I don’t think of myself as a messy person. My kitchen is almost always clean, my living room and dining room are neat, and my bed is made every morning. In my study, however, objects inevitably accumulate in piles that to an outsider might seem to be a mess. There are good reasons for this. I am almost always engaged with more than one writing project—often a fictional work-in-progress alongside continuing academic commitments. My most recent novel, however, demanded a particularly heterogeneous array of items that served as aides memoires for writing.
Little Follies: A Mystery at the Millennium, took me quite a long time to complete. [1] It is set in Krakow, Poland, and because that city underwent many changes during the time that I was writing, I surrounded myself with reminders of its appearance at the time of the plot. I kept the setting pretty accurate in terms of streets, city squares, and bridges; but I invented a fictional museum that had to be placed near the actual university, and so I had to tinker with the outline of the Old City. Therefore, I needed a map at hand more or less all the time.
I was guided by memory of the times I visited Krakow (five in all, once for a four month stay), but I found that my memory was both vivid and slippery. Exactly what direction did I walk to get to the castle? To that church? Does the river really run north, even though it seems to curve east under those bridges? I kept a Polish phrase book near to hand, as well as some small mementoes that fit into the story, such as a hunk of amber and a crystal from the Wieliczka salt mine, which are talismans for one of the crazier characters in the novel.
A couple of years before the manuscript reached its final form, an event in the real world caused a problem in the fictional one. A troublesome painting lies at the center of my story, and its actual counterpart surfaced in a dramatic fashion when a painting by Leonardo da Vinci entitled Salvator Mundi was authenticated and auctioned for an astounding $450,000,000. I was writing about a painting of the same name and possibly by the same artist that was undergoing fictional authentication (yes, there is such a thing) at the very same time that this news broke. After an interval of consternation, I figured out a way to accommodate this inopportune event, which necessitated research into art history and more clutter assembled to that end.
Skip ahead to my current work in progress, and a different array of objects are spread around my desk, which has a computer set up to the right on a jerry-built riser and a straight-backed wooden chair in front. Now I am accompanied by my great-aunt’s travel diary and her mementoes from a trip to Japan and China that she took in the improbable year of 1936, all of which ground my fictional narrative of such a journey.
I have been using disparaging terms such as “clutter” and “mess” to describe what surrounds me when I write, but I profit from the presence of these things. They prompt memories, inspire ideas, and keep imagination grounded in evidence of what is possible.
Carolyn Korsmeyer spent a good many years as a professor of philosophy before turning her pen to fiction. Her first novel, Charlotte’s Story, was released in 2021 and a third, Riddle of Spirit and Bone is due out in 2025. Little Follies (2023) is available from BlackRoseWriting and other vendors. More details about her books can be found at, www.carolynkorsmeyer.com.
