In Praise of Solitude in the Service of Craftsmanship ‹ Literary Hub

All photos courtesy of the author.

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Most mornings, clutching my computer in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, I walk down a staircase that winds around lichen-covered rocks to the door of my father’s old painting studio, where, since he moved to a new studio decades ago, is where I write.

The building is not very big—about the size of Thoreau’s cabin. It sits about a hundred feet from our house, near a salt marsh. I have set my computer on a long wooden farm table that leans against the west window. I am sitting in a yellow chair—one of my father’s, from when he painted here—that is dotted with splashes of color where he must have hastily wiped his brush. I spent so many childhood afternoons in this studio, and I know my father’s oil paints well enough to recognize most of the colors on the chair by their specific names from the tubes: cerulean blue; Prussian blue; olive green; sap green; mauve; Payne’s gray, and so on.

The workshop is a century old. It would need to be renovated to live in, but it is comfortable enough for a few hours a day, despite the smells that, depending on the season, are wood stain, dust, mildew, and sometimes, when it is really hot, the faint traces of turpentine that have been dripping from my father’s paintbrushes onto the floorboards for decades. Before my father made it his workshop, it was my great-grandfather’s tool shed, and it still has that relaxed utilitarian look, the way it sits alone on the hillside with its weather-beaten shingles, ivy creeping over the sealed windows, and birds’ nests nesting above the doors and windows. On my way to the workshop this morning, I noticed a young oak growing in the gutter. There is always some construction project going on at the house that is beyond what is necessary here, so it floats, on the edge of disrepair. During northeast storms, rainwater seeps under the door and forms a large puddle on the wooden floor, which resolves itself by drying out within a few days.

My favorite thing about writing here is that it’s too far from home to get Internet access. Then there’s the quiet. So quiet that in the summer I can identify most of the bird calls in the surrounding trees. A trapped fly, darting into the windows from one side of the room to the other, is such a disturbance that I stop writing until it heads for the open door. I run outside to shoo squirrels off the roof because of their raspy footsteps. A woodpecker foraging for insects in the shingles makes me want to come home for coffee. In fact, the boundary between animal and human space is, well, relaxed here. I keep spiders nearby because I appreciate the work they do on flies. I like watching a line of ants on the wall, wonderfully shocked that they all know where they’re going. Every spring I find at least one old tool drawer full of acorns from a cheeky squirrel, and it always makes me smile.

I can look at each object listed above and tell a story about each one.

Now that my father’s paints, easels and brushes are gone, the space inside resembles something between an antique store and a walk-in closet. Cabinet of curiosities (years of still life collection). From where I sit, I can see three pinned butterflies, a half-dozen mats, pressed seaweed framed under glass, a small bucket of colorful buttons, three dolphin teeth, an antique meat cleaver the size of a small flipper, old glass bottles, two paper wasp nests, an apple-picking basket, more than a dozen mismatched dice in various off-whites, owl feathers, speckled heirloom beans, dried flowers hanging from the rafters, glass bell jars, carved wooden statues, animal skulls, bird eggs, seashells, an old hammer, disused paintbrushes, sea glass, fish vertebrae, black-and-white photographs by French Impressionist painters, more sketches, paintings, and prints than I can count, and much more, all tacked to the walls or propped up on windowsills or piled on shelves. There’s a molasses-colored mandolin on a shelf above my desk—the domed kind that looks like a giant pear. The neck broke off and collapsed into the body. For the longest time, I thought the mandolin must have been something my father had acquired for a drawing. Then, last year, my mother, visiting the studio, casually mentioned that her ex-boyfriend had given it to her, in the 1970s, as a parting gift from a farmhouse they lived in Kentucky, which made me think strangely of a story that could have come straight out of my new book.

In fact, it’s no surprise that I wrote almost my entire book—a collection of short stories centered on objects that connect people across time—in this studio. I can look at each object mentioned above and tell a story about each one. The seaweed pressed under glass? Sent to me by a friend from Maine, whom I met nearly fifteen years ago while studying birds at a marine research station, and with whom I’ve lost touch, so every time I look at the seaweed, I feel a small loss for my twenty-something self. The carved statues? Collected by my great-grandmother when she sailed aboard a ship that sailed around the world a few years after her son died in World War II. Even the old hammer on the workbench is one I recognize from a charcoal drawing my father made in the 1980s. The drawing was so startlingly real and masterfully done—I can still see it, on the wall of his new studio—that as a child it convinced me he had special powers. It’s an idea I’ve often had: my parents were omniscient, powerful magicians, able, in addition to rendering three-dimensional objects with nothing but a pencil, to conjure up heat and stories and trips to the ice cream parlor. Perhaps it’s a feeling most people have, and for which they feel a similar acute nostalgia—when you thought of your parents as infallible demigods, even if they weren’t. It’s a vision I miss, even though I know it’s unfair to them. Regardless, I’m glad I have the hammer to at least remind me of that feeling, which I think is why I’ve barely changed anything in the studio, including the paint on the walls that are in desperate need of a new coat. If I did that, I’d lose my father’s brush marks on the walls, which to me are some of the most treasured items in my writing space.

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The history of sound by Ben Shattuck is available from Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.