It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.
My first proper kitchen was this funny little club that we set up in Mercer Street in Covent Garden. It got shut down. Then I worked at a club in Notting Hill.
I've always had lots of friends and my house was the house they all hung out at.
At one point, I had a story accepted at the 'New Yorker,' which sent off weird bells in people when I told them - 'Oh,' they thought, 'now you are a writer' - where I really had been for the last 30-odd years.
I was part of a group called Casanova Fly, doing bouncer work, attending college and working in a pizza shop when I first met producer Sylvia Robinson who came into the pizza shop where I was flipping the dough. I was rapping in the park in Englewood, and she heard about what I was doing.
I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there.
I've written in every imaginable location; a repurposed closet, the kitchen table, the bleachers while my kids had basketball practice, the front seat of the car when they were at soccer. In airports. On trains. In the break room when I was supposed to be wolfing down dinner. In the back of classrooms when I was supposed to be paying attention.
I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.