Honestly, I don’t agree with “kill your darlings.” I think one should stick to their gut when writing, especially short stories.

Melville’s “Bartleby,” one of my favorite short fictions, is a story of walls, of being pressed against them. At the end, the narrator finds Bartleby “strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones.” That is sometimes the position you can find me, behind the locked door of my writing office. Keep reading Writing Spaces with Randall Brown.

Also on the blog:
   Fictionaut Five: Matt Baker
   Luna Digest, 11/3
   Checking in with Electric Literature

When I moved in with my wife, we went through the typical early matrimonial angst that goes with trying to cram two independent lives into a two-bedroom condo. The fact that both of us are artists (Nuvia is a painter) complicated matters. Foot by foot the condo was parceled out. The guest room was turned into a bedroom for my daughter’s visits/painter’s studio/overflow library. The bathroom doubled as a cleaning station for art supplies and meth lab (kidding, kidding).

I generally work in one of four locales: the bathtub, the woods behind my house, my swingin’ 70s Dodge Forester motor home (I camp about 70 days, annually), and the room in this picture, which is my office in (believe it or not) a relatively clean state. Keep reading…

This was a spare bedroom and now it’s my work office. I share it only with my cat (not pictured—he is outside, fighting for the block dominance). I have a good view of the back yard, singing birds, copulating squirrels and pooping deer.

Here is the luminous, fractious space I call my reading and writing room. I didn’t clean for this photo; it’s the true embodiment of how this space looks when there isn’t any company.

My desk is a mess. In the summer, I enjoy a bigger one, not just the one foot square that usually surrounds my laptop. Thank god I have a landline or the phone would never be found. Keep reading…

Watch Daniel Nester’s video tour of his attic literary getaway.

I don’t have a dedicated writing space. We have four kids (current ages ten to sixteen months), and they dominate all spaces in the house.

So I write everywhere. Wherever I can.

Keep reading…

I write notes and ideas for poems and stories into notebooks first, then write on the computer. A lot of my time at this desk is spent reading, the rest in some kind of writing activity. Keep reading…