Writing Spaces: Symon Jory Stevens-Guille

This week we asked Symon Jory Stevens-Guille, author of “Weight, Wood, Heft, Brass: In Conversation with Peter Sanger” in Issue 133 and past TNQ intern, to share his (dream?) writing space with us! Here’s what he had to say.

“I actually have a desk. My desk faces a window and my partner Char’s desk faces a wall. Mine gets very little use, hers much more. I am queasy often. Consequently I spend a lot of time in the very small bathroom of my apartment. Consequently I do most of my writing while visiting the loo. I had hoped this was common but a quick google search of ‘famous writers toilet’ or ‘famous writers on toilets’ returned nothing to write home about. Consequently I have no learned quotes to make my office choice appear more palatable. The lack of famous company is not really a problem for me, however, as the bathroom is very small.

I suspect this is not a particularly useful answer to your request. Instead I am attaching a picture of the desk that I would like to sit in if I could sit at a desk anywhere in the whole world. (But with more books.) This is quite a sentimental gesture since I doubt there is anything interesting about the place in itself aside from its connotations. The interesting feature it has to me is the coincidental property of being Ludwig Wittgenstein’s desk at Cambridge.”

Photo taken by Patrick Lakey and originally found here.