Philosopher David Wood in The New York Times:
Much has been written about the writer’s cabin. Among the most notable recent books on the topic are “Heidegger’s Hut” by Adam Sharr and “A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams,” Michael Pollan’s account of imagining and then actually constructing his own writing space. A standard Internet search can quickly yield images of the writing rooms (cabins, huts, sheds) of legendary scriveners: Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roald Dahl, Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau and — a writer of a markedly different sort —Ted Kaczynski, to name a few. And Jill Krementz’s 1999 collection of photographs “The Writer’s Desk” gives us tantalizing glimpses of writers sitting at their desks. But why the interest? Have these places somehow become secular sites of the sacred?
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Interesting, but it’s telling that the assumption is that the writing retreat is for SOLO writing. I’ve found that I can write by myself anywhere, but to have the intense experience that is required for a COLLABORATIVE project it’s important to have a more formal (and more isolated) retreat. To whit, Managing the Infosphere was largely written in one week in a cabin without plumbing in northern Ontario (and with absolutely no connections to the infosphere!). Tomorrow, I start a four-day writing retreat with Arctic co-authors, but we couldn’t come up with anything more remote than Bloomsbury….and I’m much more worried about the possibility for distractions.
By the way, I’m now writing this in the Regent Street Apple Store (while my computer’s getting fixed) and trying to work on a chapter for tomorrow’s Arctic confab at the same time. I’m not sure if the anonymity of being here (and typing for hours while standing with horrible posture over a table whose height is precisely designed to make extended typing impossible) is the ultimate writer’s retreat or its antithesis.
Thanks Phil. I’ve done most of my co-writing separately, and exchanged drafts by email, rather than in the same room. The exception is the Lefebvre work with Neil Brenner for the State, Space, World collection and the ‘Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory’ pieces. (The short ‘Henri Lefebvre in Contexts’ piece was written before we’d even met.) With the co-writing we had to meet up in various places – Los Angeles, New York, New Haven, Boston, Amsterdam – as we were based in different locations, but none of them were really retreats in the sense of this piece or your examples.