View of the front room of the Writer's Room of Boston. (Source:David Kurtis)

Once upon a time, there was a blank piece of paper. The paper wanted a writer to put some words on it, but the writer was far too busy admiring his pajamas, waiting for the mailman, and moping about why he was not writing to actually write anything on a piece of paper.

The paper grew depressed and cried softly to itself as coffee stains spread across its ivory grain. But one night a fairy godmother appeared and drove the paper down the Mass Pike to a large room on Boylston Street overlooking the Public Garden* where there were lots of other pieces of paper, teeming with nouns and adjectives and even a few verbs.

The paper was very happy because it was in the Writers' Room of Boston, where poets and novelists flock and can think of nothing they would rather do than fill up pieces of blank paper, and sometimes actually do. Some of them do it late at night after they finish other jobs. Some of them head up the narrow stairway tucked between Shreve Crump & Low and the Leather Center early in the morning and stay there until the sun sinks over the trim spire of the Arlington Street Church.

Although it realized that the fairy tale in which it was the hero was fast coming to an end, the paper was also happy because it had landed on the desk of Joseph P. Fox, one of the 22 writers who are room members. Fox, unit production manager of WGBH-TV's Frontline program, is working on a memoir about his father, head bartender at the Algonquin Hotel in New York for 35 years. Although he has no publisher, Fox has been working in the room three nights a week for over two years and it seemed like a good bet that the piece of paper would be filled right down to the last line where it would say The End.

"I regard this room as my sanctuary," explained Fox, who lives with his girlfriend in a Somerville apartment. "There is no laundry to be done. No dishes. No phone. No distraction. Coming here is just like going to work, but better."

The writers' room, to be honest, is not really a room. It is two rooms, attached by a small hallway and a closet that thinks it is a third room and contains a single desk. The main room is an airy space with soaring windows and partitions dividing it into six carrels. The smaller room, known as The Cave, is a cramped, dark space divided into four carrels and used, they say, by the moodier writers.

The two rooms are linked by a small hallway that contains a small universe composed of the only phone, a microwave, a small refrigerator, mailboxes, a community bulletin board, and a bookshelf containing the writers' published works. Writers may be drawn to the room by a common need, but they are a decidedly eclectic crowd. There's Stephen McCauley, a Cambridge author who is working on his fourth novel; Linda K. Cutting, a pianist and author of Memory Slips, a memoir of sexual abuse; C. D. Collins, a feisty Kentuckian in black gloves draped with silver chains who is about to release a CD of narrative poetry; scholar Nancy Kassell, who recently completed The Pythia on Ellis Island: Rethinking the Greco-Roman Legacy in America; journalist Vivien Marx, who is writing an article on the zebra fish; and a host of poets including Carol Dine, Nadya Aisenberg (recently deceased) and Jennifer Barber, editor of the literary magazine Salamander.

Some writers use the room, which is currently scouting for a new location* because its lease is expiring, for a single project and move on. A few drift in and out, toting their laptops, as the muse dictates. Several have been members since the room opened in the nearby State Transportation Building in 1988. Over the years they have shared a lot of quiet, a government-by-committee (everyone has to serve on at least one) that somehow gets the light bill paid and the plants watered, some mutual editing, coffee at the Cafe de Paris around the corner, rejection letters, and a host of publishing triumphs. Small things, perhaps. But for some writers, who grapple as much with the isolation of their craft as the execution of it, it has made writing possible.

"This room has enabled me to go on," declared Dine, 55, now writing a book about her battle with breast cancer. "I come in and feel the energy of other people and I know I can keep going. I am afraid to die, but here I am on the side of life."

The aim, well, one of them, is to publish, and many of them actually do. Each year about two new volumes are added to the shelf out front and a bottle of Ripple is poured in celebration. In the meantime, Michale Meeske's 70-year-old mother has donated a subscription to Publishers Weekly to the room. ("She's hopeful," shrugged Meeske, who is working on his third novel in five years, none of them published.) And several writers have inspirational notices pinned to their walls.

"There are three rules to writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are," says the neat, unattributed script on yellow paper in Fox's cubicle.

" `The Combat Zone' was fantastic. I really loved the story." - Joyce Carol Oates to Michael Meeske, says the note pinned to Meeske's wall, citing a comment Oates made after reading a chapter of Meeske's novel in a local class.

If the acceptance notices are long in coming, the writers have not had to worry too much about paying the rent, at least until now. Writers pay only $300 a quarter for a permanent desk, or half that if they don't mind floating from desk to desk each time they come in. But their good fortune is about to come to an end.

In June, the room's lease expires and the space is promised to a neighboring company. The writers have formed a committee to find new space,* but are already running up against the soaring real estate market - their current rent is only $1,400 a month. Before the group became a nonprofit corporation in 1993, it was funded by the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts.

Faced with a dramatic rent increase if they are to remain in the city, the writers face a daunting and very unwriterlike task: They need to generate a lot of money and fast. For a small operation that survives on a spartan annual budget of $25,000, a combination of fees and grants, it has prompted some soul-searching.

"I see this as a real turning point for the room. We can't do it on a shoestring anymore," said Bernice Buresh, 57, president for three years. "We need more cash."

One option being considered is to expand the number of desks from 11 to 15 or more and have all the writers be floaters, as is done at the New York Writers' Room, rather than have permanent desks. A half-time staffer would be hired to manage the room, now open 24 hours a day.

For the writers, considering such sweeping changes at an impromptu meeting recently, it is all a bit daunting. "We need a committee on this!" exclaimed Collins.

Another option is to seek more support from current funders. And at least one of them, the LEF Foundation, a fund that provides an annual fellowship for the room, seems inclined to give. "These people just want to write. They do not want to grow big and powerful and that is very appealing," said Lyda Kuth, associate director of the LEF Foundation, based in Cambridge and California.

Powerful, maybe not. But big, or bigger, is definitely on the drawing board. Although the group is uneasy about expansion, attracting additional writers may be key to survival. Currently, any writer is eligible who is working on a serious long-term project. No graduate students, however, need apply. The roughly 10 writers who apply each year submit writing samples that are read by several of the writers and are then interviewed by, of course, the membership committee. One thing Buresh hopes to drive home during the room's fund-raising drive is how critical the space can be for writers.

"Everybody knows that sculptors and painters need a place to work," said Buresh, a former journalist who has used the room since l992. "Writers are supposed to be able to write anywhere. Hemingway wrote in a foxhole. Richard Wright wrote in a shabby room. But the truth is writing is greatly enhanced if you have a place to do it."

Like the writing process itself, the room operates on its own erratic, sometimes whimsical, rhythm. A few writers, like Meeske and Marx, are of bankerly stripe and arrive every morning and stay until late afternoon. By late morning, Dine, who travels an hour from her home in Lynn, Cutting, and Kassell may have shown up. When the clock strikes 1, novelist Ivan Gold, author of Sams in a Dry Season, is almost always in his desk in the back. When she finishes her job as a massage therapist at the Four Seasons Hotel at 3 p.m., Collins walks the few blocks to the room and gets to work on her novel, and sometimes stays until midnight. Or she did until she left that job. Shortly after 7, she's joined by Fox. Most nights Ricco Siasoco, last year's LEF fellow, shows up around 7 p.m. to work on his novel for several hours before heading to his job as an on-line news producer at The Boston Globe at 11 p.m.

"It's quiet and dark and secluded," explained Siasoco. "It's everything I come to the writers' room for." The rest come for many reasons. Part of it is the quiet. But there's also a sense of purpose that the room instills in the sometimes seemingly aimless process of putting words on paper.

"For me, the main purpose of the room is peer pressure," said McCauley. "I hear all those keys clicking and I think, "Oh, no! They're writing faster than me.' So I get right to work."

Cutting finds that she can practice her piano before the windows of her Bedford home, no problem. But when she tries to work on her novel, the dog marches in. The fax whirs. The phone rings. Wasn't that a noise somewhere? "At home you are infinitely interruptable," said Cutting, 43. "Here, without being completely alone you are not interruptable, so you feel respected in your work." Which is not to say that a few enterprising writers don't find some distractions even in the writers' room, because they do. The unwritten rule is that talking is not allowed, and so some writers head toa cafe. Or they heat up some spaghetti. Then, of course, there might be a comittee meeting. Or a light bulb that needs dusting.

But if there is nothing at all going on, if the waste can is disappointingly empty and the telephone sullenly silent, if there is absolutely nothing at all to do but write, one could wander into the bathroom and pick up the pink chalk sitting on the chalkboard on the back of the door.

Someone already has. And what they wrote is this:

Where have all the poets gone (long time passing)?
The short answer:
Some have gone to colonies. Some have gone to jobs.
Some have lost their self-esteem. Some are blackboard snobs.
Some are changing diapers. Some are pumping gas.
Some are scribbling all night. But they are nuts, alas.

*Note: Since this article appeared in The Boston Globe, the Writers' Room has moved to 111 State Street.