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The Rooms Where Writers Work

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Camille Bordas, author of the new novel ‘‘How to Behave in a Crowd,’’ in the Chicago apartment she shares with her husband.Credit...Sean Donnola

I moved to Chicago five years ago with basically nothing, my own fantasy of a life that fits in a suitcase. I like to reduce — I’m a sentimental person but can throw things away very easily — and I’m always aiming for a completely bare space in which to work. But then I tend to accumulate things, books and little trinkets. It’s just as well because I need something to sort through before I get to work. I have to make and then remake my own mess. It’s a constant opposition between chaos and order.

In Paris I worked in cafes, but I’ve taken to having my own space. My desk, a gift from my mother, is gigantic. On it there are stacks of printed drafts and a set of notebooks: one for fiction, one for pasted images, one for doodling in while I’m on the phone. That’s a pile to organize. There are also a thousand pencils I don’t use in pots from this ceramics shop in Andalusia. And sleeves of Nicorette. There used to be cigarette packs and those looked better.

I’ve written three novels and started 20 others and still have no idea what makes me work well. I can work in the morning; I can work at night. I can work on coffee; I can work on beer. Sometimes I need to do something with my hands. There are spools of yarn from when I thought I’d take up weaving. Two years ago I was into making side tables and before that I did a whole quilt. I envy writers with a routine — and I live with one. I don’t know what my husband’s new novel is about, but sometimes he’ll knock on my door and ask me to enact something so he can describe it better, which is fun. At the end of the day we have dinner together.

Sitting here, I like to look at a painting my brother made, of a girl with bags under her eyes and a glass of something. On the bookshelf is a jar of dried bougainvillea petals from my sister’s 30th birthday. I didn’t set out to write a family novel, and my new book isn’t autobiographical, but being away from what’s familiar to me made me able to write something closer to home. As children we moved a lot, from Lyon to the Alps to Mexico City to Paris. That might be why I like to switch it up. Though I’ve been here for five years now. Maybe, for the next book, I’ll just have to rearrange the furniture.


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The poet Javier Zamora, whose debut collection, ‘‘Unaccompanied,’’ is out next month, at home in San Rafael, Calif. He planted the garden with his father, and finds that nature figures in much of his work.Credit...Sean Donnola

I’m trying to change my routine in the hopes that it will change the work: I’m looking for longer lines. I wrote my first book to depressing music — Radiohead and this Argentine band, Soda Stereo, that’s similar to Radiohead. Now I’m trying classical. And where I used to write at night, as a way to blow off steam, now I write during the day, partly to convince myself that poetry is work. It’s starting to click that this is what I do.

Every morning, I make a huge batch of mate, because I’m weaning myself from coffee. I sit on the couch and review emails, but mostly just stare out the window at the trees and the hummingbirds that come around. Then I read a book. Right now I’m reading a lot of novels in verse — there’s this Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra who’s blowing my mind, and I’m rereading Anne Carson’s ‘‘Autobiography of Red.’’ That’s part of the process — I read something in order to spark and steal. Slowly, I transition to the marble island in the kitchen to write and revise. I’m the kind of writer who thinks on the page, and never do fewer than 20 drafts. Some of the poems in my new book were the first ones I ever wrote, and I worked on them, especially the one about crossing the border, ‘‘Let Me Try Again,’’ for almost nine years. Now that it’s done, I’m in between projects for the first time. I’m kind of freaking out and relearning how to write a poem, but it’s freeing, too.

In summer, I read on the bench outside to catch the breeze. More and more I’m hearing that there’s a lot of nature in my work. I think my affinity for it is a way of missing El Salvador. Growing up, we had lands with lots of animals and fruits and plants, and you could hear the waves crashing when you went to bed. My dad is a landscaper and we built this garden with a lot of leftover plants and materials from his other jobs, things people didn’t want. My mom jokes that it’s the garden of the unwanted.


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Danzy Senna wrote her latest novel, ‘‘New People,’’ at home in South Pasadena in the mornings, when her kids were at school. ‘‘There’s a window when my brain is most alert, and I have to take advantage,’’ she says.Credit...Sean Donnola

I jokingly call South Pasadena ‘‘multicultural Mayberry’’ because it’s so mixed and because they use it as a set for movies. The house, an old Craftsman, needs a lot of work, but it gets great light. That’s my favorite thing about L.A., the constant golden light, which is a little bit unreal. I’ve taken one of the bedrooms as my studio, but it’s only mine while my kids are at school. For those hours it’s very quiet and it feels like I can leave the world. When you get obsessed with something, which is always what I’m after, your art really does compete with your life. If the house is a pigsty and my kids have no clean clothes, that’s a good sign for the book. It’s a difficult balance and it’s never going to be figured out. My husband, who is also a writer, and I like that our kids see us working. I grew up with a single writer mother struggling with that tension, and it doesn’t seem like a negative necessarily.

I write my first draft by hand. I discovered these Bookbinders Design notebooks when we were living in France. They are brightly colored and I pick one for each book — the one for my new novel was a pale orange. I have an ambivalent relationship with technology and find I write better when I’m physically connected. Also when you write something down, it’s somehow more permanent. But for the next draft I do sit at my desk and type it up, filling in and editing as I go.

Around me are things that bring comfort: paintings by my husband and a drawing by the artist Laylah Ali, a friend. There’s a beautiful photo of my parents on their wedding day, very ’60s — my dad’s in a Mao jacket and my mother’s wearing a silver lamé minidress. There are also two pictures of me, one by each of my kids. For preschool they had to do Mother’s Day portraits, and I thought it was funny because one was significantly browner and had black curly hair and the other one was pale, so it kind of reflected the duality in my work. I have a few things from a trip to Japan: an Osamu Dazai tote on the back of the door, and, on my desk, a daruma, a little round doll with half a face. You’re supposed to set a goal and fill in the second eye once you’ve achieved it, but I don’t think I ever would. I’m attached to the idea of uncertainty and ­incompletion.

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Danzy SennaCredit...Sean Donnola
A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 180 of T Magazine with the headline: The Rooms Where Writers Work. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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