The Dangerous Myth of A Room of One's Own by Joy Castro

I won’t quibble here with Virginia Woolf’s famous contention that having a room of one’s own makes it easier, and thus far more possible, for a woman to write.  Agreed.  Solitude and space nourish the writing life.

But I will take issue with the notion that, for either gender, a room of one’s own is required.  Believing that myth holds too many would-be writers back, and thus robs the rest of us of their voices.

You don’t need a room of your own to write.  You don’t need a view of trees.  You don’t need a fancy pen, or a leather-bound notebook with thick creamy pages, or a laptop, or a sleek little iPad.  Believing that you need these things—or that you’re not a real writer until you have them—makes you dependent on them, and when you can’t get them, you won’t write.  You’ll stall.  Eventually, you may stall out for good.

The prolific poet and essayist Alice Meynell (1847-1922), who preceded Woolf by a generation, had no room of her own.  She wrote at the dining  table in the room where her husband, an editor, entertained writers.  While she worked, her seven children played—and wrote their own literary magazine—under that same table; two would grow up to become authors themselves.  It wasn’t easy.  Meynell sometimes locked herself in the bathroom to write.  Occasionally, in desperation, she would escape in a cab.

Slightly later, single mother Meridel Le Sueur (1900-1996), known for her sensuous experimental fiction and hard-hitting Depression-Era reportage, lived in one room with her two daughters.  When she got home from a full day’s work, she would dunk her head under cold running water to stay awake and write.

In our own time, Lorraine M. López, a PEN/Faulkner finalist, a full-time professor at Vanderbilt University, and one of my favorite writers, has no room of her own.  Her work-space is the loft above the family living room, where she “can hear every bloody sound in the house.”  Yet she has published two novels with a major press, a YA novel, and two award-winning collections of short stories.  In addition, she has edited two volumes of essays by other writers, which have been published by university presses, and she's currently writing both a novel and a novella.

It’s true that these writers would have been aided by rooms of their own.  For a writer, it’s natural to crave space where no one else intrudes, to want the freedom from distractions and the comfort of lovely accoutrements.  I have writer-friends who live alone yet still keep a designated study just for their writing.  I have writer-friends who live alone yet still travel to writers’ colonies to get away from the diversions and burdens of everyday life.

It's true that silence and solitude—which blossom when you’re not working your day-job and cooking and cleaning and talking with your kids at night—can open up new space in your imagination and memory.  It’s true that a beautifully weighted pen feels voluptuous in the hand, a pleasure.

But if you can’t manage to structure such things into your life, don’t stop writing.  Maybe you can’t afford them.  Maybe you’re working two jobs.  Maybe you’re taking care of kids—or grandkids, or nephews and nieces who need you. Maybe all of the above.  Don’t mystify and fetishize the luxuries that more well-off writers claim to need.  You don’t need them.  If you have only ten-minute scraps of time, write in those bursts.  If you have only a kitchen table at night after your family has gone to sleep, write there.

Like Woolf’s, this is a political argument.  It’s an argument about class and opportunity, about desperation and determination and desire, about whose voices will be heard in our culture.

In journals and magazines and books published by presses of all kinds, we’ve heard the droning voice of privilege, again and again and again.  We’ve heard its leisurely sentences unspool, telling us what literary work is supposed to be and do.

What we need, what is still mostly missing from our literature, is the voice of urgency, the urgency that emerges from Bic pens into spiral notebooks in dim-lit stairwells or drafty garages, from cell phones on subways, from a friend’s borrowed computer in a favela.

Literature that doesn’t let obstacles stop it:  that’s what we need.  So write it.  Keep writing.  Don’t stop.