The Writers' Room of Boston's / News articles

“A writer is a man who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do,” says author Donald Barthelme. The lack of 9-to-5 structure may make creative writing look like a nonjob, hardly meriting the space and time that “real jobs” require. But to honor the structure, the quiet, the away-from-it-allness that writers require and crave while embarking on the ephemeral solidity of their task, this pleasant, cozy space has been designated just for them. Located way-upstairs, intimately overlooking the beautiful Richards Building with its 39 cast-iron arches; downtown, but up at a loft remove from the busyness of business, the Room consists of seven cubicles. There’s also a sweet little sitting room, a kitchenette, also a “back room” with books on display (some of which were written here). Happily, the Writers’ Room is equally patronized by regular old non-published, non-professional writers as by the other kind. Pleasantly low-tech, no phones, no Internet, no doorbells, not even any loved ones, the place warmly invites the sipping-in the muse. Like inspiration itself, the Writers’ Room operates 24/7.

Once upon a time, there was a blank piece of paper. The paper wanted a writer to put some words on it, but the writer was far too busy admiring his pajamas, waiting for the mailman, and moping about why he was not writing to actually write anything on a piece of paper.

The paper grew depressed and cried softly to itself as coffee stains spread across its ivory grain. But one night a fairy godmother appeared and drove the paper down the Mass Pike to a large room on Boylston Street overlooking the Public Garden [former location] where there were lots of other pieces of paper, teeming with nouns and adjectives and even a few verbs.

The paper was very happy because it was in the Writers' Room of Boston, where poets and novelists flock and can think of nothing they would rather do than fill up pieces of blank paper, and sometimes actually do. Some of them do it late at night after they finish other jobs. Some of them head up the narrow stairway tucked between Shreve Crump & Low and the Leather Center early in the morning and stay there until the sun sinks over the trim spire of the Arlington Street Church.

Although it realized that the fairy tale in which it was the hero was fast coming to an end, the paper was also happy because it had landed on the desk of Joseph P. Fox, one of the 22 writers who are room members. Fox, unit production manager of WGBH-TV's Frontline program, is working on a memoir about his father, head bartender at the Algonquin Hotel in New York for 35 years. Although he has no publisher, Fox has been working in the room three nights a week for over two years and it seemed like a good bet that the piece of paper would be filled right down to the last line where it would say The End.

"I regard this room as my sanctuary," explained Fox, who lives with his girlfriend in a Somerville apartment. "There is no laundry to be done. No dishes. No phone. No distraction. Coming here is just like going to work, but better."