The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds that Shape the Books We Love by Katie da Cunha Lewin
After listening to Andrew Limbong’s interview with Katie da Cunha Lewin on NPR, I bought The Writer’s Room from bookshop.org. I was on my way to LifeTime Fitness. A book about visiting writers’ rooms? As someone who makes literary pilgrimages, I had to have it.
I thought it’d be an exploration of various rooms that famous writers worked in throughout the world. It is. It is also not that.
Lewin points out that literary tourism is a profitable industry, but not a modern phenomenon. Curiosity about the spaces writers work in dates back to at least the fourteenth century, when people visited the Italian poet Petrarch’s house. She names several “preserved house museums to lure the bibliophile,” but only takes us inside a few.
She moves from the preserved writer’s room to the spaces writers have made do with. Writing in cafés and on commutes. She makes a case for the writer’s need for real estate and time to write. Much like Virginia Woolf did in A Room of One’s Own. Appropriately, during her research, her first visit to a writer’s house was Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s cottage, Monk’s House.
Reading Lewin, I kept underlining things.
“I have been thinking about writing spaces for some time, and yet I’m still helplessly in love with the image of a desk.” Me too.
“This desk will ensure I become serious. It will eradicate my frivolity.” If only, but I like to think my desk does the same for me. An anchor for the whimsical storms.
“I bought old copies of the London Review of Books, thinking I should distract myself out of despair with reading the words of those cleverer and more certain than me.” Same. Nora Ephron and Joan Didion distract me out of my despair.
“In popular culture, cafe writers can sometimes be the butt of jokes about their (assumed) desire to be seen to be writing, perhaps on a novel or a screenplay.” Maybe this need-to-be-seen thing doesn’t exist in Minnesota, or maybe I’m oblivious. That happens. Often.
“There is no beginning and end of writing work: the ‘scene’ of writing is everywhere.” Laundry might always be there to do, but at least it can’t follow me to the café.
Laundry is temporal. It is done. It is worn. It is undone. Writing is past, present, and future. I might tinker with this review once it is done, but barring a catastrophe of the magnitude of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, it will not be undone.
Lewin covers obstacles like housework and the historical lack of access for women and minorities to the time and space to write. She quotes Simone de Beauvoir: “The housewife wears herself out running on the spot; she does nothing; she only perpetuates the present.” She also quotes Mexican writer Brenda Navarro, “Writer’s block is a thing for men with time.”
The Writer’s Room moves from the preserved rooms to preserving writing as a valued art form, a type of work that people get paid to do. She acknowledges a truth too often brushed aside: the voices that most often get to matter have unfair advantages. Rooms preserved for posterity may have more to do with social status and money than talent. Lewin cites a report showing a decline of more than 38% in writers’ income between 2018 and 2022. I don’t think I want to know the numbers in 2026.
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More for Fans of Literary Tourism
Visiting Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy
Larry McMurtry Literary Center: A Booklover’s Pilgrimage
Nora Ephron Film Locations for a Romantic NYC Trip
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Chris snapped this shot while I wasn’t paying attention.