The author of Temporary Palaces wrote the novel at a small secretary desk tucked into a bedroom corner, a setup that felt close to the one where she first learned to write as a teenager. She has just unearthed a photo of her first office from around 1997, and it looks less like a writer’s retreat than a crowded zine table: bleach-blonde hair, cassette tapes, pens, glue sticks, stacks of books, a tape gun, outgoing mail, a box full of received letters, printed photographs and records.
That image reaches back to the years when she made Ghost Pine, the zine that taught her the rudiments of being a writer. In those suburban-bedroom days, she was working out how to put a life on the page, and the pages were piled around her in the middle of the room. When she was actively making a zine, the desk surface was buried under notebooks, markers, photocopied pages, computer printouts and cut-out paper remnants. The tools were simple, but the lessons were lasting.
By the nineties, punk zines had been around long enough to be taken for granted, and music zines often followed a familiar formula: columns from semi-famous punks, interviews with up-and-coming bands, record reviews and zine reviews. What excited the author most were the personal zines, or perzines, because they opened a different path. She wrote about a suburban neighborhood, grandparents nearby, climbing the service ladder of the grocery store and high school, and she kept at it even while struggling for a long time with the difference between there, their and they’re. The work was physical, too. She relied on photocopiers and paper cutters to produce the zines, turning each issue into something assembled by hand and by habit.
That practice did more than fill notebooks. In the author’s own words, from zines she got the permission to love her place in the world, and that the way to show love is to pay attention. This is why the desk matters now, and why the photo from 1997 matters with it: the novelist at the small secretary desk in a bedroom corner is the same writer who once learned to look closely enough to build Ghost Pine, then carried that discipline into Temporary Palaces over hundreds of mornings. The answer to what shaped her literary voice is already in the cluttered office and the suburban bedroom. It was zines, and the attentiveness they demanded, that made the later novel possible.