On Writing and Rooms

      Carving out the physical space to write, carving out the physical time to write, was a completely different story. If I had the luxury of my “five hundred a year,” I still had to try and find a place that was inviolate, where, once I was inside, the world could not touch me.  That space, physical but also mental, was more difficult than the small income that let me stay at home.  The room I carved out of our first small house had no door that closed—and both children and husband felt free to come and go as they needed, or even as they pleased.  If I quickly learned that telling my family I was working carried some weight,( and the more I said it, the more the figurative lock on the door became one that actually barred entry), I was still seen as always somehow available.  I lost my room while living in England during my husband’s sabbatical, in a tiny flat with both a six year old and a newborn and so I wrote as much as I could while my son was at school and my daughter was sleeping, packing away the computer from the kitchen table as soon as I was needed again.  Years later, living in a small, two bedroom apartment in Paris, my room once again gone, I set up my laptop in the bedroom and wrote furiously while both children were at school.  I can easily say that those two years in Paris were among my most productive.  In a sense, the whole of the city became my room.  And rather than a lock on the door being necessary, the wide open space of the most beautiful city in the world nurtured my writing and sent it off into wild new places.

      In the home I resided in for ten years, I had a wonderful room, a loft which overlooked the rest of the house and was open to sound and sight, which was good, and open to sound and sight which was bad.  I disciplined myself enough over the years to be able to block out the cacophony of day to day life and get the work done. Now, in a new house with a new husband, I have a small room that indeed does have a door.  So far, though that door has remained opened, the lock unused. My desire to write is most of the door I need:  over the years, my ability to both discipline myself in terms of time and physical space has grown along with the growth and maturity of my work.  I can close the door here, and lock it, should I choose, but I doubt I will, and so far, even given a deadline that seemed nearly impossible, I left my door and myself open.  It is possible, that should it ever become necessary, I might even be able to compose, as did Dickens,  at the kitchen table with a gaggle of children clamoring at my feet. Those will, of course, be my grandchildren, but the thought intrigues me.