Flowers in Hotel Rooms Volume IV
Sarah Bodman
The series has become a set of journals, documenting my own actions as well as those of characters in novels, or writers whose work I admire. Working in Poland, meant a stay near the home of the writer and artist Radoslaw Nowakowski so we could interview him and film his books. He lives in Dabrowa Dolna, a tiny hamlet, and as I sat outside at dusk with the dogs barking (reading Ethan Frome by Edith Warton) I noticed the garlic that had been nailed up for protection outside the front door by the wonderful B&B owner. In Minneapolis last winter, with long, cold corridors but no snow, I'm reading The Shining by Stephen King, and set about typing “all work and no play” on a portable plastic typewriter.

In Glasgow, reading Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor I amuse myself in Palahniuk fashion by asking Tom if he can write “kill yourself” in the steam on the bathroom mirror of the hotel room he is sharing with a friend of ours, who is never fully awake in the mornings, and of course he doesn't even notice it. In Frankfurt, reading Haruki Murakami's After Dark, I can create my own night-time take on the novel with the ink stamped on my arm from visiting Takashi Murakami's ©Murakami exhibition that afternoon. In Whitby, England as the mist rolls in from the sea, I willingly watch it envelop the window as I read Nosferatu In Love by Jim Shepard. 2009

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