To write her new novel, Emma Hooper chose a desk near a frigid lake

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 the Etta and Otto and Russell and James author Emma Hooper.

Normally, mostly, I write in my loft. It's nice. There are big church-like windows and two surviving plants and a carpet big and soft enough to sleep on (which I do, often). However, for the first month of this new year, January 2025, I decided to try something else. I decided to try water.

I love the water. As visceral as hunger, I'm drawn to jump into any and every trickle, pool and pond I can. Born and raised, like Etta — the protagonist from my book Etta and Otto and Russell and James — in the vast dry sweep of the Canadian prairies, finding my way to water has always been an unspoken, natural goal for me. 

So, for the month of January I took a desk at a co-working space in a little village, unremarkable but for the fact that it has a lake. A lake that, every day, come rain, snow, sleet, ice, drizzle, mizzle, mist or, just once, shine, I could jump into.

By Canadian standards this lake is not a lake, it's a puddle. It's only ninety meters long and less than ten across. There are sheep a few footsteps in one direction and a couple pigs in another. The changing facility is a corrugated metal caravan, colder inside than out, with windows on every side so that the sheep, and anyone else who happens to pass by, can see every shivery inch of mud-smudged nudity.

But the water is swimmable, so it's enough.

So every morning I'd pack my still-wet bathing suit, towel, wellies and (thankfully not wet) laptop and, after dropping the kids at school, head to the village. I'd find an unoccupied desk space and dive back into work on my newest novel. 

There were others there working alongside me, but always in a respectful shared silence, so I never knew what anyone else was working on, whether they were sales managers or graphic designers or ran international greeting card companies or wrote epic sheep-and-pig-based poetry. We just smiled and nodded at each other and kept out of each other's way according to standard awkward-polite British protocol. No one ever commented or even looked twice when, every day, I'd disappear for a while and then return with dripping hair and sock feet, leaving freshly muddied boots by the door.

Every day I'd write. And write and edit and delete and faff and write and get stuck and get unstuck and get restuck and re-unstuck and, eventually, get so stuck that I'd be pretty sure that, honestly, I'd never be able to write again, that it was all over and what was the point of making art anyway?, that it was probably time to retire and look into sales management or graphic design or starting up a greeting card company. This was usually around noon.

So, at that point, I'd leave my laptop and go, walk across the muddy fields in what was almost always cold rain, past the disinterested sheep to the freezing caravan. I'd fumble out of my attempt at grown-up-office clothes and into my damp swimsuit, walk out onto the little dock, and jump in. 

And some days there was ice to be broken.

And some days there was a rainbow.

Some days my towel blew across the field and away.

Some days there were ducklings, brand new and unafraid.

But every day, every single day, it felt shockingly cold. And then, every day, everything else felt manageable. Sometimes euphoric and sometimes just okay, but always, every day, manageable enough to be able to keep going, to go back to my desk, re-open my laptop, and start again.

My partner once pointed out to me the fact that all of my books (so far?) end with water.

No they don't, I said.

Yes they do, he said.

No…? I said.

Yes, he said. Think about it.

I thought about it.

Oh my goodness, I said. You're right. They do.

All my novels, all things, maybe, end at the water, but this month made me realise that, also, maybe all things start there too — that maybe my character Etta knows something I don't: that it's a loop; that it's all one big, long, loop.

Now that January is over, I don't go to the office and lake every day. I can't afford it and I did miss my cosy, normal loft-office. But I've brought some of the water with me: a little bottle, collected from the lake. In fact, I've made a whole collection; small bottles from all the lakes, rivers, oceans and seas I've submerged in. It keeps me company and reminds me, when I need it, what it feels like to be shocked into starting again. 

And, once I week, I do go back. I walk across the field, change in the caravan and I jump in. I freeze, I unfreeze, I restart.

Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts and tune in to Canada Reads March 17-20.