Where I Write
Dylan Thomas’s Writing Shed, Laugherne, Wales—Photo courtesy Wikipedia
Some decades ago, before I thought of myself as anything but an architect, I visited Dylan Thomas’s writing shed in Wales, where he wrote for the second half of his short life. I was with my wife on a leisurely trip. She was an English teacher, so we made a travel deal. I would accompany her to the homes of famous writers; she would visit famous architecture with me. I got the better of the bargain.
Writers often inhabit interesting places that colour their tales. The Bronte sisters’ home in the North was all hard and dark stone. It poured black rain on the day of our visit. Thomas Hardy’s thatch-roofed Dorset cottage set amid a classic, sunny English country garden was an idealized environment hidden from the world. But nothing prepared me for Dylan Thomas’s writing shed. It was my first understanding of how the intimacy of the space in which one writes can affect the words.
Thomas’s writing space was, literally, a small boat shed converted to writing by the simple expedient of placing a table against the end wall’s vertical planks and battered white casement window. The table focuses on the waters of the Taf Estuary; side windows broaden the view of beach and town, providing another perspective for paused thoughts. Opposite the beach-facing prospect is an unwindowed wall, framed like a barn—vertical planks and posts between horizontal beams called girts, too narrow to serve as extra shelves but perfect as frames for artwork, sketches and photos. The whitewashed walls and ceiling complete the effect and set off the contents. A broken-framed, open backed bookcase slouches by the table under the weight of books at all angles, some still open, others askew on the writing surface.
He wrote on a wooden table, a bit narrow and short for formal dining. It’s the kind of table your grandmother might have had for breakfasts in a screened porch, with solid, slightly worked, scuffed and faded red spindle legs kept steady by trim boards that cracked your knees if you stood up too quickly, supporting greenish tabletop planks—I couldn’t tell if there were three or four planks, nor how they were butted. Everything was covered with books, papers, oil lamps, urns and a beer bottle from the days when there were only quarts.
He sat on an unremarkable thatch-seated wooden kitchen chair, with two wooden leg knobs at the front edges to torture the backs of your knees. There is no waste basket, only crumpled papers on the floor, perhaps discarded first drafts. I wonder what food for masters’ theses is hiding in plain sight, not moved as homage to the poet’s life, itself crumpled too soon.
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I have lived in the same house for a decade longer than Thomas in his writing shed. I have worked in almost every one of its rooms but only recently set out to create a purposeful writing place. Like my writing, it is somewhat tentative, unfinished, somewhat workable, struggling for a balance between character and function.
There is no typewriter in Thomas’s writing shed, only pen and paper. As a modern man, I have a laptop, two additional monitors, two printers, a personal stereo system and an impertinent little holder for my iPhone—half of one table is consumed by cables and connectors rather than brilliant word fragments. I sit between two parallel, unmatched IKEA tables, connected along the wall with a short leaf that would fold down if ever I allowed it. And hidden behind one monitor as printer support is a small antique oval table bequeathed for the moment by my semi-nomadic son. He acquires furnishings at garage sales and lane abandonments, sheds them to our home each time he moves or amalgamates with another household. All told, my work surfaces are at least three times the square footage of Thomas’s.
Like Thomas, my main writing surface faces outdoors, in my case through a pair of glazed French doors opening onto a small patio sunk five steps below the garden beyond, so that my view is horizontal, close and green—not so out and down and changeable as the sky and the Taf through Thomas’s traditional casements. The evening dark stops my view at an old apple tree, supported by timber props that preserve ancient branches still bearing fruit after many decades and alight with strings of clear Christmas bulbs, temporary decorations that I have just never found the time or need to untangle. I like to think the warmth of these old-fashioned tungsten bulbs helps the apple blossoms get an early start, so the transparents can still be picked before the end of June. Thomas’s nighttime view would have also been lights, twinkling from across the Taf and the town of Laugherne.
It’s important in this year of fear to create places of calm and certainty when so little is anchored, so much is lost—so much time, so much closeness, so much peace. It’s perhaps harder when you are older, when each turning of the hourglass as you wait, entrapped, becomes a larger fraction of those that yet remain.
A telling detail I just happened upon while revisiting old photos—Thomas’s writing desk is itself cantilevered over the water below. The entire water’s end of the building is on stilts, but there is an additional push of the Taf-facing wall out from the main framing, just the size of a writing table. It’s as if the flow of his words could not be contained, needed to expand beyond mere walls and soar even further over the Welsh countryside below and beyond.
Or so I like to think.