Van Reid and His Writing Space

Dark, red, sometimes noisy. These are words I could use to describe the place where I write. The library, my study. Dad’s room to the kids.
There’s the dark. I make excuses to people who visit, if they ask to see my study. The shades are pulled, the walls are relatively dark, the wall to wall, Persian-type rug is dark as well. “I’m a bat,” I say. I don’t know why this is so. I don’t care for direct sunlight, except on a cold winter’s day. I’m a nighthawk. I’m a bat. I darken the room, pull the shades, sometimes even put flattened cardboard boxes up behind them to make it darker. Then I put on a single light, a little to one side but not behind me so the light won’t reflect in the computer screen. I only put on the light so I can see the keyboard – which is black.
I guess I don’t want any visual distraction as I “see” what my people are up to.
There’s the red. Years ago, I found that I seemed to work best in a room that had lots of red in it. My parent’s den had wallpaper that had a lot of red in it. So did the area rug. When we put together my study, my wife wallpapered the room in red. The border is largely red. The area rug is largely red. Even when it’s darkened it seems to work.
My mother read a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne and told me that he liked best to work in a room with a lot of red in it. Considering that I consider Hawthorne one of the greatest writers of all time, and considering that the more I read about the man, the more I like him and like to imagine that I feel a self-flattering affinity toward him – this pleased me as only an admirer can be pleased.
There’s the sometimes noisy. When I told him that I listened to music while I wrote, a good friend and fellow writer looked at me like I had two heads (or maybe three). “But not music with words?” he said. “Oh, yeah! Rock and roll!” Then it was like I had three and a half heads (or two and a half).
All art aspires to the condition of music, according to Victorian writer and critic Walter Pater. I think it a fair assessment. It may seem strange for a writer to say that music is (for him) the most important form of art, put I guess that’s what I have to say. I write and listen to music. I’m listening to music now.
The tougher the writing gets, the louder the music gets and the more insistent it gets. The quietest passages of my most contemplative book (Daniel Plainway) were written to The Who and Led Zeppelin turned up to 11. I try to write when everyone is at work or school, but if they are not, I apologize, close the doors, and turn up the music. Fortunately everyone here likes music.
There are the books, of course; two walls more or less occupied with shelves of reference, dotted with a talisman here and there – The Pickwick Papers, Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones. There’s the Oxford dictionary at my elbow and two atlases open behind me. There’s a balsam-filled pillow that my daughter made me that floats around the room, the pictures of my wife and the kids, file cabinets and drawers – everything more or less full.

A big old wooden desk. A reasonably comfortable chair to sit and read in.

And there is the less conscious occupation of clutter – the papers, the stacks of books, the CDs and DVDs and disorganized discs of burned writing and information. Too much organization would seem sterile to me. Life’s complicated, messy; my writing tends toward a kind of clutter (sometimes organized).
On bright sunny days, the vines climbing the house make wonderful patterns on the fading shades.
Otherwise, it’s pretty dark.

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Van Reid has published six novels (five about the Moosepath League) and created a throw-back, pseudo 19th-century literary journal called The American Zig-Zag. A new Moosepath book and the second American Zig-Zag are planned for 2011.

Van lives in Edgecomb, Maine where his family has been for generations, with his wife, two kids, various species of creatures, and a ghost at the end of the driveway.