With a four-year-old daughter and a full-time day job, I’ve resigned myself to writing on the go a great deal of the time: perched atop a barn rail while my daughter trots her horse around the ring for her weekly lesson, on my lunchbreak, in various waiting rooms, airports, or train stations, or at the coffee shop down the street from my daughter’s school. But when I have the time and circumstances permit, my absolute favorite place to write, the place I consider my true “author’s space,” is at home in my dedicated office.
When I first started writing with the intent to publish, I reread Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, in which he discusses the importance of situating one’s writing desk not at the center of the room but to the side, because “life isn’t a support system for art but the other way around”; my writing desk is indeed in the corner, but I firmly believe that, lording over the corner or not, the space where all the magic happens can still be imbued with personality and color.
My desk is an old rolltop built in the early 1900s and originally used in the rectory of a local church before it was given to my grandfather’s brother, and eventually passed down through several other family members before it came to me. I love that the desk has what feels like a million different compartments into which I can tuck all manner of inspirational items, mementos, and gifts from family and friends. Each time I take something out of one of these cubbies—be it sticky notes printed with lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest stories, a polaroid photo of me and another writer friend, a personalized notebook, or a good luck charm—it feels as if I’m acquiring or unwrapping the object for the very first time. For someone who writes first drafts in little sprints followed by short rests, a desk chockful of surprises is essential.
In addition to myriad gifts and talismans, my desk is typically strewn with whatever books I’m using for research, titles such as The Ghost: A Cultural History (Susan Owens), Vexed with Devils: Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England (Erika Gasser), New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural from the Seventeenth Through the Twentieth Centuries (Faye Ringel), The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis (Thomas Goetz), or Poe’s Helen Remembers (John Carl Miller). Stuck haphazardly around the research books and notebooks will be any number of diagrams, timelines, and sticky notes.
Just recently, I ripped down a length of paper (pilfered from my daughter’s easel, along with her collection of Crayola markers) from the desk’s top shelf, the paper color coded to highlight the different story beats and narrative arcs of my recently completed third novel, How to Fake a Haunting (fall 2025, Thomas & Mercer), to ensure the pacing was up to snuff. I love the mental acuity that comes when things are organized, but I know my writing space will eventually deteriorate to match the chaos that comes with completing a work-in-progress. If my desk is tidy and mad-scientist-diagram-free, like in these photos, that undoubtedly means I’m between projects.
When things get crazy, I need only to turn from my desk in either direction for a reprieve for the chaos. Behind me to the right is a low bookcase of my novels, short story collection, and anthologies to which I’ve contributed, as well as books written by friends and my all-time favorite novels, poetry collections, nonfiction books, and coffee table volumes. Atop this bookcase are several altars outfitted with things that keep me grounded: a shelf in remembrances of my late beagle, Maya, another holding awards, and another adorned with candles, tarot and oracle cards, talismans, gemstones, seashells, statues, and the like. There’s another bookcase to the right containing the works of Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Beyond that is a daybed, usually occupied by my bloodhound / golden retriever mix, Mirabel, as she waits—sometimes patiently, oftentimes not—to go for a walk.
Finally, as a last source of distraction, relaxation, and/or inspiration, there’s the view outside my office window: in one direction, a large shepherd’s pole hung with various feeders (suet for the woodpeckers, thistle for the finches and sparrows, seed for the chickadees and cardinals, and hummingbird, oriole, and crow feeders, depending on the season). In the other direction is our chicken coop, home to a modest but dynamic flock of hens, including a Barred Rock, Golden Comet, Leghorn, Black Sex Link, and Rhode Island Red.
As often as possible, I try to get into a creative headspace by surrounding myself with things I love, each item, experience, or diversion like the ingredient to a spell. When I’m unsure where to go next on a first draft or stuck on a rewrite, pouring tea into a cup gifted to me by a dear friend, lighting a candle, or shifting my focus for a few minutes to the kaleidoscope of feathers and birdsong outside helps return me to where I need to be in order to write: the present.
Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the author of The Daughters of Block Island, winner of the Bram Stoker Award and a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated “Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell” (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror). She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.
When she’s not writing, she keeps chickens; uses a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle; and sets out on adventures with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound–golden retriever mix. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes, and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.
