Me & My desk: Clover Stroud
5 children, 2 kitchen tables and some ponies
This is an occasional series about writers and their desks.
Clover’s beautiful, raw, lyrical writing about motherhood, grief, landscape and the meaning of home is so honest and visceral that I feel I know her intimately, even though we’ve never met. She is the author of four bestselling memoirs: The Wild Other, My Wild And Sleepless Nights, The Red Of My Blood and most recently The Giant On The Skyline, which is out in paperback in the UK this week. She has five children aged between 24 and 8.
She is British and deeply rooted in the English rural landscape - ‘the jewel brilliance of green England,’ as she says below. Nevertheless, she currently lives in Washington, D.C., with the three youngest children and her husband Pete.
Her Substack, On The Way Life Feels, is here. Her podcast is called Tiny Acts Of Bravery, and here is her Instagram. She is currently writing her fifth book.
What is the desk?
When I can choose the ideal place to work, it’s not at my home but rather is an innocuous table, possibly with a fake wood grain, in a public library. I really love the anonymity of writing in a library, and the sense of industry of other strangers working around me. They don’t know it, but I think of them as my colleagues. It helps me simulate a busy office environment, although to be honest I’ve never worked in an office with other people. I’ve always worked alone, and always worked freelance, since I started writing when I was 24, when I had my first baby.
I wrote with Jimmy in a bouncy chair at my feet, or propped up in a buggy in a launderette, watching washing swill round while I clattered out a few hundred words on my laptop. I learnt to write in scraps of time, fitting words around my children, since I’ve had another four since Jimmy, spread across 16 years. My desk has been many different places during that time, like the table on a coach going to London to meet an editor, or the edge of a sink where I propped my laptop while my children created watery mess beside me, or my favourite place, which is that quiet space in a public library.
Jimmy is 24 now, the same age I was when he was born, and my youngest son Lester is still only 8, so fitting together the jigsaw of writing and motherhood is not finished. I am fifty this year and there’s a tonne of intense mothering still to do, which I love and resent, but not in equal measures, luckily. Motherhood, however, means I cannot always get to the library, and at those times my desk is my kitchen table; I don’t especially love getting up at 5am to write, but I got into the habit of it during the pandemic when I was writing my third book and when there were children in every room, all the time.
Dawn was the only place I could find any sort of silence or space, and now I love writing at that time. The world seems silent and strange in that early morning translucent blue light, all mine, like there’s been a zombie apocalypse and I’m the only survivor. I get a lot of work done, until my son Dash, who is 10, comes down at about 7am wearing nothing but his pants inside out, asking for cereal and my phone. Sometimes I stop writing then, and at other times I oblige him, especially if I am deep in writing and the rest of the children are still silent, which means I can barter myself some more times at my kitchen table desk by handing the screen over.
“There’s a tonne of intense mothering still to do, which I love and resent, but not in equal measures”
Where is the desk?
It’s very strange for me to write this as moving countries seems like an accident, but for now my kitchen table desk is at home in Washington DC. In some senses I’m not wrong to feel like I’m writing during a zombie apocalypse, as I live just a couple of miles from the Capitol and the White House and we all know what’s going on there.
I moved here almost two years ago from a home I loved entirely, in rural Oxfordshire, because my husband was working in America a lot; although I didn’t want to leave my home, I also love my husband entirely. Our home in Oxfordshire was close to that mythical and mystical track called the Ridgeway, sometimes known as Europe’s oldest road, which runs over the high hills of the downs which I can see from my home, just over a mile away. This is a ritual landscape, dotted with standing stones and long barrows and beech trees on high hills and the strange and almost algebraic outline of the Uffington chalk horse.
When Pete said we should move to America, I was thrown into a kind of existential crisis about what home represented to me and I spent some time before that walking out into the landscape and really thinking about what it was that I didn’t want to leave. I talked to a lot of people in our small rural life about what home meant to them, and my fourth book, The Giant on the Skyline, explores the idea of homesickness, and whether the feeling of home is a building or a room, a landscape, an emotion, or even time and memory itself. I’m really interested in the way a place or landscape holds the imprint of the people who have inhabited it, and how landscapes we love absorb us, as we absorb them.
I wrote the book during that period of time before we moved to America, and I loved writing it; I felt as if my entire being was absorbing the jewel brilliance of green England while I was writing it. Now I’m living in America, of course, so the desk is in Washington D.C. where we live.