George Saunders: shedworker

On the day the Man Booker Prize shortlist is revealed, it's interesting to discover that last year's winner (for Lincoln in the Bardo) George Saunders is a shedworker. He tells Writers & Artists that: "I have a writing shed in New York that I go to. It was actually a tool shed and my wife, very sweetly, remade it and now the family joke is that I’m the only tool in the tool shed"

Here he is waxing lyrical for The Letters Page magazine about his shedlife:

Here in my writing shed, door open, dog at my feet, on a clear fall day, on which the quality of light is so clean that it has all day been landing on the autumnal woods in a way that makes a person just want to stand there and stare

And here's a good description of it from the New York Times:

Saunders writes in a shed across the driveway from his house, where we sat for a couple hours one morning while his two yellow labs nosed around outside the door. There’s the desk and a sofa and a table stacked with books that he has been researching for his next project. On the shelves there are pictures of him and [his wife] Paula and the girls and a great one from his jazz-fusion days of him playing a Fender Telecaster, with white-blond Johnny Winter hair to his shoulders. “In our lives, we’re many people,” he said as he lifted the photo off the shelf.

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George Saunders: shedworker (part 2)

We've already talked about novelist George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain) before on Shedworking, but now we're delighted that he's shared an image of his writing shed in Corralitos, California, for the first time. He talks about it on his substack page where he is also launching his new excellent-sounding Story Club programme. Here's a snippet about how he felt while writing A Swim in the Pond in the Rain:

I’d come flying/stumbling down at the end of the day from a little writing shed I have up on the hillside in Corralitos, California, feeling, not that I’d “taken a break from” the current difficulties, but that I’d, well, girded up my loins for a deeper, less fearful engagement with the world.

He also talks about it in an interesting interview with the Guardian. 

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End of an era for George Saunders' garden office

We've mentioned novelist George Saunders and his writing shed, pictured above, several times before here on Shedworking, so we were sorry to read that he has effectively called time on it by moving to California and leaving it behind (it would be a tricky one to move). Here's what he says in his latest newsletter about it:

Finally, I want to say a proper and public GOODBYE and THANKS to one of the best non-sentient pals I ever had, my writing shed here in Oneonta. It was very good to me. I remember finishing Lincoln in the Bardo in there the fall of….2016, maybe? I was out here alone, driving to Syracuse to teach Wednesdays through Thursdays, but then the rest of the week I was racing to finish the book, sometimes fourteen hours a day, feeling everything falling into place in this crazy way I’d never experienced before (all the bowling pins coming down on their own, smiling at me, all of them meaning something, something extra, that I hadn’t anticipated), racing out of the shed to walk the trails when I needed a little time to think, or going over to the house for the excellent creativity blend of Graham crackers plus Wilco or Sleater-Kinney…and, by the end of the semester, the book was done.

And most of Tenth of December was written in there too.

These places, these places, this short and sacred life…

Goodbye, old friend,

I know I’ll dream of you often.

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Meg Mason: shedworker

Australian novelist Meg Mason, author most recently of the acclaimed Sorrow and Bliss which is shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction, is also a shedworker, as she revealed in a recent Guardian interview ("I have had a copy of Fox 8 by George Saunders within reaching distance in my writing shed since I first read it, in 2013"). There's also an excellently detailed interview with her in Toast in which she discusses her daily shed-based writing routine, roughly 8.30am- 5pm-ish. Here's a snippet:

It’s a real shed. We built it when we bought the house and it's a little weatherboard thing, painted a smoky grey colour. I tell people it’s small, and they’re like, ‘oh right okay.’ And then they come and see it and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I say to my husband that you would not want to go in there with anyone you were not in love with. It’s maybe six feet by four so perfect for one lady.

But I’m really grateful to have somewhere to go that’s separate from the house.

Well worth a read.

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