Katie Zdybel’s Writing Space

“trying to write everywhere, anytime”

I live in a very small house in the Yukon with my husband, two children, and dog. There are two bedrooms, each just slightly bigger than a station wagon. We affectionately call one of these rooms the Swiss Army Knife Room. It has a Murphy bed, a clothes rack on a pulley system that can be winched up to the twelve-foot ceiling, a built-in desk, and a row of hooks about ten feet up for my husband’s many guitars. If you took all the things stacked or hanging vertically in that room, there is no way they would fit horizontally on the floor space. It is where I work out, do yoga, put my kids to bed, dry my clothes, and usually, write.

But lately, actually, I’ve been trying to write everywhere, anytime. I bought a bunch of plain notebooks and some Pilot Hi-Tecpoint pens. I keep them in my backpack, my car console, my cloth grocery bag. I’ll write a paragraph sitting in the car in the driveway with two kids snoring in their car seats behind me. I’ll write a few lines lying in bed with my baby asleep and smushed into my armpit. I started writing a new short story this summer while sitting in a squashy chair on a sun porch at the edge of Lake Huron, breastfeeding my daughter, and watching my parents and sister move back and forth between the cottage and the water. I thought I didn’t like writing with pen anymore, but I was wrong. They kept interrupting me (can I use your SPF lipbalm? Can Sam have a juicebox?) which is something I thought impeded me from sustaining focus, but I was wrong. The waves sounded like an audience rising to standing ovation over and over again and my left shoulder pinched at my neck. It was a good writing moment.

Photo provided by Katie Zdybel