039 ☼ no sleep, bus, club, another club

on writing on the road

On a recent press trip to Dallas, I stayed up for 24 hours—the first six hours were spent wandering around an art fair gazing at paintings, chatting with gallerists, and taking illegible notes, then I spent the next 18 eating, despairing, trying to write, writing finally, and then trying to sleep. I think I watched four movies on TCM in the background. I filed two round-ups that I took way too seriously and missed the sculpture talk I wanted to see the following day because, as you can guess, I was asleep.

Poetry is not a luxury but room service is!

“Where do you write?” — what a question. My favorite place to read is on the bus or on a train/subway which translates roughly to how I focus: amidst movement with a touch of ambient chaos. My glamorous writing life has somehow lead to an entire month of weekend out of town for coverage or otherwise and I am still very much on deadline.

Once I arrived in a funeral home to find a source and to take the temperature for a story on a cremation scandal. A source asked me to write something down and I patted myself in haste, then terror and embarrassment. “A writer without a pen?” the man had balked—a humiliation I will never live down—I have never been without a pen since. I prefer oversized men shirt’s with breast pockets for said pens and for keeping my iPhone mic open while I interview sources and for easy snatching when I need to take a photo. Pens also make great hair clips and buns are excellent pen holders. I’ve never been able to write on a plane, too much heavy sighing and not enough elbow room (I fly economy and air travel has gone the way of the Greyhound), though I love to read in movement—on the bus or on a train. Planes are for dissociating anyway.

There’s some thing about writing in a place that isn’t yours. No context of your own messy thoughts and lives crowded around you like books or notes, no energy left over from past writing sessions or fights or phone calls. Just pure clean space to project anything that you need to onto the page. Almost every hotel has a desk, no matter the size. A wide open expanse or a tiny table top in veneered oak or walnut, sometimes a plain pine, every now and then a laminate (depending on the hotel). This most recent trip, I skipped the desk and used an even bigger surface: the hotel bed.