I’ve just been replaying an interview I did with Betsy Warland in January about writing spaces and the materials of writing (going to start transcribing it next week). She’s just finished a collection of essays on the subject, and one of the ways in which she formulates her writing space is as a heightening of the ordinary; every day language and objects, she points out, are the materials of writing. So, in her space, she arranges her materials with deliberation and consistency in order to evoke and sustain whatever writing project she’s working on at a given time. It’s as if the threshold to her study door is one that abandons the happenstance. I’m excited by her collection. There are so many books out there about writing, but this one is a different and more interesting approach altogether. Anyway, it’s the first in a series of such interviews on writers and their spaces I’m doing for Matrix. Next up, writers who write in public spaces (like the local coffee shop or the VPL); and after that, an interview with a writer whose orientation to text is through sound and echo.