> CD #102: A room of my own
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
I know, I know. Virginia Woolf’s phrase “a room of one’s own” is so often repeated by women in literary circles that it has almost become a cliché, which means we are in danger of forgetting its truth. When Woolf first spoke those words at a lecture at Cambridge in 1928, it was clear to her audience that most women lacked the agency and resources to do creative work. And it is tempting to think that now, nearly a hundred years later, “a room of one’s own” is no longer as relevant. After all, women can vote and work and raise families and own property and pretty much “do it all” these days, right?
I mean, that’s what I told myself when I was writing my first book, Dear Scarlet, at the kitchen table for two or three hours every night after the kids went to bed, pausing frequently to nurse my youngest whenever he woke up crying. That’s what I told myself when I packed away pages and supplies every time we needed the table for meals. That’s what I told myself when I wrote and drew during lunch hours at the office, on shaky airplane trays during work trips, in waiting rooms before doctor’s appointments. I didn’t need a room of my own: I was resourceful. I could work anywhere.
My residency in 2021 was the first time I had a dedicated office to myself and time to write during daylight hours, and it gave me a taste of what I had been missing—what Virginia Woolf was really talking about: the space to spread out, freedom from interruption, and a door to shut out the world. The office was nothing special, worn linoleum under a random assortment of 1960s institutional office furniture and fluorescent lighting that made you want to die, but it made such a difference.
I didn’t have the words to describe it then, but I could sense that the office was changing the way I related to my work and helping me think more expansively.
Recently, I read The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul and her chapter on how physical spaces affect our cognition explained a bit of what was happening to me back then (emphasis mine):
But the home advantage is not limited to sports. Researchers have identified a more general effect as well: when people occupy spaces that they consider their own, they experience themselves as more confident and capable. They are more efficient and productive. They are more focused and less distractible. And they advance their own interests more forcefully and effectively.
[…]
Benjamin Meagher, an assistant professor of psychology at Kenyon College in Ohio, has advanced an intriguing theory that may explain these outcomes. The way we act, the way we think, and even the way we perceive the world around us differ when we’re in a space that’s familiar to us—one that we have shaped through our own choices and imbued with our own memories of learning and working there in the past. When we’re on our home turf, Meagher has found, our mental and perceptual processes operate more efficiently, with less need for effortful self-control. The mind works better because it doesn’t do all the work on its own; it gets an assist from the structure embedded in its environment, structure that marshals useful information, supports effective habits and routines, and restrains unproductive impulses. In a familiar space over which we feel ownership, he suggests, “our cognition is distributed across the entire setting.” The place itself helps us think.
I realize I’m saying that I felt more ownership of a space provided by the University of Calgary than a home I helped pay for—I’m on the title and everything, lol—but that’s because my family’s home belongs to all of us who live there, whereas the office was just for me.
It was also just for 10 months. So as my residency wound down, I applied for a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to fund a studio rental. Now I have my own little room above a Staples with a view of a gravel parking lot and the university in the distance. I don’t get to it as often as I’d like because I still work a part-time day job—I haven’t figured out the “money” part of Virginia Woolf’s equation yet—but it’s there for me and I love it.
It’s a very corporate setting, the guy in the studio next to mine is too loud, and the lighting is only moderately better than in my previous office, but it is a room of my own. They’re raising the rent next year, and I have spent a not insignificant amount of time worrying about how I’m going to keep it (I have a solution in the works, fingers crossed).
But sometimes I force myself to stop fretting for a second and just sit here in wonder, thinking, “Even if it is only for a little while, I earned this space with my drawings and words. I made it all happen with a story.”
:) Teresa
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