Where We Write: A Desk in the Family

By Thomas Reed

A friend was showing me his old barn-turned-writing-study in rural Virginia when I had one of those rich moments where the thing you’re looking at starts to morph into writing—in the form of a metaphor. (That my friend is a poet probably didn’t inhibit the process.) There were twin hay lofts on either side of the barn’s central space, and mounted on the cross and support beams of one of them was a massive, flat-fronted but funnel-shaped grain hopper that vee-ed down to a di...