Kai mokiausi gimnazijoje didžiąją dalį namuose praleisto laiko praleisdavau prie savo rašomojo stalo, kur kaliau biologiją ir rašiau laiškus, daug laiškų. Todėl drąsiai galėjau sakyti, kad mano stalas – mano tvirtovė. Ir dabar dar matau, kur kas būdavo sudėliota. Tikriausiai nepatikčiau mūsų prezidentei, kuri kas vakarą palieka stalą tvarkingą, o ir per visą dieną jį tokį sugeba išlaikyti, – nes mano stalas visada būna visiška kuitalynė, bet toj kuitalynėj dažniausiai ( ;)) žinau, kas kur padėta būdavo. Neseniai pagalvojau, kad dabar namuose visai neturiu jokio savo kampo, kur galėčiau meiliai apsikuisti :). Dabar yra kas ir taip apkuičia 🙂 Na, bet aš ir vėl į lankas 😀  

Kai koks nors brangus žmogus kur nors išvažiuodavo, prašydavau, kad aprašytų (tikruose laiškuose), kaip jis gyvena, kokia jo aplinka, koks jo stalas. Kad galėčiau geriau įsivaizduoti jo naują gyvenimą, naują “tvirtovę”. Ir štai netikėtai aptikau seriją straipsnelių apie rašytojų darbo kambarius arba kitas vietas, kur jie rašo. Mintyse iš pasitenkinimo apsilaižiau kaip katinas – neįtikėtinai įdomu!!! Ir mintyse vis sukasi “A room of one’s own”, nors čia gal ir nelabai į temą, nors gal ir į temą.  

Daugelis autorių mums nepažįstami, bet jei buvo kas įdomiau, vis tiek cituoju. Cituoju angliškai, nes jei jau reikėtų versti, tai tingi žiurkelė, nuoširdžiai prisipažinsiu, tikriausiai niekada neparašytų šito posto. Todėl, jei nelabai suprasit, naudokit šitą (nors ką tik pabandžiau išverst pastraipą, tai ne kas).  

Nekantrauju pradėti:  

Colm Toibin – airių rašytojas ir kritikas. Jo knyga The Blackwater Lightship 1999 m. buvo nominuota Booker Prize. Čia jo kambarys ir citata iš aprašymo: “The chair is one of the most uncomfortable ever made. After a day’s work, it causes pain in parts of the body you did not know existed. It keeps me awake.”  

“The room is like a cave, and has books I love in it. The main door was closed up and a smaller opening was made under the stairs. (I went away while all this was happening.) The furniture is locked in, and part of me is locked in too, or I hope it is, although I often made a bid to escape. I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up.”  

Graham Swift – šio rašytojo knygų yra išleista ir lietuviškai. “I write in longhand, using the computer only in the later stages. I need the link with ink and the ability to cross out savagely. I’m a great user of the wastepaper bin.”  ”The photo somehow disguises the fact that the heavy-duty floor covering badly needs replacing”. 🙂

Carmen Callil. “I write every day, typing straight on to that small computer. I start at my desk at six or seven in the morning and continue all day. There is a section of my study that you can’t see in this photograph. In it is a small, hard, painful sofa and two extremely comfy dog beds. When writing goes badly, I am often to be found on that sofa gazing at my ceiling with the dogs asleep on the floor.”  

Seamus Heaney – 1995 m. Nobelio literatūros premijos laureatas. “I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded”.  

Penelope Lively apie savo knygų eilę: “Below the mantelpiece is the book bench – recent arrivals and things waiting to be read”.   

Nicola Barker. “I’m very focused when I work. I wear a pair of industrial earmuffs, even though I’m partially deaf and don’t really need them.” 

“As I work, my dog, Watson, insists on positioning himself under my chair. He’s a terrifying mixture of needy and companionable. He groans a lot, and sighs expressively”. 

“In general it’s always possible to tell which phase I’m in with a project by the number of books piled up on my desk. At the start there’s just a few, by the end they pose a serious health-and-safety hazard. I like to cover the ones I use regularly – notebooks. dictionaries et cetera – with wrapping paper and a shiny coating of sticky-back-plastic (for better hand-feel).” 

Alan Sillitoe. “Next to the steps is a bottle of Putinka – little Putin – vodka I picked up in Russia in 2005. My new book is a record of travels there from the 1960s, the bottle to remind me I’ll need to be at the launch in October. Elsewhere on the shelves is my RAF cap badge, which gets a polish when I think of it, a model typewriter, a small library of books about Nottingham and a 22-volume Jewish encyclopedia which is wonderful, but whenever I look up one thing, I’m always sidetracked into reading about something else”. 

“I’m usually at my desk by 9.30am. I have an hour’s sleep in the afternoon and a couple of vodkas with supper, but I’m often still there at 10.30pm. I can’t stand Radio 4, but have Radio 3 on most of the time. Sometimes I might just put in a comma in the morning, and take it out again at night. But that’s the way it goes.” 

Kate Mosse. “I use the tiny laptop on my desk for novels only – no email, no journalism, no internet, no administration – and I hoard only books and paintings relevant to the project I’m working on.”

 Helen Simpson. “It’s the only room where I occasionally catch an ancient whiff of nicotine; it must have been to where the smoker of the previous family was banished.”

“Myself, I’m grateful for my laptop but I don’t want it to dominate. It’s not allowed to hog any desk space, it keeps to the white side-table, and I don’t have it turned on all the time. I write with a fountain pen – there it is, on the desk.”

Caryl Phillips. “I write at the chaotic desk”.

Craig Raine. “There is no easy chair. When I am exhausted, I lie on the floor”.

Ronan Bennett. “Before I had kids I used to get up early to write. If I started at 6 or 7am, and was writing well, I would finish by 1pm, sometimes earlier. I can’t do that any more because my eight-year-old son is a light sleeper like me and uses the excuse to get up and come in for a chat.

I’ve told the kids they can come in whenever they want, and because they know this they don’t actually bother that much. I’ve read of writers who enforce something like a prison “silent system” on their families, but there are more important things than writing.”

“The state of my desk is always an indication of how the writing is going. If it’s tidy, I’m avoiding work. If there’s clutter, it’s going well and there’s neither time nor inclination to clear up.”

Virginia Woolf. “She was always being distracted – by Leonard sorting the apples over her head in the loft, or the church bells at the bottom of the garden, or the noise of the children in the school next door, or the dog sitting next to her and scratching itself and leaving paw marks on her manuscript pages. In winter it was often so bitterly cold and damp that she couldn’t hold her pen and had to retreat indoors.”

“This was where, on Friday March 28, 1941, on a cold spring morning, she wrote a farewell letter to Leonard before walking down to the River Ouse, leaving her papers in disarray, with several revisions of her last essay on Mrs Thrale in the waste-paper basket and immense numbers of typewritten sheets lying about the room. It looks much tidier now.”

Maggie Gee. “But when I write at home, I like to be surrounded by evidence of love – cards, messages, faces – which is strange because in many ways writing is impersonal.”

Jane Austen. “Chawton Cottage was a household of ladies – Mrs Austen, her daughters and their friend Martha Lloyd – all taking part in the work of the house and garden. But Jane was allowed private time. Having no room of her own, she established herself near the little-used front door, and here “she wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper”. A creaking swing door gave her warning when anyone was coming, and she refused to have the creak remedied.

From this table the revised manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice went to London to be published in 1811 and 1813. From this table too came Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Here she noted down the encouraging comments of neighbours – Mrs Bramston of Oakley Hall, who thought S&S and P&P “downright nonsense”, and “dear Mrs Digweed” who volunteered that “if she had not known the author, she could hardly have got through Emma”.”

George Bernard Shaw: “This was a strange place for a red-bearded socialist, with large ideas of how to change the world, to land up. But somehow it suited Shaw. He was, after all, a master of paradox – and besides, what all writers need, even the most public figures among them, is privacy while they are writing. “People bother me,” Shaw confessed. “I came here to hide from them.” From this modest hideout, he could bother people without interruption.”

John Banville. “How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of. In my time I have had to make do with some strange work-spaces. The one I liked best was a converted maid’s room where the ceiling was so low I could not stand upright, but where there was a wonderful little window with geraniums crowding the glass and a smooth green lawn beyond, and where in uterine cosiness I wrote two books and the beginning of a third.”

Ian Rankin: “The pair of handcuffs were a gift from a friend who used to be a copper in the 1970s. The trees outside the window belong to our neighbours, and I believe they’re about to chop them down. If I knew anything about antique fireplaces, I’m sure I could tell you something about those tiles – but I don’t, so I can’t. I always have music playing when I’m working, and from the CD cases on the floor it looks as if my choices that day were Julie Fowlis, Magazine, Steven Lindsay and John Martyn. I always think of myself as a tidy sort, but this photo gives the lie to that. There is, however, method in the seeming chaos. Trust me.”

Kurio kambario savininko knygą išsirinktum skaityti?

|room rider|

PS Šie kambariai ir dar daugiau kambarių čia.