Some writers glug from a bottle to fuel their work—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway—but others, myself included, prefer to sip our creativity awake with coffee.
In Paris, I once stood in the bedroom of the great novelist Honoré de Balzac, inside the Maison de Balzac in Passy. The modest flat hasn't changed much since Balzac's time—and there, on display now beside his writing desk, sits his burgundy-inscribed coffee pot, perched on a Bunsen burner.
It's a humble contraption, yet it once powered the man through marathon writing sessions, as he churned out novels by candlelight, often dressed in a monk's robe.
Years later, I found myself halfway around the world in Jamaica, chasing another kind of coffee high. Most tourists stick to the beaches—but I was curious about the origin of the island's famed Blue Mountain beans. I rented a tiny Ford with my friends Stephanie and Chuck, and we wound our way up narrow mountain switchbacks into the mist. The higher we climbed, the more the ocean disappeared behind clouds, replaced by soft rain and a sense of otherworldliness.
We passed the locked and forbidding gates of several big corporate plantations—places with perfect signage and zero hospitality—before finally spotting a hand-painted wooden sign: "Coffee." It pointed down a dirt road.
A few hundred yards in, we came upon a thatched-roof shed with smoke curling into the wet air. Two workmen were roasting beans in a giant flat pan over an open flame. They ground the beans by hand in a carved wooden hollow, then boiled the grounds in a pot and strained them through cheesecloth. The coffee was thick, fragrant, and impossibly fresh.
We sipped slowly and talked long under that roof, learning all we could about the process. When we finally continued on to our remote hotel, we stayed up deep into the night, caffeinated and giddy, watching the stars and replaying every detail of our unexpected adventure.
These days, my ritual is far less romantic. My beans come in a vacuum-sealed pouch, pre-roasted. My coffee pot is a perfectly ordinary drip machine—no ornate burner, no monk's robe. But I still fuel my writing with caffeine. And as I chip away at my latest thriller, mug in hand, I think back fondly on Balzac's burner and those misty Blue Mountain hills, and the strange, beautiful places that coffee—and stories—can take you.
