Lauren Peat’s Writing Space
These days, I do most of my writing at the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library. At first, this habit was pragmatic: I found I could focus more easily outside my apartment, and the library was a place I could linger for hours without spending any money. Over time, though, the library has come to embolden my work in other, less obvious ways.
At the library I write alongside students studying finance, single parents minding their toddlers, and unhoused folks looking for respite from the cold. I marvel at how librarians make such a space possible: on the one hand, curating knowledge; on the other, waking patrons up in case of overdose.
But I’ve begun to realize these activities aren’t as distinct as they seem. Curating anything of value requires staying awake to our surroundings and responsibilities; knowledge divorced from these concerns might more accurately be described as information, and often causes more harm than good.
Unlike libraries, poems aren’t born out of social mandates, and nor should they be. And yet poetry is a powerful knowledge-making activity, even if the knowledge it produces is sinuous, impossible to quantify. Writing at the library, then, reminds me of my own responsibilities—to a place, a context, a set of relations. Of every poem’s capacity to become a site of social encounter and repair.
Writing can be an intensely solitary endeavour, and so it’s tempting to assume we write for ourselves alone. For me, the library is an antidote to this way of thinking. Sometimes the antidote is pleasant, and other times less so: just yesterday, everyone was asked to evacuate because someone had sprayed pepper spray in the stacks. How not to feel interdependent, waiting outside with a hundred people for the air quality to stabilize. How not to feel interconnected, returning all together to the tables and armchairs, the stacks of books grown out of other places and contexts, other sets of relations.
I’m discovering that these relations offer me and my writing as much—if not more—than they ask.
Lauren Peat’s debut poetry chapbook, Future Tense, was published by Baseline Press in Fall 2024. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Asymptote, Only Poems, The Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review, and World Literature Today, among other places. Her writing is also featured in the repertoire of acclaimed vocal ensembles across North America. Translation Editor for the online poetry magazine Volume, she lives in Vancouver and works in public education.
Photo by GoToVan on Flickr
