As in:
INTERVIEWER: Do you write in your study or do you occupy every room of the house?
ROBINSON: I do a lot in the study, but the couch also, and so on. It’s nice to be able to move around and not be completely bound to one place or another, the way some people are.
That I can relate to. Reading the interview with Marilynn Robinson (The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 198) I’m reminded of why I do bother those times I do to read author interviews. It’s fun to read of the [revered, successful] writer whose practices or ways of doing it are your own, and in this case, it’s fun to have debunked the idea that one must have one’s regular spot. This is what’s assured and promoted in such [good] handbooks as The War of Art and Eric Maisel’s Deep Writing, and a few others. It’s not that I don’t see the reason for it, as part of the ritual, and the reason for the ritual — how it shortcuts and avoids a lot of anxieties and unnecessary diversions and energy drains, etc and so on — but it’s important to me to be fully alive, to not be a robotron. Write anywhere! I say. Write anytime! What is the point otherwise?
On the other hand, I appreciate tremendously how she says that she needs to forget the physical — yes — and therefore dresses like a slob, so that she can forget herself:
I dress like a bum. John Cheever would wear a suit and a hat and go down from his apartment to the basement of his building with an attaché case. But that’s not me. I like to be as forgetful of my own physical being as I can be.
(I will make no comment on her religiousness. Other than to say at least she has given it thought.)
