Susan J. Atkinson’s Writing Space

It has been six years since The New Quarterly published my poem “The Dining Room Poem by Another Poet” in their Spring 2018 issue #146. Six years since I last offered a glimpse into the space where I write. I still maintain the same writing routine when I am home in Ottawa. I still start my morning sitting on my brown couch, composing first thoughts and ephemera in my journal, in the hopes that something will gel and be the beginnings of a poem. Nothing much has changed there but since then I have created a second writing space.

As a child, there were two things I dreamt about being when I grew up. The first was to be a writer. By the age of nine I was constantly making up stories and reading relentlessly. (I had not yet met poetry, hence the general desire to be a writer rather than a poet.) My second dream was to live by the ocean. I didn’t have a specific ocean in mind, I just wanted to be a writer living by the sea.

Once I reached high school I was introduced to poetry and fell madly in love. That’s when the dream morphed slightly, from being a writer to being a poet. And now that I am grown-up (!) I have had the great fortune to realize both dreams as I spend part of my year beside the Caribbean Sea in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. It is here where I have found my perfect winter-writing space.

When I first started writing seriously, I thought I would need an office walled with bookshelves, and stacks and stacks of paper filling whatever floor remained. As it turns out, I don’t need a lot of space, or even a specific room for that matter. Of course, I have bookcases crammed with poetry collections, anthologies and journals, but a desk and a dedicated writing room are not priorities for me.