Many of you know that I have incredible honor and privilege
of calling myself a writer in residence at the New York Public Library’s
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street.
The room I work in—the Allen Room—is reserved for writers
with book contracts. I spend three or
four days a week there. I have a
bookshelf of my own where get to keep the books I need from the library’s
extensive collection. On each visit, I
can take any empty cubicle and spread out my research, open my laptop, and go
to long ago and far away in my imagination.
It’s heaven.
It’s also a bit intimidating. For one thing, some writers I MUCH admire,
who write absolutely splendid books, are frequently in that same room. I often wonder what I am doing in there with
them.
Right inside the door as one enters is a bookshelf as tall
as I, filled with volumes that were written in that room. The one I am most aware of on those shelves
is Lily Tuck’s The News from Paraguay. I had already begun to research Invisible Country, my story set in the
same time and place, when her book won the National Book Award for
fiction. Clearly, Lily Tuck and I
studied the same source material.
What a daunting notion!
But I stay, and work, trying my best to tell a really good
story.
If I were to run home, there are awesome ghosts all around
where I live. Here are some of the works
produced below 14th Street, beginning with our hero EAP:
113 ½ Carmine Street:
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by
Edgar Allan Poe
147 West 4th Street: Ten Days that Shook the Word by John Reed
Grove and Bedford: Alice’s
Let’s Eat by Calvin Trillin
Charles Lane: Gravity’s
Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Washinton Mews: Bright
Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
12 W. 10th Street: Etiquette by Emily Post
13 East 8th Street: Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
East 2nd Street & Avenue A: Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg
Horatio and Washington Streets: Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz
West 12th Street and Sixth Avenue: In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
21 Fifth Avenue: The
Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain
5 Bank Street: My
Antonia by Willa Cather
For twenty-five years, I lived on the last block of Waverly
Place just before it ends at Bank Street.
Right at the end of my block stood the former home of Willa Cather. I came and went, frequently aware of who had
lived there, picturing her with pen and paper and her imagination taking
herself back to the prairie.
How can I keep going, with all these impressive ghosts
around me?
Actually, I cannot stop, no matter how intimidated I am.
Being a storyteller is a calling, a vocation. It grabs some of us, and we have to do
it, no matter what. Even if we cannot do it as well as
we would like, or very well at all, even if our gifts don’t measure up to our
hopes and expectations of ourselves, we must keep trying. Writing stories is not what we do. It’s who we are.
Annamaria Alfieri
