Eight Sites for a Book under Construction

1. The large wooden desk near the window was reserved for the manuscript in progress. There, Ashley Diana Culver was working on her first book, a narrative formed of lists: lists of objects sitting on her desk, lists of things she finds when she empties her purse, and so on.

2. On another table sat emails, contracts, and her work as an art critic.

3. Elsewhere was a yellow armchair that she used for reading on her phone and text exchanges. Each space required a different way of sitting, of holding her body. It also required a distinct way of being attentive to and transcribing the world.

4. Above her desk hung a bell. I like to imagine that it punctuated the time in residency: transitions from writing to coffee, from coffee to meals, from meals to discussions, from reading to writing. In fact, time is central to the book that Ashley was writing here. The story takes place over three seasons, but the lists have no linear chronology. Time advances and retreats according to inventories.

5. All the lists were glued onto a wall. They were organized in columns by month, according to the needs of the narrative and in harmony with the seasons. Lists were dismantled and moved. Passages were crossed out. Large parts were highlighted in red. Yellow flagged moments of self-reflection. Putting the pages on the wall allowed her to shift constantly from entirety to detail: to see the architecture as it was being built and to rework each list separately.

6. One evening, I came across Ashley sitting on the sofa in the living room, her notebook on her knee. She had lit a fire. The conversation moved naturally toward the conditions for writing. Does she write better in the morning? In the silence of a “room of her own” or in the noise of a lively kitchen? Like the narrator of her book, Ashley is a chef whose body is beginning to give way due to all the hours standing up. She wanted to become a full-time writer. Like many of the authors she’s reading these days: daily life, gardening, and shopping are the basic components.

7. On her desk, I listed: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, Chris Kraus’s Where Art Belongs, Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather. We also talked about Sheila Heiti’s Alphabetical Diaries. Other books by Chris Kraus. About Kate Zambreno.

8. At the same time, the studio door remained closed in the morning. For, if writing means bringing life into writing, it also means putting life off as long as possible each day: writing before checking emails, writing before having conversations, writing lists for her book before to-do lists take up all the room.

9. Does this mean that something can be written on the surface of a bowl of soup? During the residency, Ashley organized one of her Soupy Pop-Up events. She prepared two big pots of soup: a sweet-potato soup and a chickpea soup. Participants were asked to mix the two colours in their bowl, to add marinated onions, and then to photograph the result before eating. What appeared: faces, moons, landscapes. I am tempted to see in this a metaphor for her writing. Like the soups she serves, Ashley’s lists transform ordinary materials into opportunities to tell stories. They remind us that everyday things often tell the most about bodies, their constraints, their desires, and the marks of time on them.