Photo Credit: Murray Krow
Cutbank’s The Woodshop slips into the workspaces and habits of writers we admire. Richard Hugo would tape his poems to his walls to read the drafts out loud and remind himself to continue working on them. Vivan Gornick keeps her home minimally furnished, the better to free her mind. Colton Whitehead moves his desk around inside his West Village home in order to find new inspiration.
This glimpse into the writing life comes courtesy of Leyna Krow, who lives in Spokane, Washington, with her husband, two kids, and an old dog. She is the author of the novel Fire Season and the short story collection I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking. Her next short story collection is forthcoming from Viking in 2023.
What was your writing process while you were working on Fire Season? How long did it take to write the novel, and was it written in one location?
“What [my] office actually looks like with moving boxes and other random house stuff.”
My process with Fire Season was very haphazard. I started working on it while I was revising my first collection of short stories, I’m Fine, But You Appear To Be Sinking. So it was sort of something I’d tinker with in between other things. It took me more than two years to finish a first draft and in that time I got married and my first child was born.
I took long breaks with it and then would come back and be like, “Okay, what was I even talking about here?”
It was written almost entirely in one location – the house my husband and I shared before we were married, and where we lived up until the beginning of this year. We never really had a dedicated office space in that house, so I wrote most of it while sitting on our living room couch. Now, in our new house, we have a real office! But even though we’ve lived here nine months, we still haven’t done much to make it nice. We got a cool bookshelf, which makes a great Zoom background, but the rest of the room is still a lot of boxes and other stuff that we haven’t figured out where it goes yet. We’ll get there eventually.
For now it’s still a treat just to have a room with a desk and door that closes.
Tell us about your day-to-day writing life—are you a morning, afternoon, night, or whenever writer?
“The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt was the first novel in the western genre I’d ever read. . . . Really funny and showed me how a writer can be playful in that space was really funny.”
“Outlawed by Anna North and Whiskey When We're Dry by John Larison both provided great models for feminist westerns.”
[Dewitt and Larison are both on the right, third shelf down. North is on the left, third shelf down]
I’m very much a whenever writer. For a long time I was a night time writer out of necessity—after work when I had a full-time job, and then after my kids went to sleep when I was a full-time parent. It was never ideal though; I often feel pretty drained by the end of the day and forcing myself to sit and write in that state is hard. At the beginning of September my daughter started kindergarten and my son started daycare. So now, for the first time in a very long time, I have consistent daytime writing schedule and it’s been amazing. I’m a Monday-Wednesday from 9am-2:30pm writer!
“Family portrait by my daughter. . . . Probably my favorite thing in the room.”
Do you have any totemic objects you keep near you while you write? Do you listen to music while you write?
“My dad bought a window that was part of a building that survived the Great Spokane Fire and he gave it to me as a present after Fire Season was published.”
My dad bought a window that was part of a building that survived the Great Spokane Fire and he gave it to me as a present after Fire Season was published. I think it’s very cool and would like to find a way to put it in our office…but it’s a whole window, and it’s fragile because it’s old, and it’s probably covered in lead paint. So the logistics there are challenging. Right now it lives in our basement. I’ve got a pretty funny family portrait on my desk that my daughter made. That’s probably my favorite thing in the room. I do like to listen to music when I write. For a long time I would stream whatever show was playing on KEXP. But my husband got a Spotify account recently. So now I listen to that quite a bit and mess up his algorithm, which he’s a good sport about. He hasn’t even suggested I get my own account, which I would have done immediately if the roles were reversed.
Do you have any superstitions about writing, or your writing process?
No. Isn’t that boring? I regard writing as work; it’s my job. Some days work goes well and some days it doesn’t, but there’s nothing more to it than showing up for work when I’m scheduled.
That doesn’t mean I don’t love it, because I really do. But I feel like I also have to realistic about what it takes to make a life this way.