This afternoon we start with the desktop of Donna Quattrone, a writer, editor, and artist who lives in bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Donna writes lovely fairy-tale inspired stories, creates mythic and folkloric art, and is one of the Good Fairies behind the online fairy tale journal Cabinet des Fées.

She says: "My writing area [in the photo above] is usually fairly neat. A wall of bookshelves opposite the desk helps keep things organized. The Muse Room [in the photo below] is where I paint and draw, and it ranges from cluttered to chaotic. There's a bit of recently cleared space now, for working on winter projects."

Next we travel up to Canda to visit Alyxandra Harvey's writing room, in the three photos below.

"I live in Ontario," she says, "(though you can't see the 2 feet snow on the other side of the window). I write Paranormal Young Adult novels for Bloomsbury Books at this desk (currently 'The Drake Chronicles,' the first of which, Hearts at Stake, is a Snow White retelling with vampires); and I have a YA Victorian ghost novel out next year called Haunting Violent. I've also written two other fairy tale retellings for Canadian small presses: Waking and Broken."

I greatly enjoyed the latter two books, and look forward to catching  up with the rest!

The first photo pictures Alyx's desk in a Victorian-looking room of dark wood, old books, and lace:

The second photo: "A close-up of my dust, with Mr. Darcy pictures in the background and a Storytelling collage."

The third photo: "A close-up of some of my writing books, with my beloved Kali and Ganesh fingerpuppets."

Theodora Goss, on the other hand, prefers a space that is spare and entirely uncluttered:

Dora is writer, editor, and scholar of fantastic poetry and literature. She was born in Budapest, Hungary and now lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. "My writing area is in a corner of a bedroom," she says. "It actually contains two desks, a bookshelf, and a printer that you can't see in this picture. It's fairly spartan, except for the piles of papers and the stickies on the walls and beside me. But I need my writing area to be relatively neat. The painting above my desk is by my grandmother."

[Edited to add:] But although simpler and tidier than some writers' spaces, Dora's has a literary atmosphere and charm of its own (with echoes of the Art-And-Crafts era in the clean lines of the Mission furniture) -- as evidenced in these further pictures of her writing corner, posted on her blog.

I highly recommend Dora's In the Forest of Forgetting, a story collection I loved so much that I wrote the Introduction to it. You can learn more about her work on her website and blog, and read some of her mythic poetry in the Journal of Mythic Arts archives.

 

If you'd like to contribute a picture to the "On Your Desk" series, you are very welcome to do so. You'll find more information (and the address where you should send your photo) in the first post of the series. Click here for the full series so far, and here for our last photo series: "The View from Your Window."