As far as obsessions go, collecting photographs of writers’ workspaces is fairly benign. Regardless, it’s the subject of one of our many recurring features here at Unstressed. If you’re a publishing poet who wouldn’t mind sharing a photo (and an optional description) of your workspace, please drop us a line.

First up is Sandra Beasley, whose poems appeared on Linebreak on June 10 and Aug. 19.

Here’s Sandra:

I don’t know if it’s truly where magic happens, but that’s how the Linebreak editors phrased it when they asked for a snapshot of my writing space. What does happen at my desk: drafting, cussing, sneezing, gesticulating, wikipedia-ing as an aid to drafting, wikipedia-ing as a distraction from drafting, reading lines aloud, tapping out ten syllable-lines out with my left hand, and drinking of scotch.

A rundown of some visible elements:

• A new-ish macbook (which replaced my beloved ibook). This laptop will sometimes move up with me to the balcony, or to a rocking chair in our bedroom.
• A hulk of a printer that bears a sticker proclaiming SCREW GUILT. I have gone through five printers since high school, and this sticker has been transferred to each and every one of them. I don’t particularly know why, but now it’s tradition.
• Two framed prints that are actually each half of the same image, a menagerie of animals depicted in styles ranging from the cartoonish to Audubon-exact. I clipped these from an issue of CABINET magazine, and find them a useful place to rest my eyes when I’m feeling stuck. Every time I look, there is an animal I hadn’t noticed before. This may have a role in the high frequency of giraffes, horses, turtles, capybaras, and platypi that appear in my recent poems.
• An exceptionally comfy chair that I bought at a second-hand store here in DC and then carried, balanced on top of my head, the eight blocks back to my old apartment building.

I really do keep my desk this clean. Don’t get me wrong, there are stacks of to-do paperwork elsewhere, but having a blank surface is key to giving myself permission to write. If I were trying to draft a sestina while also eyeing my incomplete 2008 tax return, the sestina would never happen. If the walls seem a little bare, I am trying to pace myself. We’ve only lived here since March, so I’m waiting until I have just the right things to hang up.

When we moved in, I worried that the lack of a window would keep this from working as my studio. But I get plenty of natural light (there’s a skylight above that staircase in the upper left of the photo). It never feels claustrophobic, and it is also the first space I see when I walk in the door–so naturally, the first place I sit. Much more organic than creeping off to an attic.

The books to the left of my desk are only a fraction of my poetry collection. I have far too many books, and since I can’t bear to get rid of anything signed to me, it is safe to say I will always have far too many books. They’re grouped according to the color of their spines. It is an indulgence, but as easily as I can remember the author’s last name, I’m able to picture how the book looks in my hands. You’d be surprised how quickly I find what I need. And when I can’t locate a title right away, the search causes me to stumble across three books I’d kind of forgotten about, but want to re-read. Who says any system having to do with poetry has to be efficient?

What I love best about this space is that it is, truly, a room of my own. It doesn’t double as a sewing room, or a guest bedroom; the boy has his own desk, on another floor entirely. It is a room for writing, and that is a rare and lucky thing.