for the Trillium Poetry Book Award, and his novel, Emberton, was longlisted for the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, Pulp Literature, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He has been selected for two editions of the annual Best Canadian Poetry series and shortlisted twice for the Montreal Poetry Prize.