Ergonomics are important. That's why Emily St. John Mandel has her laptop on two dictionaries and a suitcase

Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel.

I moved into this apartment in Brooklyn at the end of November. It's perfect in some ways but not others, which in my experience is almost always the case with rentals in expensive cities. I love the high ceilings; I don't love that my bedroom and my office are the same room. 

On the other hand, I do like that when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I see is the unicorn tapestry over the desk. I bought the tapestry years ago. It was hanging in the window of a store in Brooklyn. At the time I had a day job that delivered me back to the neighbourhood in the early evening, and for a week before I bought the tapestry I would visit it every night — just go and stand there, staring at it through the window of the closed shop before I walked home. 

There's a piano by the desk. I've been playing since I was nine, although I stopped for almost 20 years in adulthood. I just picked the instrument up again a couple of years ago and try to play every day. Taking a few minutes for Schumann clears my head when I'm working. 

I mostly work standing up, but I sit in that little armchair with my laptop sometimes. My standing desk is a bar table. Ergonomics are important, so I use a suitcase and a couple of dictionaries to get my laptop to the proper height. The monitor is a recent addition. I've been working in television, so I'm on Zoom from 1pm-7pm in the service of a TV show, and having an extra screen has been helpful. If those hours sound eccentric, it's because the room's running on Los Angeles time. (It could be much harder — one of the other writers in the room is zooming in from London.) 

In the mornings I sometimes have a moment to write fiction (although lately most of my time has been eaten up by emails and book tour logistics), then I get onto Zoom after lunch and spend six hours building a world with other writers, which is as fun as it sounds.  At 7pm I relieve the babysitter and put my daughter to bed. It's a pleasure to come back to this room after school drop-off in the mornings.

I won't live in New York City forever — I love New York, but also my life would be significantly easier and less expensive if I could just live in the same time zone where I work. But I know that when I do eventually leave this city, one of the things I'll miss most is this room. 

Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts and tune in to Canada Reads from March 27–30.