Alena Papayanis’ Writing Space

My choice of writing space often reflects how I’m currently feeling about my writing practice, in particular, how much resistance I’m experiencing. The more resistance, the more likely it is that I will flee my office at home and opt for a coffee shop. If there were such a thing as a coffee shop passport, my pages would be packed with stamps from Toronto’s west end coffee shops like an avid, maybe even obsessed, traveller. I have a penchant for coffee shops that are painted green, and in the west end neighbourhood of Toronto I live in, I’m lucky to have two that I can visit often. The green is calming and slow and is reminiscent of being out in nature, but with all the conveniences of being indoors.

For me, a coffee shop is like a micro vacation; each new shop or subsequent visit to a regular one brings me a new set of people to watch, strangers to have random exchanges with, conversations to overhear, and windows to stare aimlessly out of. It feels like a fertile creative space for an autistic, introverted, writer who loves to observe the world but not always be a part of it. I can sit there like a scientist with a clipboard, like a radio ready to receive, like a painter with an empty canvas, ready to receive the world.

But writing at home, at the desk in my bedroom, is where I get to my deepest truths because it’s where no one else is watching, so I can allow myself to admit more. It’s where writing often brings me to tears — bigger, deeper tears than I’ll let myself shed in public. Or perhaps it’s the other way around — that the tears bring me to the truest words because they wash away the surface to reveal the emotional truths hidden beneath.