Irish Bars, Supermarkets & Coffee Shops: Where the Writing Gets Done

Where you write isn't all that important.

Photo by Carli Jeen on Unsplash

I’m writing this from a little café attached to my local Publix, which, if you don’t know, is a spectacular, yet increasingly expensive, supermarket chain in Florida. This café is the latest in a string I’ve frequented in the neighborhood for the past few months. I’m here because the Wi-Fi is decent and the café con leche costs two dollars.

Behind me are an assortment of sunscreens on sale. To the left, a bunch of inflatable kid toys for the pool. A couple aisles back, there is a short line of people waiting to fill their prescription medication because this café also doubles as a pharmacy. There isn’t a bathroom, and the outlets under my chair don’t work. No music is playing, but at the table next to me, there is a grown man playing a Pokémon game on his phone with the volume turned way up (I know it is Pokémon because I’m a child of the ‘90s and I know that theme song anywhere).

It isn’t the “ideal” writing scenario. But then again, does that even exist?

You might think so if you watch movies, television, and, lately, TikTok videos depicting the writing life. In these mediums, you’ll often find writers sitting at clean, neatly organized desks. A candle lit next to them. Their window will look out to gray clouds or morning sunshine. There might even be some ambient music in the background, perhaps jazz. Often, the writers will have a whole process they go through before they even start writing. It might include brewing coffee in a fancy machine, lining up fancy pens, watering plants, opening up to the clean page of a pristine notebook (do they even write in them?). 

I saw a TikTok video depicting a writing setup and routine like this recently. The discrepancy between this and what I’ve experienced in the decade of writing my book made me think about the various places I’ve done the majority of my work.

So, I decided to write an ode of sorts. It isn’t elaborately structured and doesn’t have a special rhyme scheme. Here it goes.

An ode to some of the places I’ve written

Shoutout, first and foremost, to the desk where it all began—or at least my novel. That would be my freshman dorm room at Cornell University. A small desk near a window overlooking part of the quad. I sat there to write, usually at night, and was often scared shitless because Cornell’s campus is so eerily quiet. I grew up hearing cop sirens and people cursing at each other outside of my window. It was at this desk, nonetheless, that I wrote, in a mad rush one night, 25 stream of consciousness pages about my childhood in the Bronx and friends of mine that never got to see a place like Cornell. A chunk of raw text that became the building blocks for fictional characters and scenes. 

Shoutout to the crooked desk I inherited when I moved off-campus my junior year. Home became a ramshackle house in downtown Ithaca that resembled a crack den. It was $400 a month, and my room had its own private entrance—which made it easy to ignore the general disrepair. The last guy who lived there left behind a huge, clunky desk that tilted to one side because of an eroding leg. It was here that I started writing a string of short stories based on that chunk of raw text I mentioned. 

Shoutout to the Bronx Library Center on Fordham Road, where I’d walk to from my apartment when I was on break from school and needed to get words in. I’d spend hours in there turning over stories and getting them ready to submit to journals, while watching homeless people sleeping with propped open books get woken up again and again, by annoyed security guards. Along the way to the library, I’d always pass Edgar Allen Poe’s old cottage which sat, hilariously out of place, in the middle of Kingsbridge Road. I’d stop and stare at the old house, usually slathered with bird shit, and wonder what Poe would have been like if he’d lived in the Bronx nowadays. Would we be cool?

Shoutout to my first apartment in Miami, when I came here directly after graduating from Cornell, having been accepted into an MFA program. As a broke grad student with no car, I lived in the cheapest place I could find near campus: a microscopic efficiency. In the six months I lasted here that first time around, before I dropped out and ran back to New York (another story for another day), I did a bit of writing while sitting on my bed and resting my laptop on a little stand-up tray that I also used to eat food because there was no room for a table or chairs. Mostly, though, I smoked a lot of cheap cigarettes. 

Shoutout to the first proper desk I ever bought: a small, but sturdy wood secretary desk. I set it up near the fire-escape in my apartment in Washington Heights, overlooking the block below, and the corner boys who sold drugs day and night, rain or sunshine. I often wrote in the mornings or at night after work and stared down at those drug dealers, feeling inspired by their commitment to their craft. I finished the first full draft of my novel there, assembling my little stories from college into a manuscript I thought was done but would in fact be only the beginning. 

Shoutout to the Irish bar a couple blocks from that apartment, where I’d often go to get some work done in the afternoon on slow work days, over a couple of beers. I became friends with the waitress, and soon enough, she had my Purple Haze IPA ready for me once I came through the door. She was a writer, too, and it was she who made me realize the opportunity I’d thrown away by fleeing my fully-funded MFA program in Miami. “I’d kill to get into a program like that,” she said, “I can’t believe you just left.” I thought about that for a long time, and secretly thanked her when I ended up getting a chance to re-enroll in my MFA program years later. 

Shoutout to my loft in Hollywood, Florida, where my girlfriend, by then my fiancée, and I moved in 2016. I took my secretary's desk with me and set it up in another corner of the room, this time overlooking a freight train track. The freight train ran by a few times a day, creating a deafening sound that always startled you—even though you knew it was coming. I spent a lot of the two years I worked there smoking weed I’d buy from a Russian dude down the hall and tricking myself into thinking the weed was helping my writing. Mostly, it wasn’t. 

Shoutout to a little coffee shop a few blocks away from that spot in Hollywood, which I often walked to. The shop, which has since closed and has been replaced by a real estate office, was run by filmmakers from Venezuela. The barista became a friend and made great coffee. Often, I’d bum a cigarette from him and we’d talk about whatever I was working on—some part of my novel, a freelance piece—and then he’d tell me about his family back in Venezuela who didn’t have access to toilet paper. I usually got back to my desk thinking that what I was doing, writing this book of mine, was so frivolous. But at the same time, reminding myself of that frivolity proved useful. At the end of the day, I’d tell myself, this shit isn’t life or death.  

Shoutout to my condo in Miami, which my wife and I bought a couple years later. It is a two-bedroom and we quickly turned our extra room into an office. I woke up early every morning and worked there before my day jobs, and often would return at night. In the beginning, it felt spacious and quiet, almost like those TikTok videos I mentioned. But by 2020, my wife was pregnant, and as my son’s birth approached, the room became crowded with boxes of gifts and diapers and toys. I held it down another six months or so after he was born, but eventually, I ceded it to him. Now it’s filled with a crib, too many cars to count, and all of his books.

Shoutout to a coffee shop down the block from me in Miami, which, for a long time, became my refuge after I lost my home office. It has changed owners three times in the four years I’ve been going there. I’ve been cool with all of them. The first one was a Mexican woman who paid little attention to the shop (she had very few customers, I wonder why…). So much so she’d often leave me there alone while she went to run quick errands. The second owners were better, and ran a tip top place, but after the pandemic they left. The newest owners are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Often I show up to find they’re closed for no reason, which messes up my day. They did add tequenos to the menu though, which I love, and which smoothed things over for a while. These days, though, I rarely go there. A simple iced latte will run you about eight dollars, which I can’t bring myself to pay.  

Finally, shoutout to my dining room table, which, at this moment in time, is where the majority of my work gets done. It’s not a big table, and, usually, has some left over scraps from whatever my kids ate for dinner the night before. But it’s what I’ve got. Usually, I’m there writing in the dark as my wife sleeps nearby on the pullout couch. My daughter is nearing one and recently we ceded our bedroom to her in an attempt to train her to sleep through the night. So, I’m up at 5 a.m., trying, really, really hard, to brew a cup of coffee as quietly as I can, and not make too much noise as I pull my chair out and get to work. Every now and then, I’ll have to stop writing to go into my son’s room, because he’s wailing into the night about his blanket being slightly off his body, or his sock falling off. Sometimes, my little dog, whose crate is directly behind the chair I sit at, will start growling at me because she wants to go outside already.

Ironically, it is at this dining table where the bulk of the writing and revision for my novel’s final form got done. 

In fact, as I approach publishing my first book, with a great publisher and a nice advance, I probably have the worst writing setup I’ve ever had in my life. (Thanks, economy.) But sometimes, that is just how things go.

I’ve learned throughout this journey that where I write is never really all that important. I don’t really have any rituals, and I don’t need any fancy accessories. In fact, I’m a little skeptical of people who make too much of a deal about where and how they work.

In my experience, a reasonably quiet place (you can get used to freight trains after a while) where you can set up a charged laptop and a coffee is all you ever really need to get going. 

Peace,

Andrew

Recommendations:

• This excellent humor piece in The New Yorker that satirizes profile writing is the first thing I’ve ever read by

  Dennard Dayle
  , but it won’t be the last. I’ve already ordered his debut book of short stories, Everything Abridged, and I’m looking forward to digging into those, too.

• I stumbled upon

  Charles Schifano
  ’s Substack recently, and really appreciate how well he can articulate his thoughts on modern writing. His prose is a joy to read, and no less so than in his recent post on Martin Amis (RIP) and how reading great stylists can urge you to the page.

• Jay Caspian Kang has a great piece in The New Yorker on how identity is performed, and made fun of, in battle rap. “Battle rap offers a kind of representation politics for the unwoke, a space where there’s some separation between the craft and the respect that the combatants have for one another. In this way, it is both a reflection of a certain reality and, for its fans, a fantasy for how we wish we could talk about identity.”

• Since the last time I published here, I finished Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans. I highly recommend it. The prose is wonderful, and Murray’s arguments articulating the need for more nuance when depicting race in popular culture hold up today (it was originally published in 1970).

• Finally, if you’re a fan of audiobooks (I wasn’t until just recently) I recommend you check out the app Libby. It’s a wonderful, free, resource with a great interface that allows you to borrow audiobooks from your local library system and listen on your phone (or wherever you listen to your audio books). I used it to finish a couple of books (Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid and Novelist As A Vocation by Haruki Murakami, both of which I recommend) since my last post and really enjoyed the experience.