Catherynne M. Valente
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Denizen of the Month: THE GRAND DESK/WORD ORGAN KNOWN AS KRAKATOA
🕑 Added 2025-03-27 15:33:59 +0000 UTCI am so excited to show this to you all I can barely stand it. (Unlike most denizens, I am posting this to everyone who gets the experiment, and also, since it's my work desk, this won't be just our secret forever, I'll show the world soon enough, but for now...)
Before I get into it: yes, that is a piano converted into a desk. It is an 1883 Whittier upright the previous owners of this house refused to cart away when they left and which I have been trying to get rid of for over a decade. I WILL NEVER GET RID OF HER NOW.
So, I've been at this writing thing for twenty-one years now. And for that entire time, I have kept my working spaces...well, one says Spartan to sound fancy, but ugly and bare is way closer to the truth. My philosophy was always that if I didn't really like being in the space, I would get my work done faster so I could leave. If it was too comfortable, I'd just lounge around in there and not accomplish anything.
So everything I've written, I've written looking at a drop ceiling, some raw-ass floors, and a series of particle board Target desks or some beast of a thing that gave up its dreams in 1982. Or in my bed under the covers. I've never had a desk I didn't get off Craigslist, or a space that felt inviting at all.
In my 40s...well, I'm a little more interested in comfort? And with a child and a thousand responsibilities, I thought possibly a space I actually wanted to be in might be a bit more helpful now?
LOOK AT THIS HELPFUL GLORIOUS CREATURE. (Don't mind the cat hair.)
If you look at the before pictures, you can see what it looked like before...and a glimpse of this room in my house that we really barely used, even Sebastian, because it was basically totally unfinished. Untrimmed ragged dry wall, holes in the floor leading directly to the Maine Outside, rotten corners, gouged out bits, totally untreated wood, and of course a piano that was missing several hammers and keys and the keys that remained were only occasionally in tune. Can't imagine why I could never get anyone to take it off my hands.
I'll post more pictures of the rest of the room when it's finished, but there are no more holes to outside! The wood is painted! There is an actual floor! There is a door instead of a rectangle sawed out of the wall and just left like that because why not! (Note: it honestly looks like a museum in here now, to the point that I'm slightly uncomfortable about how nice it is. MANY PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES AT WORK. But I want to say I don't have anything like the money this full-on sunken library now implies I do? What I do have is a talented friend who needed some help and wanted to return the favor. And a basement full of scrap wood. I did not do aaaaaany of this, nor am I capable of it.)
When we first started, I didn't even think of using this room as my home office. But around Christmas, my niece Sophie idly wondered if the piano could fit between the bookshelves (stunning spatial awareness, it does, but to the centimeter. The desk is now fused into the bookshelves and it is all one piece. It can't be removed even if I wanted it to be). Then I posted a few photos of the broken horrible place as it was to an interior design subreddit asking for thoughts, and someone said oh well you know, if your friend is up for it you could convert that piano to a desk...
I got A Look from my friend. But I also got a desk. And it's so wonderful and huge and beautiful and I can hardly believe it's the same thing I hated so much I considered taking an axe to it a few years ago. And as of today, this little separate world that looks nothing like the rest of my house is my new writing library, with a Cathedral Word Organ in the middle. I'm beside myself.
Every part of this desk is part of the original piano except for the screwhole covers, which I'll get to in a minute. My friend kind of went all out. I wish I had a before picture of what the guts looked like, because I assure you, they were not glowy and golden and Gilded Age Industrial Splendour like they are now. They were nasty as hell when we took the front panel and fallboard off. Just covered in dust and filth and mold and probably a century's worth of human skin cells and pet fur. My friend scrubbed it all up and individual stained the wood on the hammers, hammer rail, dampers, bolts, serial number, logo, everything. He even painted each treble string iridescent rainbow silver. (You can see the difference between the original and iridescent in the 6th photo.)
The surface of the desk is the front panel that once covered the piano workings, turned upside down, stained, and fixed to the piano itself. It turned out to be solid mahogany! For the ADHD lady, you can even still slip your fingers under and wiggle the keys.
The screws that hold the panel to the surface are covered because they were ugly. Again, this was not my idea, we played with a lot of notions for what to cover them with, but ultimately my friend went into his backpack and grabbed four actual no-shit Liberty Dimes he'd been saving for nothing in particular--and that's what you can see in the corners of the desk. Liberty dimes were solid silver and only made for awhile. These are 1908, 1941, 1917, and 1926. The best part is, when I went to learn about liberty dimes, since I am not a numismatist, I found out that the model for Lady Liberty was Wallace Stevens' wife Elsie! It felt meant to be. American poet, and the promise of someday liberty returning, maybe even for ladies. Plus, solid silver--clowns can't get me while I work!
In the end, I named this genuine fucking art installation Krakatoa. Krakatoa erupted in 1883, like this piano, but also, without making a thesis about (because I literally already did in college and that's why I know the following information and why I am still obsessed with the poet in question), Emily Dickinson conceived of her creative self as a somewhat separate entity, because it was not so easy to be both a good woman and a passionate writer in her world...or any of them. She called that entity Vesuvius.
So with a little luck, maybe I can be Krakatoa for a few more decades yet.
I hope you like my desk BECAUSE I AM OBSESSED.
Comments
Gail Leinweber
Amazing!
KJ Hawkwood
This is one of the most extraordinary transformations I've seen - I simply do not have either the brain to perceive that such a thing could be, nor the skills to make it happen, so this is pure awe! What a gorgeous place for you to wrestle and entice your magic onto the page. I can't but believe it would come out more readily on this magnificent beast!
