Looks like I'm the first one to try this. So here goes ... my desk. I'll start at the top. You probably all recognize the work of Jackson Pollock (it's called "Number 13A: Arabesque"). Below that, framed in black, is a series of photographs taken by a close friend centering around books. The hodgepodge below the photos is comprised of rejection letters I've acquired over the years. I used to keep these hidden away in a folder, but Stephen King has a rather interesting take on how to handle rejection letters in his memoir, On Writing. When he was just getting started, he nailed a large metal spike into his wall and impaled every notice he received on it. Not having quite the same violent urge, and not wanting to hammer a metal spike into the wall of my apartment, I decided to turn my rejections into a collage of sorts. Airing them out has several benefits: it helps keep me grounded, balancing the successes (there's a much smaller collage featuring those outside the left edge of the frame); it deflates the significance of the rejections (when you see them every day, you tend to forget what they are; they just become pieces of paper again); and it means that even failures are productive because they contribute to my decor. The majority of things on the actual desktop are fairly common: speakers, lamp, letter holder, etc. I keep some reading materials handy; in this case, it's Pablo Neruda and Poets & Writers to the left and the last two issues of Poetry to the right. On the far right side, there's a clock that produces a very soothing ticking and a photograph taken after a fishing trip with my father and grandfather when I was five years old. These remind me that 1) time passes whether I'm ready or not, and 2) I'm not a blank page even when I sit in front of one.
