Authors' Spaces: Andrea Eames

In the first of a series where Booktrust asks authors to write about where they write, Andrea Eames, author of the forthcoming The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (Harvill Secker), takes us through some very orange surroundings...

A writing space can become a shrine or a place of writerly magic and rituals; but when you move around a lot, you cannot allow yourself to become attached too rigidly to one place. I have become an itinerant writer, happy to work wherever I land. My superstitions run the other way, in fact – I find it difficult to have a ‘proper’ place of work! The intimidating qualities of a blank page are well-documented, and I find a blank desk equally intimidating.

I have always imagined a ‘proper’ writer’s space as a room lined with bookshelves (filled with leather-bound, gold-tooled volumes, naturally) and perhaps containing a globe and an antique desk. I think a room with such gravitas, however, would scare me. My writing room here in Austin is bright orange, and the actual desk is in a closet (very Harry Potter), but I do not spend much time there. It feels too formal. Desks have expectations and demands – the grander the desk, the grander the prose should be, I feel. I prefer to work behind my own back, fooling myself into thinking that I am playing, and I like to write at odd angles – lying on my stomach or with my feet propped up above my head. My laptop sees more action than the serious-minded desk computer.

I spend most of my time working on the couch. And napping. I am a firm believer in a nap’s ability to turn off the logical, methodical part of my brain and let the weirder things float to the surface (and there are a lot of weirder things lurking down there). There is an extra-comfortable and very ugly pillow stuffed down the back of the couch for nap emergencies, and my guitar is propped up against the wall in case I need a distraction (although I usually spend the entire session tuning it). Three clocks on the wall keep track of the three time zones in which I work and play – New Zealand, Texas and the UK.

Even so, I am not faithful to my writing space, I’m afraid. We live close to several coffee shops, and when the weather is good I like to work there, lingering over a cooling cup and listening to the commotion around me (I hate silence when I’m working – even at home I have the television on at a low volume, to provide that constant, comforting murmur of sound). I will always be a nomadic writer, it seems – but good to know that my little orange room will be waiting for me when I get home.