A 200-year old desk made for opium smoking serves as the author’s amuensis
I spend six months a year in an old house in the Adirondack wilderness of northern New York, where my writing space is a renovated sugar shack, built in 1914 for boiling maple sap into syrup. The other six months, November to May, I’m in Saratoga Springs where I work inside the house in a large windowless basement room. I don’t want to be distracted in either place by a view of the outdoors. I’ve worked in the sugar shack for over 30 years. But as I write this note, I’m in our Saratoga Springs home, where I’ve written most of two novels-Foregone, published in March, and The Magic Kingdom, scheduled for spring 2022. I have two large tables in this space, an 18th century French farm table, for my computer, and an 18th century teak opium bed bought in Australia by a sea-going relative and shipped back to the US in pieces, found to be too big for domestic purposes, and given to me to use as a table for stacking books and research materials. It’s a gorgeous piece of furniture, designed and made in China two centuries ago solely for opium smoking, and now re-purposed in the 21st century for a novelist’s studio in upstate New York. Its history could make for the basis of a novel I may well write someday.
This piece originally appeared in issue number two of Grand Journal.
