Guest Post – Gabriel Gadfly and His Writing Space

I’m a bit of a nomad poet, in that I don’t really have a dedicated writing space. I tend to wander around to coffee shops and libraries, so my writing space is anywhere semi-quiet where I can use my laptop. I do find it easier to write on a computer — when I’m working on a poem, I’m constantly changing words or moving sentences or phrases or stanzas around, so it’s simply more efficient (and cleaner) than scribbling it all out on a piece of paper.

That said, there’s some manner of notebook in every room of my apartment, two in my bag, one in the center console of my car, and one in my desk at work. (More often than not, I can find a notebook but not a pen.) I use these to jot down phrases or images that come to mind, or a starting line to a poem I don’t want to forget. Of course, they get used for other things as well, so there’s poetry intermingled with notes like “Staff meeting, 10 a.m., Thursday, re: library remodeling plans.” One, in big bold letters, says “TOOTHPASTE, CONDOMS, EGGS & CURRY POWDER.” Scrawled arithmetic (I’m horrible at doing math in my head).There’s little doodles of dancing fruit in one of them. The banana has the phrase “bellies of fog” jutting through his head. It’s a wonderful sort of chaos

I’m not sure it’s necessarily ideal, but it certainly works for me. I’d love to have a dedicated space — something like a traditional study, with a big desk and lots of bookshelves, but at the moment, my living arrangement doesn’t have a spare room to devote to a place like that.

Gabriel Gadfly has just published his first poetry collection, Bone Fragments , a collection of war poems published by 1889 Labs . He also self-publishes much of his poetry directly to readers through his website, http://gabrielgadfly.com . Gabriel’s work has also appeared in Four & Twenty, Borderline, and Anatomy & Etymology.