The Laundromat Is My Favorite Office in America

I've written in a lot of places. Coffee shops with exposed brick and $7 lattes. A rented desk I convinced myself would fix my procrastination. A library so quiet I could hear my own pulse. None of them worked half as well as a laundromat in Winnemucca, Nevada, at 9:40 on a Tuesday night.

There's something about a place where nobody wants to stay that makes it perfect for the work I do.

The Geography of Nowhere (Which Is Actually Everywhere)

If you've driven any stretch of the American interstate, you know these places. The diner off Exit 87 where the coffee is terrible and bottomless. The motel with a pool nobody has swum in since the Carter administration. The truck stop with a rack of paperbacks nobody will ever read.

We treat these spots as gaps between destinations. Places to pass through, never to be in. And that's exactly the point — nobody is performing anything there. No one's networking. No one's building a personal brand over a flat white. The guy folding his fifth load of towels doesn't care what you're typing, and that indifference is a kind of gift.

Boredom, I've come to believe, is prime real estate for imagination. It's just been priced out of most of our lives.

My Unofficial Tour of Empty Rooms

It started by accident. My laptop died on a road trip a few years back, and I was stuck in a laundromat in the panhandle of Oklahoma with a notebook and forty-five minutes of nothing to do. I wrote the opening of a story I'd been circling for two years. The hum of the dryers did something my carefully curated home office never could.

Since then, I've kept a running list:

• A diner outside Amarillo where I wrote three chapters longhand between refills of bad coffee
• A motel pool in Bakersfield, drained and empty, where I sat in a plastic chair and outlined an entire project
• A Greyhound station in Boise at 6 a.m., which smelled like diesel and gave me one of my better endings
• A laundromat in rural Vermont where the owner let me stay past closing because, quote, "you're quieter than the TV"

None of these were planned. That's the part I can't overstate. I didn't seek them out as some romantic writing retreat. They found me because I was stuck, in transit, with nowhere comfortable to be.

Why the In-Between Works

Here's my theory, for what it's worth. Creative work needs two things that are hard to find together: low stakes and total aloneness. Home has low stakes but a thousand tiny distractions. A workplace has aloneness but pressure humming under everything.

A laundromat at 10 p.m. has neither problem. The stakes are a load of towels. The company is a stranger watching a soap opera on a cracked screen. Your brain, denied stimulation, goes looking for it. It starts making things up. That's the whole trick. That's the entire secret.

The empty motel pool is even better, if you can find one. There's a strange honesty to a drained pool — a shape built for a purpose, sitting unused. I've never left one without filling a notebook page.

Building a Routine Out of Nowhere

I won't pretend I plan my life around laundromats. But I have started leaving room for them. When I travel, I book the cheap motel with the sad pool instead of the efficient chain hotel. I take the long way through towns with one traffic light. I do laundry on the road instead of at home, which my family finds baffling and I find essential.

If your creative life has gone stale, I'd suggest the same. You don't need a cabin in the woods or a residency in Taos. You need forty minutes in a plastic chair somewhere nobody would choose to be. Bring a notebook. Order the coffee. Let the fluorescent lights do their thing.

The loneliest places in America turned out to be the least lonely rooms I've ever worked in. Go figure.