When author and playwright Gordon Dahlquist (his latest sci-fi novel, “The Different Girl,” was published earlier this year) arrived in New York from Portland, Ore., in 1988, he had what one might call a religious experience.
“I was living in a church in Chelsea,” he explains. “In return for acting as sort of a caretaker, I paid a very low rent.”
But that changed in January 2012, when the church ultimately needed the space he was living in — and nicely gave him six month’s notice to vacate. “I had no intention of ever leaving Manhattan,” he says. “But circumstances change, and I’m very glad they did.”
Five months later, Dahlquist landed a 975-square-foot co-op in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he lives with his girlfriend, playwright Anne Washburn (her play, “Mr. Burns,” is currently in previews at Playwrights Horizons) and their two cats, Suva and Frangipani.
He paid $600,000 for two bedrooms (one bedroom is now an office), and 1½ bathrooms, plus a living room/dining area.
“We liked a lot of small things about it,” he says. “It’s very sunny and the front part of the apartment is really good for entertaining. But the main thing was the combination of work and living space.”
Dahlquist — who famously received a $2 million advance for his 2006 debut, “The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters,” which ended up losing his publisher quite a bit of money — admits life as a writer is never easy.
“It was a tricky time,” Dahlquist says of the experience with his first book. “I just kept writing. I didn’t see anything else I wanted to do more. Our culture is full of people who go up and then down and then up again. So all you can do is keep working.
“To me, the good thing is that I’ve had two books published since then and I just finished my third. I’m really happy to be writing and getting a good response to what I’m working on.”
And that huge advance did change his life.
“I can’t regret that deal, ” he says. “I bought some shoes, I bought a computer and then I bought this apartment.”