To Write, and Sketch, and Dream
In search of the places where the writers once sat
The old man handed me a book. “You’re going to like this one,” he smiled. He had remembered. A week before, we had been talking about Irish writers — Irish poetry, to be specific. He was Irish and he learned quickly that I knew little beyond Yeats.
With some magic in his eye and pointing with his head, he added, “And that man over there wrote it.”
I turned around and saw an older man humming into a tiny book. I looked at the cover, read the name, turned to my mentor of the week. “This is him?”
“Aye.”
As a young man, growing up in New York City, learning I had a love for words and trying to play with them, I was constantly chasing the shadows of writers. I found myself sleuthing my way to their haunts. And then, just sitting in their spaces.
I missed Frank McCourt’s teaching time at my high school by just a handful of years. But I knew where his brother Malachy owned a bar and held court. A friend introduced me to Kettle of Fish, the place where Kerouac and Dylan had hung out just decades earlier. I was one of the first customers at the new Lion’s Head, where those beat writers had called home. It wasn’t the same place, it had a new owner and new location, but I made it my own for a bit.
I carried a yellow legal pad and would pull up a seat and pull out a pen and take notes. Random happenings in the head, ideas to save for later, and character sketches. New York is the city of characters. Sit in any one spot and you have the entire cast and crew of your next literary masterpiece. And sit there long enough and encounter enough people and magical things might happen. Sitting down a couple of seats over from an Irish poet, for example.
I had the honor of meeting a dazzling writer friend, of the old days of LiveJournal, at one such place, and we sat, yellow notepad out, sketching out a theory of life and dreaming of a future where our thoughts and words would change the world. Those moments, like the childhood memories that flitter in and out like swallows on a cliffside, are ones I wish I could hang on to and sit with again.
Now, twenty years later, no longer having the luxury of vagabonding about in search of the places where the writers once sat - or currently sit - I have just the memory. I’ve had thoughts of recreating those special places in my new city of Minneapolis; to go sit somewhere, and write, and sketch, and dream. And, perhaps, become the old man who subtly points to the older folk whose name appears on the cover of something written long ago and say to some young kid, “I think you’re going to like this one.”
Friends, let’s make this an interactive art: Where, in your town, do you like to sit, and write, and sketch, and dream? Do you meet up with other writers? Do you sit in spaces that writers of generations past haunt?
Comment below with the name of the location and maybe we’ll see each other out there.
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