I once met the writer Gail Scott in Vancouver. I’d fallen ill on the plane and was lying on the carpet at the back of the room, listening to her talk, scrawling down her words in a notebook. ‘The space between words is an abyss’, she said. Or was it sentences? Regardless, there was a shape inside me ready to receive that language.

Is the space between the bed and the table an abyss?

I sleep on a makeshift bed in the same room as the table you see in this photograph. Every day it’s this: how can I take the three steps from the bed to this table? To be honest, it’s not even one step. Yet, there are days when it might as well be a crevasse I’m being invited to step over. Nothing to it. Yet, the vertical cut through the orange rock below induces vertigo. That is a memory of a real crevasse, in Moab, Utah. Long ago, I threw my rucksack over it. Passport, wallet. It landed with a thunk. What came next was irreversible. Leap over that gap, a matter of inches. Slip and you’d fall, a hundred feet or more.

That is my practice every day. Imagine a horizontal line that crosses a slice of space, a great depth. If I can cross this space with ‘urgency’, as the artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger said, when I asked her for advice about this particular problem – the problem of how to get from the bed to the table – the question of how to write in a domestic context without a physical studio or separate room in which to write – then – I’m there. I’m writing.

In the photograph, you’ll see a pile of notebooks. I’d just come back from Colorado with three suitcases of notebooks, retrieved from a storage unit with the help of my friend Andrea Spain. Waiting for Andrea to come around with her truck, at the end of the third day, a boiling hot August day in the Western United States, a woman pulled her Buick LeSabre into the loading bay.

She got out. A worried look on her face. ‘Are you a citizen?’ she asked, without introducing herself. ‘Are you homeless?’ ‘Would you like me to drive you to the relevant authority?’ She was, I understood, a moment or breath or answer away from calling a hotline. Just then, Andrea came round the corner, and we loaded the notebooks into the bed of her Toyota.

The notebooks contain writing-towards-works-of-many-kinds. The notebooks are an index of fragments. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the same place as all of my notebooks. It’s exhilarating. My work in the present is to decoct these notebooks, methodically or by opening them at random. I want to write three more books. The books are all in these notebooks: rough drafts, possibilities, glimpses, a grid.

My studio practice begins with a circle, a zero, a mandala, like the one you see in the notebook that’s open. I draw or paint a mandala every day, and then I caption it, sometimes in an ordinary way, making a note of the lunar cycle or the season, and sometimes with a language that doesn’t belong to the day. This is a nervous system practice that is also an art practice, in the sense that the zero of the mandala is also a portal. What comes through is often something connected to a project I am working on, or that I can enter (an image or scene), to retrieve what’s necessary to keep writing, to write at all.

Behind the notebook is a makeshift shrine. The cobra comes from a little shop next to the temple at the end of my mother’s road when she lived in India. Can you place something in your work that, like copper, will perform a conductivity that does not require you to re-install it each time? The citron-yellow and black / silver triangular object is a piece of asphalt skinned in hand-dyed velvet by my friend Sharon Carlisle, an artist.

During the time that I was writing Ban en Banlieue, in Colorado, Sharon would come every day to sift dirt in my back garden. By the end of the summer, this dirt was clay. In the intervals of making and sifting, I developed performances on the rectangle of earth that Sharon was scraping and building, which found their way into Ban, a work set in West London in the 1970s. At that time, I was making my art far from my birthplace, the place in which it was set.

The shrine: I want to always remember that I am making my work in a context that’s not separate to cosmic and planetary flows. I want to remember a life of making and writing that was also friendship, love, coffee on a little tray in the garden.

The mat is a mat hand-woven by my great-grandmother, from my ancestral home, a place now in ruins.

Behind the shrine, flat on the table, there’s a pamphlet from the D. H. Lawrence Ranch in New Mexico, where I lived and worked in my twenties. There, I encountered the descendants of coyotes that Lawrence had raised, and lay beneath a tree that Georgia O’Keeffe painted. Above that pamphlet is a postcard from Carole Maso, the American novelist, asking me to send her my work. This was long ago, before I’d written a book, or could have dreamed of this other life, in which, every day, I am writing sentences with my fingertip.

On the windowsill.

Thank you for visiting my studio.

Perhaps I can end with a question, something you might take back to your own studio time.

Dear artist, dear writer.

What is the zero of your work?