Finding a good place to write

 I like to read about writing places and routines. I’m interested in how other writers do it. Ronald Blythe reminds me that the furniture and furnishings are not always important. 

The great rural poet John Clare often wrote in hiding, lying low in a field or under a hedge, so that the neighbors could not see a ploughman engaged in matters that were none of his business.

 

Blythe says Clare changed the direction of rural poetry. Before Clare, gentrified folks not much disposed to getting their hands dirty would effuse about the merry peasants working the fields. Clare described working the fields.

I remember taking breaks from cutting bullnettles on Grandfather’s farm. Under a hedge was a good place to be.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 101.