In and out the window: north-by-northeast facing, so almost entirely
indirect light, mediated at this first-floor level by a wealth of walnut
leaves; faint whiffs of jet fuel, when the wind's in the right direction, as
it seldom is, and (almost only then) faint engine noise and faint noise
(from much closer -- two minutes on foot, but screened by substantial,
mostly Victorian houses) of trains pulling into or out of the station. By
train, one hour from central London, two hours from the offices of UKOLN, my
current employer; on foot, five minutes from the Thames Path, ten minutes
from an Ottakers book shop.
Interior: tools of my three (current) trades crowd a smallish room created
from the division of one good-sized bedroom into two when this house was
re-cast as a three-house terrace, distributed across two desks (this one
shared with my husband) and about 75 feet of miscellaneous shelving.
Otherwise, one plant (possibly dead), one French cocoa tin containing a few
gluten-free cookies. A gap between music-listening arrangements, and no
visual art (yet), no non-functional ornaments, no pets, no kids. As Leona
Carpenter I use this G3 and a Vaio F190, Rational Rose, Dreamweaver3, MSWord
the net, books like "Scenario-based design", "UML distilled". The telephone
is job-only, on answer-phone out of hours. As Leona Medlin, I use this G3,
Dreamweaver, MSWord; but otherwise, my writing stuff is confined to a desk
and shelves in one corner, and just now includes the following material
brought together as background for my most pressing work-in-progress: a San
Franciso guide book, _The Adventures of Augie Marsh_, the complete Eliot
poems and plays, one of Rod McKuen's books, several volumes/version of
Rilke, an LP of _South Pacific_ with the lyrics printed in the sleeve-notes,
Ernst Bloch's _Principle of Hope_ in the three-volume Plaice, Plaice and
Knight edition, the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edwin Morgan's collected
poems, Aphra Behn's _Oroonoko, The Rover, and other works_, a box full of
post-war and pre-email correspondence. For publishing, it's this G3 again, a
scanner, and PageMaker. Vennel Press stock is warehoused elsewhere in the
house, or off-site by my co-editor Richard Price.
Further in: the Michigan me hasn't withered away. Idiomatic evidence
emerges in a tendency to use 'folk' to connote what it did there, rather
than what it does there. I hear the twang in my voice only in that
answer-phone message, folks from home don't hear it at all these days,
*you'd hear it alright if you're born-British. Perhaps as much as half of
my library of poetry is North American, lugged back several volumes at a
time wherever I'm over there for family or on business. Half a lifetime in
London, plus less than half a year in Staines, has not made me British, but
may have made me a British poet.
Leona Medlin
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