My Secret Place - April 2010
By Hampton Sides, as told to Devon Jackson
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My secret place is truly a secret. I’m not at liberty to divulge its name or location, even though it is a thoroughly public place in a well-trafficked part of town. I’m a writer, and while I have a perfectly fine office at home, for some reason I’ve found it nearly impossible to work there. So, starting about 10 years ago, I made a formal study of the coffee shops of Santa Fe and lit on a certain place that grabbed my fancy—and ignited my muse. I can’t explain the attraction: a certain ineffable combination of gritty location, high-quality caffeine, eclectic music, interesting traffic patterns, and hideous thrift-shop chairs with good ergonomics. Since then I have written three books at my secret place, nearly 2,000 pages in all. I have an account, a regular parking space, and a certain chair, in a certain corner (at one point I actually had a bronze plaque emblazoned over it).
My friends know to leave me alone, and strangers who get too friendly are treated to an evil eye I’ve spent years perfecting.
I started working at my secret place a little before the advent of WiFi, and I was, at the time, a bit of an oddity—the resident writer. Now I find writers are often fixtures at coffee shops around town, and around the nation. But few, I would hazard to guess, have logged my kind of quality time. I once put in 13 straight hours in my secret place. I’ve become so much a part of the furniture that, recently, the owners locked me inside for the night.
I wouldn’t recommend coffee shops to every writer who’s looking for a place to work. This place is decidedly not for hermits who thrive on silence. But for me, peace and quiet are greatly overrated. This place is noisy, but it’s not my noise—which is to say, it’s not noise that I have to do anything about. For some reason, I need to hear voices, saxophones, laughter, clinking dishes, the hissing of espresso machines—human racket! Even when I’m not consciously aware of it, the noise reminds me of an important truth: that literature, and especially history, is a public enterprise. Books should not be held in secret. They’re for people.
Author Hampton Sides lives in Santa Fe. His latest book, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for his Assassin (Doubleday Books), is slated to go on sale April 27. Known for his gripping narrative non-fiction, he is also the author of Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission, which has sold over a million copies, and Blood & Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West.
