The Writing Room, by Brian Oliu & Tara Goedjen

The exquisite corpse is a writing exercise.  The corpse is created when someone writes a paragraph and then passes the sheet of paper off to another writer. The cycle is then continued. In this case, the following writing (on writing) was shared between two writers. Two writers who at different times lived and wrote in the same room. The room is in Alabama. At this time it may be available for rental.

The Writing Room

The room I write in is green and I know who painted it this color.  I don’t pretend to be a person who writes in cafes or libraries or surrounded by nature–the room is, in fact, a room, and the green is a green not found in nature.  Hold up a plant to the wall and it will not blend in or disappear.  Hold up a piece of grass, a fern, a flower.  Some days, a dead leaf crawls through the cracks between the glass and the wood that make up the window and it is lost in the same way a cockroach vanishes:  a dark place outside to a dark place inside.  I wonder if the leaf thinks it is some sort of plant heaven (if it knows about these things) something familiar yet artificial.  I have killed every plant and every flower that I have been given.

I have accidentally killed every plant and every flower that I have been given. Also, pets.
But the first time it happened it was with a fern, a small potted fern that I forgot to water one summer. And when I found it dead, its leaves crumpled brown all over the floor, I vowed to punish myself by never having another potted plant. I kept this vow for many years. The fern, when it was alive, was not the color of the green writing room where I once wrote. It was a natural shade of green, whereas the green room shined nearly fluorescent, even at night. Now I write in a room with fake wood plasterboard. Fake wood plasterboard along the walls and old watercolor paintings created before I was born. I imagine that I like my desk near a window. I insist that it be placed there, underneath the only window in the fake wood plasterboard room. But the truth is, I get the most writing done in front of a wall unobstructed by glass. Definitely not surrounded by nature, not in libraries that sometimes remind me of hospitals, and not in cafes (although once I was very fond of them). I write best in front of a wall and not a window, because there is nothing to distract me from writing. Because it reminds me of the wall that I sometimes write against. Call it the blank page, call it “nothing is working today”, call it anything you want. That metaphorical wall is far worse than a bare plasterboard wall, than the cement wall of a shed, than the wall painted the brightest green you can imagine. For some reason the metaphorical wall and the one I sit beside overlap one another and the writing flows. Also, I write best on a tabletop instead of a desk. Any table will do; the more inconvenient the better. In this way I trick myself into writing. In this way it’s more informal. I am sure the most heavenly thing for a plant would be to go back to the earth once it’s dead.

The window where the leaves crawl through is to my left but I never look through it.  It is covered with window blinds and a light piece of fabric to prevent the sun from coming in, though the sun has not been out in days here in Alabama.  The song about the skies is a lie, nothing is ‘so’ anything here.  Facing me is a monitor, and behind that, another monitor.  It gets dark in this writing corner despite the walls glowing fluorescent and the light coming off the screen.  I am okay with this, this filtering of words through mechanism–I press a button and a letter appears, a word appears.  A writer once told me that she has a typist; she hands her pages over to someone who will transmit them from paper to something electronic.  I joked that I needed the opposite–someone to take what I have created and make it something tangible–something that can be thrown about a room and torn apart with hands, set on fire.  I would venture a guess that the wood paneling only looks like it would burn nicely.  Where I write is where everyone else can write.  This window shows me words, this window shows me a photograph of a dog I used to see often and the shoe of a girl I once knew.  She has gotten a new pair since the last time I saw her.
Writing on a computer screen—this window that shows only my faint reflection and the glare from the Australian sky—means that I have files upon files to be hidden away on my hard drive, never to be read by anyone. These archives of unseen words should be printed and burned.  At least satisfaction can be gained from an act of destruction, in smelling the smoke and seeing the charred paper tear away into the wind. Without that burnt and crumpled artifact, that physical piece of paper, my computer coyly reveals nothing: no evidence of my production, no sweat droplets from my labor, none of my flustered eraser markings across its monitor. And so my stories seem nothing more than musings set to the rhythm of fingertips against a keyboard. And everyone knows that only the lazy muse. The dreamers. Writer, they scoff, how do you earn your money? How do you buy your shoes? These days, I buy hardly anything at all. I buy hardly anything at all and in my dreams I see green leaves.
Sometime, someday, though not someday soon, there will be a program that will keep track of all the letters that we delete, of all the characters that we decided to never have exist, the emotion that we did not feel like placing into some words, all of the honesty that was sacrificed for nuance and flair.  Someplace, somewhere, perhaps in the green room and perhaps not, is a box where all of the things that were once said and taken back are sitting and mixing with each other–a proper noun here, an action or inaction there, and someplace, somewhere, someone will find these words long after we are gone.  The concern is not in the words that were unsaid, but in the ones that were; the ones that were spared deletion but still remained secret.  The sitcom sock drawer where photographs of dead lovers are hidden underneath layers of the inconsequential. If you find these things, sell them to anyone who will buy them.