Vox Meditantis

You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?

At eighty-five, I’ve learnt that perfect spaces aren’t built – they accumulate, the way silt gathers in a river bend. If you’d asked me at twenty-five what my ideal room for reading and writing would look like, I’d have described something from the college library where I spent too many hours avoiding real life: mahogany shelves, leather chairs, that hush that makes you feel clever just for occupying the space. Now, having lived my entire life in New Corinth except for four years at the University of Delaware, I know better. The perfect space isn’t about what you put in it – it’s about what you can see from it, and what you’ve carried there over decades of stubborn residence.

The Geography of Reading

My writing room sits on the second floor of a narrow row house three blocks west of Market Street, built in 1887 when this city still believed it would rival Philadelphia. The house has settled unevenly over the decades, so the floor slopes gently towards Minerva Creek, which flows southeast about two hundred yards from my back window. That creek has organised this city’s life since colonial times, dividing the older district from the industrial west, and it’s organised mine too – I can’t write a sentence without glancing up to check the water’s mood.

My desk faces the front window, which overlooks a street of similar houses, most now converted into flats like mine. Beyond the rooflines, if I crane slightly left, I can see a sliver of the Delaware River where it bends past the old freight yards. That glimpse matters more than it should. I grew up watching ocean-going vessels move past this city, carrying commerce that kept my father employed as a customs clerk at the port. The river’s navigable depth – thirty-five to forty feet, a fact I learnt before I learnt algebra – meant New Corinth mattered once. Now it means we have something beautiful to build condominiums beside.

The room itself is small, perhaps twelve by fourteen feet, with plaster walls I painted magnolia twenty years ago and haven’t bothered to refresh. There’s a radiator beneath the window that clanks like a prisoner’s complaint every winter morning, a sound I’ve grown to need the way some people need coffee. Two walls hold floor-to-ceiling shelves I built myself in 1973, the year I returned from teaching English at a secondary school in Wilmington and accepted that New Corinth – declining, troubled, increasingly emptied of the people I’d grown up with – was nonetheless where I belonged.

The Furniture of a Life

The desk is my father’s, a heavy oak piece he used at the Port of New Corinth offices until they downsized in 1982. It has water rings from decades of tea mugs, a cigarette burn from when he still smoked, and a drawer that sticks unless you lift whilst pulling. I’ve written everything that matters to me on this surface: lesson plans for thirty-two years of teaching, letters to editors about riverfront development and school funding, three unpublished novels about this city that nobody wanted, and a neighbourhood newsletter I edited for two decades until the internet made such things quaint.

My chair is a disaster – a wheeled office chair I salvaged from the high school when they renovated in 1998, its padding compressed to near-nothing and its vinyl cracked like a dried riverbed. I should replace it. I won’t. It fits the landscape of my back, and at my age, familiar discomfort beats unfamiliar comfort every time.

The shelves tell the story of what I’ve cared about, arranged not alphabetically but archaeologically. The bottom shelves hold books from my childhood – a 1947 edition of Treasure Island my mother gave me the winter I turned seven, water-damaged poetry collections from the old Market Street library before it closed in 1985, histories of the Delaware Valley I checked out so often the librarian eventually let me keep them. The middle shelves are my teaching years: battered paperbacks of Baldwin and Morrison, annotated copies of Shakespeare I used until the spines gave out, student writing I couldn’t bear to discard. The top shelves are recent additions, books about cities in transition, climate adaptation, the opioid crisis that killed my neighbour’s grandson in 2017 when New Corinth recorded eighty-nine overdose deaths and I stopped believing in easy answers.

What the Light Shows

The front window gives southeastern light in the mornings, the kind that makes dust visible and forgives nothing. I’ve watched this street change in that light: children who played stickball in the 1950s, their own children who disappeared to the suburbs in the 1970s, the years when almost no children played here at all, and now a tentative return – young families attracted by what estate agents call “historic character” and I call the houses my generation couldn’t afford to abandon.

The back window faces Minerva Creek and catches afternoon sun filtered through the sycamores that line the banks. In summer, the light comes green and dappled; in winter, it’s grey and honest, showing the creek’s true colour, which is usually brown with runoff and history. I can see the old Minerva Mills building from here, or what’s left of it – converted now into the sort of loft flats where people who’ve never operated a loom pay a premium to live inside industrial authenticity. The building once employed over six hundred workers processing cotton and wool, using waterpower from the creek that still flows past my window. Now it employs a doorman.

This double view – street and water, past and present – is why this room works for writing. I need to see both what’s changing and what endures. The Delaware still runs at the same depth it did when this city was founded in the 1760s. Market Street, three blocks east, is finally recovering from decades when it was largely empty except for pawnbrokers and desperation. My desk sits between those two facts, and so do I.

The Necessary Discomforts

A proper writing space needs friction, I think – not the inspirational-poster version of creativity, but the genuine resistance that comes from writing in a place that asks difficult questions. My room provides that because I can’t ignore what’s outside it. The university students who’ve moved into the converted warehouse two streets over, displacing the Portuguese family who’d lived there since 1982. The riverfront park that’s genuinely beautiful and genuinely inaccessible if you don’t have transport to reach it. The maritime museum that opened in 2018 and tells this city’s shipbuilding story to tourists whilst the people who actually built ships can’t afford the admission.

I’m not romanticising poverty or decline – I lived through the 1990s here, when we recorded 127 murders in a single year and I stopped walking after dark. I remember Market Street when it was thriving, then dying, then dead. I was here for the civil unrest in 1968 after Doctor King was killed, three days that accelerated the white flight I refused to join, even when my sister begged me to follow her to the suburbs. I know exactly what this city lost when the Iron Works closed in 1978, because I taught the children of those 1,200 eliminated jobs, and I watched what unemployment and hopelessness did to families who’d built their lives around steady work.

But I also know what a city gains when it survives its own near-death. The Riverside community, which has been the heart of Black New Corinth since the nineteenth century, didn’t disappear during the worst years – it held on through churches and schools and the kind of stubborn mutual care that keeps people alive when systems fail. The Italian families who settled near the river in the 1880s, working the docks and building this city’s physical fabric, their descendants still run businesses on Fourth Street. We’re still here, those of us who stayed, and that persistence is its own kind of knowledge.

What Makes It Perfect

My perfect reading and writing space, then, is this: a small room with sloping floors in an old house three blocks from a recovering downtown, with windows that show me both the creek that powered this city’s first industries and the street where ordinary life continues. Shelves built by my own hands, holding books that span eighty years of caring about language and this place. My father’s scarred desk, my terrible chair, radiator heat that barely reaches this room on the coldest mornings. Light that changes with the seasons and the time of day, reminding me that writing is always temporal, always situated, always in conversation with what’s happening outside the window.

I don’t need silence – the radiator clanks, the street has traffic, and on First Fridays the gallery district three blocks south generates the kind of cheerful noise that means the city is alive. I don’t need isolation – my neighbour’s television comes through the wall, and I can hear the couple upstairs arguing about whose turn it is to take the rubbish out. I don’t need beauty, though the afternoon light on Minerva Creek occasionally provides it.

What I need is a room that keeps me honest about where I am and what I’m writing about. New Corinth has taught me that places matter, that geography shapes possibility, that a city’s relationship with its river determines futures in ways that policy documents never quite capture. This room, with its view of water that flows indifferent to our human plans and streets that carry the weight of all our choices, gives me that.

I’ve spent fifty years in this space – since 1975, when I bought this house for a sum that now seems laughable and moved my books in on a Saturday in March. I’ve read thousands of books here, written hundreds of thousands of words, watched this city nearly die and stubbornly refuse to. The room has aged with me. The shelves sag slightly now; the floorboards creak in new places; the window frames need replacing but probably won’t get it.

That’s what makes it perfect, I think. It’s not separate from the life it’s meant to help me think about – it’s made of the same materials, subject to the same pressures, holding on through the same combination of structure and luck. The Delaware still flows thirty-five to forty feet deep past the edge of this city. My desk still holds my weight. The light still comes through the windows, morning and afternoon, showing me what endures and what changes.

At eighty-five, that’s all the perfection I need: a room with windows on the water, shelves that hold what I’ve loved, and a desk where I can keep trying to make sense of this stubborn, troubled, beautiful river city that’s been my home for every year but four. The space isn’t built – it’s accumulated, like silt in a river bend, and it’s exactly right.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.