Author Wayne Johnston is building a sensory deprivation room for writing. He calls it 'The Bunker'
For the Canada Reads finalist, 'the main enemy of creativity is noise'
Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Jennie's Boy author Wayne Johnston.
I call my current writing space The Bunker. I have been perfecting it for years. What I have in mind but know that I will never quite achieve is something like a sensory deprivation room.
For me, the main enemy of creativity is noise. Were there music, or birdsong, or poetically clattering autumn leaves, I would listen to them and attend to nothing else. I have been diagnosed as having a low nuisance threshold and an eidetic memory — the former, I am told, often being the curse that accompanies the gift that is the latter.
My only somewhat lesser enemy of creativity is natural light. No laziness-excusing windows to stare out of in search of distraction for me, thank you very much. Nor even, now that I think of the other senses, tantalizing, thought-interrupting smells of food; nor steaming but diverting cups of coffee; nor nuzzling but inspiration-muting cats or dogs.
I envy — but am mystified by — writers who say they find their productivity enhanced by bars or coffee houses or sidewalk cafes or the chaos of after-school kitchens teeming with skylarking kids. This is life, the very stuff of it, I know, but when I'm writing it's best recollected in tranquillity.
I suspect other writers of doing their real writing while sitting in an empty bathtub and scribbling in a notebook resting on a length of board, as I once had no choice but to do for a while. I tell myself that I am too busy being a writer to waste time living and looking like one. But, as I say, I envy those who seem to do all this and more.
On the walls of my house writerly things are hung: a moody painting of St. John's at twilight as one might see it from the ocean but for the interrupting Southside Hills; a black-and-white print of mad Cervantes in his writing space, all but crowded out of it by all the things that I find inhibitive, like wine goblets and dinner plates, the faces of his characters vying to be noticed from inside the walls that hem him in. But nothing hangs on the walls of The Bunker, which surround me like a three-dimensional blank canvas, demanding that I fill them in. They are monochromatic white, as is my desk, except for years-deep smudges of blue and black ink from the heel of my writing hand, my left hand — the sinister one, the Devil's, which the nuns of my childhood failed to convince me was opposed to God.
But one thing does hang on the walls of The Bunker — a white board on which, in green and red and yellow and black cursive, I sketch out oversized sentences or the sprawling scaffolding of plots. I write in The Bunker in the quiet of the night when the day shifters of Toronto are asleep or cursing the noise that's keeping them awake but doesn't make its way to me. Writing longhand in unruled Crayola sketchbooks such as pre-schoolers use, I do my best to sink into the page, the Cave on the bottom of which Jung's archetypes are strewn about like bones.
Writing Jennie's Boy, I went back in time night after night, stirring up homesickness, time-sickness, the never to be satisfied longing to return to where and when I came from, to the many houses the nomadic Johnstons lived in in search of the elusive one true house that would satisfy us all and end the endless odyssey for good.
Jennie, my young mother, smoking and fretting — I saw her when I wrote about her, sitting sideways to the chrome table we lugged with us from house to house, tipping the ashes of her cigarette into the broken egg shell on her plate. I saw her restored to me, brought back to life for as long as I could feel her presence in the gloom. I saw Lucy, too, my grandmother, the keeper of the chocolate milk, in her burgundy dress, her dark eyes like burnt raisins, smiling down at me. Lucy risen, Lucy laughing, unable to resist telling me things she knew I had no business knowing.
It's not that you can't go home again — it's just that you can't stay. By the end of Jennie's Boy, I had the feeling that all of my family were somehow still back there in the past, still going on without me, that I alone had moved on, leaving the others to forever wonder how and why.
Tonight, a blizzard howls outside, unheard, unseen. Not until I write about something am I certain that it's real.
Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts and tune in to Canada Reads March 17-20.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
