~from Ami

...or, Rooms In Which I Have Written, A Reflection.

1989. We live in a tiny, dark duplex with fake paneling on the walls that is thin and buckled, orange-and-brown shag carpet with unmentionable sins buried in the fibers- so dirty I dare not put the baby down without first placing a blanket. I write on a typewriter placed at an angle on a cheap desk my husband has had since the seventh grade. The apartment's one large window faces west, lets in ungodly heat. The drapes are old and dank, weighted with mildew, gold-and-brown. It is hard to find inspiration here,among our thrift store and hand-me-down dun-colored furniture, but I type out poems and stories, getting lost in the river of words, praying the clack-clack-clack of the keys doesn't wake the baby. I am published in the University of Arkansas magazine. A former high school classmate calls to ask if that was "really me" in the magazine.

1992. A small, blue house with wall to wall carpet and peach-colored walls. My office is the laundry room, where the washer and dryer churn into the night after the two year-old is asleep. There are stenciled tulips around the southern-facing window. I am at this time a radical vegan, weighing 100 pounds, writing essays against dairy products and meat by-products. A swinging door connects this room to the mauve-and-blue kitchen (it's the early nineties, forgive my color scheme!) The University of Arkansas' student magazine actually wants me to write a few pieces for them. I sit at the typewriter and pound out stories about dead mothers and lost daughters, and sell my first piece of fiction to ByLine Magazine.

1993. A two-story farmhouse, with a drive so steep we park at the bottom and walk all the way up to the house, lugging groceries, college homework, the four-year-old. A porch and a porch swing is where I write my first novel, longhand on yellow legal pads. The top story of the house is haunted. There is a vindictive mouse who leaps out when the cupboard doors are yanked open and races across the bathroom linoleum while I'm on the toilet, there is no central heat and no shower and it is winter. My son is afraid of the upstairs (and so am I) so I write him stories to distract him in between working on the novel. I write on the porch swing, watching the traffic stream by, people on their way to Eureka Springs. There are two men living in the shack below our house, their names are Slim and Fatso, and I am determined to work them into a story somehow, maybe the ghost upstairs, too. My son takes his naps on the porch swing.

1995. The year of loneliness. Also the year of the most beautiful home I've ever lived in and the best office I've ever had the privilege to write in, ironic in the face of such personal chaos. The house, built by our own hands, is perched at the top of a mountain in Madison County, Arkansas, a stunning, cedar-sided, two-story cabin (not haunted)...with a loft upstairs just for me. Nearly 300 square feet of me-space, with a closet, filing cabinet, computer, desk, huge, HUGE windows looking out over the cedar-covered hillside. I finish my first novel and start on more short stories. My husband is working two jobs. I forget what he looks like. He forgets what I look like. We fight on the stairs just down from the writing loft around midnight most nights. Sometimes we fight about my writing. I sell an article to McCall's for $1500 and catch up on the mortgage payment with the money.

1996. I am alone in another duplex, as if I've come full circle to my beginnings of windowless, brown-colored surroundings and icky, suspicious carpet. It is me and my son and I can't write. My computer is set up in the dining room-slash-living-room-slash-kitchen. I also can't read. I also can't function like a normal person and end up sending my son to my mother's for a short while. I fight quietly over the phone with my husband, so the neighbor can't hear me crying through the thin walls. Most of the time I run through town, miles and miles, and I try to escape through the fire burning in my mind in order to think. The computer, a small, early-version Macintosh, hums in the corner, the cursor blinking.

1997. We-my husband, son, and I-all move to Van Buren for a new start, a touristy little town in Arkansas where I-40 plows through the hills and the path of a recent tornado is burned into the mountains. People here are jumpy when it storms, and they sleep fully clothed in case of another tornado. My office is in the spare bedroom of a nice little cookie-cutter 3-bedroom house with arches and mini-blinds and French doors looking out into the subdivision. If we could afford another bed we would make it a guest bedroom, but instead there is the desk, the computer, mountains of storage boxes. The house has a dishwasher and a self-cleaning oven. We have friends over for Sunday dinner and I break my glass pitcher-a Christmas gift from my sister-by pouring boiling water into it for sweet tea. I'm on a non-fiction kick and send out queries to major magazines on my lunch hour from the bank. It's a sunny, happy room where I concentrate on burying my pain. I am strictly non-fiction, writing articles on house-cleaning, child-rearing, and cooking. These are safe areas of research. First For Women magazine calls me about an essay. The neighbor, ten feet from the window where I write, is obsessed with his lawn and mows it in diagonal strips every three days.

1999. We are renting an old white house in Oklahoma and trying to make a go at our own business. I've lucked out and started selling to the state's tourism magazine while working in one corner of the dining room, finally getting accustomed to being online, understanding what it's for and how to use it. The house has a deep,generous porch and porch swing, so sometimes I write outside, longhand, watching people walk down the sidewalk towards Main Street. One spring a freak snowstorm burdens the blossoming cherry tree with heavy snow. The tree crashes down, inches from the window where I sit writing, inches from my son playing with friends in the driveway. I've started a new novel, about murder in a small town in Arkansas, and I tell my husband how much I want to be a writer. "Then write!" he says.

2006. My office is a combination TV room and writing room. I have chosen a red plaid wallpaper that makes me noxious, makes me wonder what made me reach out, in the Home Depot aisle in 2000, and choose this pattern. It is not conducive to writing. No one could ever come in and take a picture of me, The Wryter, in this office. I hate the wallpaper so much I've begun tearing it off, little by little. My husband says it looks like a shotgun has gone off above my head, for the way I have ripped the paper. A visor is thrown in the corner, as if I tossed it down after a walk up the hill, so anxious to slide into my ergonomic, quilt-covered chair, and write another chapter. The snarl of electrical cords at my feet worries me to no end. I have clear plastic filing cabinets blocking the door and my son's guitars propped against one wall. There is a bottle of wallpaper remover and a plethora of empty,tea-stained mugs. I have finally sold a novel. I am working on two more. I am selling consistently to state-wide magazines. I am the happiest and the most successful I have ever been in the ugliest writing room I've ever had. A pair of headphones is at the ready, should someone want to come in and watch television while I'm writing. My son is sixteen, he's reading some of my work, he's forgiving me for not allowing a television in the living room. My husband is listening to me read aloud at night, catching mistakes in the tales, loving me in spite of my bad wallpaper choices and repeated author-ly use of the phrase "She settled back in her seat."

Future. I long for an office of my own- no TV's, no pile of DVDs and X-Box games, no washer or dryer, no ugly carpet- in the second story of a Victorian house, with floor to ceiling windows letting in floods of light. Room for file cabinets and orderly stacks of manuscripts. A stereo system and worn wood floors. A dust-free bookcase that reaches to the heavens. My son away at college, the house quiet and clean. Maybe it's in South Carolina. Or Georgia. Maybe it's someplace I can't even dream of. I'll wait for this vision to come to pass.

I'm a writer. And I write. The flow of ideas from my head to the page has carried me through an endless variety of homes and rooms. There is always one constant and one thing that sustains. The words.