Sonya Huber is an award-winning, writer – she writes essays and memoir. Her book Pain Woman Takes Your Keys won two awards, and her latest, Supremely Tiny Acts, is likely to garner more. It’s a book-length memoir essay whose framework takes place over an anxiety-inducing day, but covers a lifetime of other memories, expertly interwoven as one thought leads to another. It’s written in a vivid and enveloping style that made me feel as though I were accompanying Sonya as she headed into court for being arrested on an Extinction Rebellion demonstration. It’s an exhilarating read. She’s a professor in the English Department at Fairfield University, and I asked her where she likes to write.

I’ve moved my desk around a lot in my house through the pandemic, and I’m currently in a back hallway in my basement, which sounds grim but is lovely. One office was too near my son’s video games, and then when I was really sick with Covid I couldn’t climb stairs so I was in the kitchen, where I could watch the birds at the bird feeder.  When I realized this back hall already had tons of bookshelves and a window and was isolated from the rest of the house, I thought: that’s it!

I need nice lighting, coffee, a high monitor so I don’t hurt my neck, and fountain pens for line editing. I have lots of rocks on and behind my desk, and a photo of my son when he was a baby, and lots of lip balm. Visual art is a refresher for my mind, so I have a daily art calendar. This is where I’m working on a big book project and where I did copy edits for the book that’s out now, Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day,  which is about activism and privilege and parenting and climate change, inspired by one-day novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I am working right now on edits for my forthcoming writer’s guide, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, forthcoming in the fall from the University of Nebraska Press. Anyone who’d like to get in touch can find me at www.SonyaHuber.com, or on Twitter, and Facebook.