Paul McKeague’s Writing Space
My writing space was created by a design error. After our twins Sam and Sarah were born, expanding our family from three to five, we renovated our house and created an additional bedroom. When our renovation drawings morphed into construction, however, it became clear that my wife and I had a made a mistake. One bedroom was too large. Our infant son, for whom we had planned this room, was almost bound to arouse the jealousy of his older brother, whose bedroom was half the size. To avert the prospect of long-term enmity between the brothers, we shrank the new bedroom by moving in one wall nearly six feet. This left a long, narrow, awkward space between the wall of our young son’s room and the wall of our bedroom. What could we do with this space? It was large enough for a desk and computer, we realized. Amid the chaos that enveloped on our house for the next twenty years, this became my writing space.
For a long time, I didn’t write a lot here besides work projects and day to day correspondence. I stopped writing fiction after the twins were born, but in my writing space I did sporadically keep a journal, where I tried to put into words thoughts, feelings and impressions that had no place in what I wrote for my government job. This journal writing came in moments that fell between the cracks of our work and family routines – moments that were accidental, unplanned — like the writing space itself. In this nook, born of a failure of design, I kept my creative writing dreams alive.
Then the kids left home and I retired. Now I am working in earnest on the book of linked short stories I contemplated for two decades. There are three empty bedrooms in the house. In one of them I could create a dream writer’s office, with a beautiful ergonomic desk and shelves filled with the books I love the most. I could put photos of my writer heroes on the walls, along with framed quotations from great artists to further inspire me. But I have done nothing of the kind. When it’s time to write, I still slump down behind the makeshift old desk, strewn with paper and odds and ends, that we set up so long ago in the unlovely space between two bedroom walls. I am spending more time here than ever before. Through the window just above my head I can look up past the roof of my neighbour’s house to the sky. I need no better view. In this space, I am at ease, which means I can lose myself in the fictional world of whatever story I am working on. I suspect that a dream writer’s study would burden me with a sense of obligation and big expectations that would freeze my imagination. My little writing space, in contrast, is a pressure-free zone where my mind is free to roam at large. It may not look like much, but it’s a beautiful mistake.
Paul McKeague lives in Ottawa, where he writes fiction and folk songs. He is working on a collection of linked short stories. One of these, “Downtown,” appears in Issue 178 of The New Quarterly.