The Longest Nights

In early winter, when the heavy rains come to the Pacific Northwest and we settle under a blanket of sullen sky, something stirs in the creative soul. At the calendar’s gloaming, while the landscape is inert, and all is dark, sluggish, bleak and cold, writers and cooks and artists and tinkerers of all sorts are at their most productive.

At least, that’s my theory. As a lifelong resident of a latitude well to the north of Maine, I’ve come to the conclusion that creativity needs a season of despair. Where would William Butler Yeats be if he nested in Tuscany? Could Charles Dickens ever have written a word from South Beach? And the sun of Hollywood did much to bleach the talents out of that troubled native of Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Today, here in Seattle, the sun will set at 4:40 p.m., after making a sketchy appearance of eight hours and 45 minutes. Paris, farther north by 1.2 degrees of latitude, will get even less daylight — eight hours and 35 minutes. And Dublin, straddling the 53rd parallel, will see seven hours and 56 minutes.

What these cities share, in addition to long winter nights, is a large and active creative class. Countless Americans (and innumerable French artists and writers) have done their best work under la grisaille, as Parisians call their leaden ceiling. Ireland surely has more good writers and dramatists per capita than any country in the world. And in Seattle, you can’t walk outside for a snort of espresso without bumping into a newly published novelist who finally finished the tortured tome after escaping from somewhere with too much distracting sun.

In truth, it is disheartening when you start work in the dark and end in the shadows. This great outdoor metropolis, the only major city in the world that people move to in order to get closer to nature, as the British expat and adopted Seattleite Jonathan Raban once wrote, seems closed for many of the days of gray. But that forces creative types to the far interior — the soul, the heart, the meditative marrow.

To test my theory, I asked a cluster of accomplished Seattle writers about dark-season gloom and creative fertility. These wordsmiths in winter jammies selflessly agreed to take a break from checking their Amazon.com numbers to commit some hard thought to the subject.

“A poet once said that a sad heart is a pure heart. Might he have meant SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)?” That was from Bharti Kirchner, author of nine books and an award-winning cook. “I find it easier to write in winter in the Pacific Northwest,” she said, “not just because my heart is pure, but also because the rain acts as a barrier — to distractions, to restlessness, to going out for tea.”

Jennie Shortridge moved to Seattle from Denver, where 300 days of annual sunshine were one reason it took seven years to finish her first novel. “When I moved to the Northwest, I wrote the next novel in 15 months, and subsequent books every two years,” she told me. “The dark and chill keeps me at my desk.”

Peter Mountford, whose novel “A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism” won last year’s Washington State Book Award for fiction, does his best work in winter. “We’re stuck inside, paunchy and pale, teeth stained from coffee, so of course we don’t want to see anyone,” he said. “I get it now. And it’s what makes us such avid readers.”

Others said they needed a crutch. “I retreat to my office, turn on my happy light (yes, as a California native, I am not embarrassed to confess that I have one), put my fingers on the keyboard and hope that the muse can find me beneath Seattle’s heavy gray cloud covering,” said Bob Dugoni, a best-selling writer of legal thrillers.

“Gray causes depression,” said the novelist Bernadette Pajer. “I know that sounds like a bad thing, but when mildly depressed you wallow in your emotions, you search for reasons for your misery.”

A wood stove is the best stimulant for the novelist/anesthesiologist Carol Cassella. “The radiant heat, the smell, the color, the glow, the undulant flame better than the gold swirls in a whiskey ad’s ice cube. Who needs more for inspiration?”

With the onset of afternoon’s murk, Sean Beaudoin’s quirky mind catches fire. “I feel an overpowering impulse to write,” he said of the ebb of a winter day. “In fact, I’ve gotten more done in the few years since I moved to Seattle than I did over the entire decade before.” Beaudoin’s Web site boasts of “enough excellent writing to fill a large tube sock.”

He said, “By rights I should be crippled by clinical depression, bending toward the light like a dying tomato plant, wan and pale and in need of a raw steak smoothie. Instead, words pour out, sentence by sentence.”

More depressing than weeks of drizzle is unrelenting sunshine, said the novelist Randy Sue Coburn. Last year, Seattle went nearly 100 straight days without rain, prompting a major work stoppage in writing nooks. “As any comedian knows, the wheels of invention are often turned by melancholy,” she said. “And Seattle’s winter weather is a veritable melancholy machine.”

There you have it: my theory proved, anecdotally. One must have a mind of winter, in the words of poet Wallace Stevens, to be productive in the cold season.

What waits at the other extreme, of course, are June days of 10 p.m. sunsets, gardens on photosynthetic hyper-drive and very little work on the interior side. Thus, there’s an urgency to these January hours; with each lengthening day, each additional few ticks of daylight, we lose time in the creative well.