Where Tommy Pico Writes

By necessity, my workspace must be extremely versatile (much more versatile than my boudoir life I might add but it doesn’t really matter because I don’t have one because of the Pangea but I’m not bitter or anything I don’t even care so why are you asking lolsob).

My home office, where I go to be alone and formulate my thoughts into words, now also has to be a stage, a recording studio, a classroom, and a TV writer’s room. On any given day, I’m recording podcasts, giving lectures and workshops, doing readings, am “in conversation” with authors on Crowdcast or Instagram Live, visiting classrooms, watching audition tapes, pitching story ideas, reading poetry submissions for Catapult, and, of course, writing! From essays, to emails, to episodes of television. Instead of propping my desk up against the wall, I plopped it in the middle of the room for lighting, I dotted the landscape with my new quarantine obsession (PLANTS!), and decorated the walls with show posters, playbills, and fliers from past events.

In the beforetimes, I mostly made my income from touring. It was not uncommon for me to wake up at three in the morning and head to an airport three times a week, for the past three or four years. Performing for audiences far and wide was kind of my thing, it was my super power, it was something I’d worked really hard to bloom. Covid obviously shut all that down, and I suddenly found a huge part of my identity denied to me.

It was devastating, and while Zoom performances and such offered an alternative, they aren’t the same. During early pandemic, I dug out all my old fliers and posters and made a negotiation with myself. If I had to be here in this room in all my employments for the foreseeable future, I wanted to be constantly reminded of all the cool shit I used to get up to, and hopefully all the cool shit that’s waiting for me on the other side of this.

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