"2018"
( Munday: In the future. Where do you see your writing five years in the future? How do you plan to get there?)
June 3, 2018, 7:36 a.m. The clock radio comes on and Mrs. Harter yells from the kitchen.
"Hurry up, boys and girls. Breakfast is on the table in FIVE MINUTES!!!"
She volunteers on weekday mornings at the writer house on Elm Street, a rooming house for out of work writers. I'm in room 3, just off the living room. Not the best room in the house, but not the worst. There's a breeze that usually comes in through my open window in the summer, especially during the morning and afternoon commute, from all the buses passing just beyond the sidewalk.
"You up?" Mary Ellen Frist says as she knocks twice on my door on her way to the enormous kitchen table. Big by most standards, it only seats sixteen, so the last five people to make it to the morning and evening "serving times," have to stand, butts against a kitchen counter, or sit on the floor by the washer and dryer.
With twenty-one people living in the house, we're eleven over fire code, which sounds worse than it is. Half the eight hundred writer houses in the city are more than three times capacity, many with people sleeping in the halls and on the stairs.
"How do people sleep on the stairs?" I asked Mary Ellen when she came to Elm Street from West Clancy.
"Not soundly," she replied. "Remember when you used to dream about one day writing stuff that people would pay money to read?"
"Yeah, I guess," I answered. "But, in all honesty, that dream seems so long ago, I can't remember if I just dreamed dreaming it, or if I really had the dream when I was awake."
"That's it. That's what unsound sleep and dreams are like," she said.
2013-06-05 00:20:13 (304 words)
June 3, 2018, 7:36 a.m. The clock radio comes on and Mrs. Harter yells from the kitchen.
"Hurry up, boys and girls. Breakfast is on the table in FIVE MINUTES!!!"
She volunteers on weekday mornings at the writer house on Elm Street, a rooming house for out of work writers. I'm in room 3, just off the living room. Not the best room in the house, but not the worst. There's a breeze that usually comes in through my open window in the summer, especially during the morning and afternoon commute, from all the buses passing just beyond the sidewalk.
"You up?" Mary Ellen Frist says as she knocks twice on my door on her way to the enormous kitchen table. Big by most standards, it only seats sixteen, so the last five people to make it to the morning and evening "serving times," have to stand, butts against a kitchen counter, or sit on the floor by the washer and dryer.
With twenty-one people living in the house, we're eleven over fire code, which sounds worse than it is. Half the eight hundred writer houses in the city are more than three times capacity, many with people sleeping in the halls and on the stairs.
"How do people sleep on the stairs?" I asked Mary Ellen when she came to Elm Street from West Clancy.
"Not soundly," she replied. "Remember when you used to dream about one day writing stuff that people would pay money to read?"
"Yeah, I guess," I answered. "But, in all honesty, that dream seems so long ago, I can't remember if I just dreamed dreaming it, or if I really had the dream when I was awake."
"That's it. That's what unsound sleep and dreams are like," she said.
2013-06-05 00:20:13 (304 words)