Can we please dispense with the tedious archetype of the lonely writer? In addition to garrets, this trope usually includes isolation, with its connotations that one is cut off from society and suffering from a lack of companions. Nonsense! As Flannery O’Connor writes in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969):
There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the “lonely writer,” the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him.
She goes on to call this myth a cliché. I agree.
I live in rural Maine on nearly twelve acres of land. The property includes a fire pond; a big field of wild grasses, flowers, and mowed paths; and an undeveloped forest that stretches on for hundreds of acres behind my writing shed, a converted tool shack and chicken coop. A small deck with a pergola covered in grape vines leads to a sliding glass door that reveals a pine-paneled space with four windows, a long desk made from a yellow Formica countertop that I ate on as a toddler, and a reading chair tucked into the crook of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
Joan Dempsey in her writing shed in rural Maine. Photo credit: Greta Rybus.
Often, when I’m at a literary event in the city of Portland, a writer new to me will inevitably ask where I live, and when I tell them New Gloucester what usually comes next is some variation of, “Oh, wow, way out there?” My home is a mere twenty-two miles north of Portland, not exactly a godforsaken hinterland. The person’s tone is typically either envious or pitying, but both seem to have the same roots: I live way out there, which might mean enviable isolation, or it might mean I’m bereft of community.
The romantic desire for the equivalent of an isolated writer’s garret is less about a physical place, I believe, and more about a yearning for the privacy which can be found there. Writers don’t need isolation, but we do need freedom from interference so we can “[w]rite with the door closed,” as Stephen King says in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000). That door can be physical or metaphorical. Some of my best writing is done at a big table in my public library, where people respect each other’s privacy, especially if they think one is hard at work.
The beauty of the shed, though, is that its use is restricted to me; it’s my private space, but I don’t ever feel isolated, and I’m certainly not lonely. For one thing, I have books, and therefore a rich community of authors at my fingertips. One shelf is particularly influential: books by and about James Baldwin. When I was getting my low-residency MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles, I wrote my thesis on an autobiographical aspect of Baldwin’s famous story “Sonny’s Blues.” While writing this paper, I was fully immersed in all things Baldwin and I often had the distinct and sometimes unsettling impression that he was in the room with me, directing and encouraging me in equal turns. I had dreams of him that felt more like visitations than something conjured from my unconscious mind. Eerie, but also rather wonderful.
During this time I traveled to New York City to see a one-man play about Baldwin, with Calvin Levels playing the author, and I had the good fortune of going out afterwards with members of the Baldwin family and Levels himself. I asked the actor if he ever felt Baldwin’s presence and he threw back his head, laughed, and said something like, “Oh lord yes, he would not shut up! I finally had to tell him to leave me alone.”
I recently read an essay by Mary Oliver from Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin Press, 2016) in which she talks about this precise feeling of inheriting an “immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground....” She writes about being “inseparable from…my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones” and adds, “I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life…this innumerable, fortifying company….”
At my Antioch graduation Steve Heller, the creative writing MFA chair at the time, invoked the names of a long list of our literary ancestors and welcomed us into their esteemed community. I felt a prickle of excitement and sensed their presence as keenly as I’d felt Jimmy Baldwin hanging out on my screened porch, smoking his ever-present cigarette while I tussled with “Sonny’s Blues.”
On other shelves in the shed are books written by those ancestors, but plenty others are by living authors, many from right here in Maine. In fact, my shelves teem with contemporary Maine authors, fifty-six of them (I counted), too many names to list here, although I’d like to, because what a gift it would be for you to know each and every one of them as I do. These folks exist in the pages of their books, of course, but I’ve also met them in person. I’ve been in their kitchens and living rooms and on their decks, sat next to them at events, raised toasts at their parties, celebrated their new books, retreated and workshopped with them, bumped into them in New York and Los Angeles and Florida, and hung out with them online.
How can one possibly feel alone with such company?
I got my start in fiction at the terrific GrubStreet center for creative writing in Boston, back when GrubStreet was just getting started. When I left the area I was worried I wouldn’t find the same kind of vibrant, nourishing literary community—was I ever wrong!
After moving to Maine, I was invited to sit in on a Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA) board meeting to try it on for size, see if I’d be a good fit for the board and vice versa. At the University of Southern Maine in Portland I sat around a nondescript conference table with a small group of writers, and the first thing we did was listen to a board member—a poet—read a poem. Glasses wedged on the tip of his nose, grey hair swept back, grey beard unruly, he read, and we listened, each one of us rapt. We would later turn to the budget and strategy and programming, but first on the agenda—always, I discovered after officially joining the board—was a poem. No matter who read what poem, the subtext was evident: This is what we love, this is why we’re here, this is what matters most. That was my first experience of the Maine literary community.
Years later, when Longfellow Books in Portland suffered significant water damage from a burst pipe, damage that meant the store’s owners would have to close Longfellow for good, those folks I’d served with on the MWPA board—friends now—and scores of other Maine writers quickly banded together. Within two days we raised enough money to save the bookstore. I wasn’t surprised. From day one, everyone in the Maine literary community was welcoming, generous, and deeply caring. In 2017 a packed house inside the born-again Longfellow Books celebrated with me as I launched my debut novel, This Is How It Begins.
Way out here, then, I have my great ones on the shelves, and I have my writing friends and colleagues all over the state. I also have an extended community of Antioch writers, including three women from my graduating class—Dawna Kemper, Christa Mastrangelo Joyce, and Mary Rechner—who joined me right after graduation to form an inviolable quartet; every single month, for almost twenty years now, we have checked in with each other via e-mail to share every aspect of our writing lives and support each other on our respective journeys.
As if these riches weren’t enough, I’ve also created a free, private, online community specifically for novelists: the Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio, which currently has 2,464 members. This includes a highly engaged, core group who are incredibly community-minded. Members live in the Outback of Australia and suburban Texas and the shores of the Canary Islands and the city of Vancouver and everywhere in between, and all of them bring wisdom, experience, good humor, and generosity to this virtual writers studio. From those new to writing novels to those who are well-published, these folks all have one desire in common: to connect with other writers who love what they love.
The vast majority of these writers I’ve never met in person, but a few have made their way to Maine to attend a writing retreat I host every year in early June. We gather in Bar Harbor at the home of Arthur Train, an attorney and author who wrote legal thrillers in the early 1900s, copies of which grace the shelves of his old house. He’s less well-known than Maine writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. B. White, but he’s nevertheless become a part of my literary community, and every year I read a snippet of his work to the retreat-goers so he can become a part of theirs as well, so they may be as wildly companioned by writers both living and dead, local and distant, as I am, way out here.
Joan Dempsey is the author of This Is How It Begins (She Writes Press, 2017), which won a bronze Independent Publisher Book Award for literary fiction and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and a Sarton Women’s Book Award. Her honors include a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, a Maine Literary Award, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, a Key West Literary Seminar scholarship, and a Jentel Artist residency. Dempsey holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and lives in Maine with her partner and their family of animals. Her website is joandempsey.com.
