Bookmark: Is This the End of Writing in Cafes?

 

Is This the End of Writing in Cafés? On the Appeal of Lingering During (and After) a Pandemic by Emily Temple

snip:

One obvious problem that comes up with the loss of free or cheap public spaces to sit and write—and this includes cafés as well as libraries and train station lobbies and wherever else one might scribble—is that it further narrows the already narrow field of who can, practically, write. The publishing industry already struggles with elitism and a lack of diversity; I worry that if cafés become unsafe in the long term, it will exacerbate the issue. Knecht invoked the image of the frozen writer’s garret as part of our romantic ideal of the literary life, but while the pervasive story that J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in a local café because she couldn’t afford the heat in her flat turns out to be a rumor, it’s not hard to imagine something similar being true for plenty of writers—who cannot afford a room of their own, literally or figuratively, and therefore have taken up writing in public places to get a little functional solitude.




Btw, for me coffeehouse writing was a function of my personal reward system: A nice drink of something to make me go for a couple hours, and then when I finished or had made good progress on something, I could buy a dessert or something. In the New Normal, this has translated as trying to differentiate the coffee I made to wake myself up in the morning vs. the coffee to research with, which is honestly usually the difference between adding different flavored creamer and whipped cream topping. /TMI