The Chair

Writing as a bad habit

My Cousin Mimi Lipson made this memorial linoleum print of the chair.

My physical therapist, John Stephen, has been pounding on my upper back, saying, “You've got to straighten up,” and “this is as hard as a rock.” He points at a stylized image on the wall of a woman whose spine is visible through her clothes and skin. Her upper spine is rounded as though she’s looking down at a cell phone. Or a laptop. Her shoulders fold forward and her chin juts out. “Don’t do that!” Or, as some mothers used to say, you’ll get stuck that way.

If I don’t stop rounding my shoulders and allowing my chin and head to jut forward while I write, I’ll end up permanently bent and with a permanently sore, strained neck that will continue to get more bent and painful until I die.

I went in for this physical therapy because I got in a car accident, and my neck seized up, but the good physical therapist is trying to recreate me in a better form altogether. Just so you know, I’ve dutifully done my exercises, and I’m much improved and have only 3 visits left, but, according to John, sitting at a desk writing is the worst thing I could be doing for five or six hours a day.

After all, sitting is the new smoking, or so they say. (link on that subject here)

“Get up every twenty minutes and stretch and do the cervical/scapular retraction exercise,” he says. John has a job where he works standing up. I explain that a writer has to get lost in her writing and can’t be breaking the narrative or imaginative dream every twenty minutes. If I stand up every twenty minutes I will never write timeless prose, only Facebook posts.

“There’s still hope for you,” he assures me, as I run a wheely thing up the wall with both hands. He pushes on my upper back when I’m holding the thing way above my head and something cracks. “Good,” he says. There is still hope if I remain conscious of my posture every moment for the rest of my life. Always pull those shoulders back and down. Pull the chin back.

And he is right that if I relax for a minute, my shoulders begin to roll forward, my chin too, especially if I’m sitting in the wrong chair. And I’m always sitting in the wrong chair.

A writer should be writing in a chair that has arms that are (or adjust to become) the same exact height as the desk or table, John says. And your screen, well, that should be up so that you are looking straight ahead, eyes level. The screen height I can manage by hooking my laptop up to a bigger screen set on a carton, but the chair, well, I hate the way those ergonomic chairs look and feel with their synthetic fibers. Lately I’ve been writing in a leather-and-wooden office chair that belonged to my great-grandfather, FJ Herlihy, Himself, an extra-large-sized captain of industry.

This is also the chair my mother died in. In other words, the chair is not just a chair to me, and I don’t like the idea of paying a bunch of money to switch to something new and technical. The picture at the top of this post is a linoleum print image my cousin Mimi made of the chair, memorializing my mom, Susanna, after her death in 2020. She died in her chair, at her desk, with her feet up. There are a lot of reasons for me to write in this chair, despite the low arms and wheels that make it hard to position.

The problem with no-armed or low-armed chairs is that the weight of your arms drags your shoulders forward—or at least that’s true for me.

And exercise? Who has time for that? And when I walk nowadays I fall on the ice. Have I mentioned the Comstock Glacier, right outside the house? It will be here until at least April.

So I’m sitting here writing this post and a new poem about horses, and my physical body is paying a price. I guess I’m okay with it. How about you?