“There is something about the writer as a character or an archetype that enthrals us,” da Cunha Lewin observes, and the same goes for the rooms in which writers work, or in which we imagine that they work. For aspiring writers, in particular, writer’s rooms are talismanic sites. Making a pilgrimage to some writer’s space, we might want answers to practical questions about their process. But we also want, more abstractly, to gain insight into “the route of creativity,” as da Cunha Lewin puts it, from inspiration to text. “What is writing?” she asks. Contemplating someone’s long-unused desk, staring through the window through which they stared, we hope to see the writing process externalized, so that we can understand “what it actually is.”journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter