WRITING ROOMS: RECONSIDERING THE NOTION OF A ROOM OF ONE S OWN

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1 WRITING ROOMS: RECONSIDERING THE NOTION OF A ROOM OF ONE S OWN Susan Close, Ph.D., University of Manitoba, Canada ABSTRACT Writing rooms, whether permanently situated or temporarily constructed in transit, have a long history of allowing writers an escape from daily obligations and distractions in order to focus on the task at hand. This essay considers these interiors from a feminist perspective informed by the process of cultural analysis. Here, I argue that, particularly for women, the writing room is a retreat that allows for the solitary reflection necessary for the writing process. Often, what we write is influenced by where we write. Evidence for this is found in close readings informed by the concepts of mise-enscene and place making of a representative selection of six photographs of writing rooms where I have worked. The following theorists and writers inform my analysis: Mieke Bal, Tim Cresswell, Rebecca Solnit, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Virginia Woolf. For all their obvious differences, what makes these writing rooms productive is that, in their own way, all have been environments free from distraction that have been able to provide the calm and quiet that has allowed writing to flourish. INTRODUCTION In an age of gendered retreats such as man caves and she sheds, it is worthwhile to reflect on an alternative typology of private places, a writing room. For as long as I can remember, I have had a fascination with both Virginia Woolf s seminal text A Room of One sownand her writing lodge at Monk s House in Sussex. Based on this, I argue that where we write is significant to what we write. This visual essay is an investigation of this notion. In it, I consider a selection of photographs of places where I have written in Ireland, France, and Canada. They are interiors sheltered from the quotidian; they function as places of refuge where thoughts can be transformed into words on paper. Evidence for this is found in close readings of a representative selection of photographs of writing rooms where I have worked. The selection criteria for these images were based on the representation of a sample of the kinds of places where women, more specifically feminist women, often write. The activist and author Rebecca Solnit concludes a chapter in her recent book of essays, The Mother of All Questions, by insisting that women break their silence to find voices. Solnit advocates that even the smallest gestures to fit together our stories or expand their scope help to undo privilege, and she argues: We make ourselves in part out of our stories about ourselves and our world, separately and together. 1 Heartened and called to action, I picked up my camera to record locations where women find a voice and write. The resulting essay explores these issues in three parts. First, it briefly presents the key concepts of place making and mise-en-scene that inform the argument. The second part features the dominant element of the essay, a series of photographs of writing rooms accompanied by text that maps the territory to be covered and explains the process of reading the photographs. Third, employed as they are to inform the use of the writing room as a refuge and retreat for its often-nomadic inhabitant, the images are read in relationship to the key concepts presented in the first section. Finally, an afterword further reflects on what can be understood from these images about how women write in, and about, spaces of writing Interior Design Educators Council, Journal of Interior Design 43(1), WRITING ROOM AS PLACE AND mise-en-scene Most of the writing rooms analyzed in this essay were temporary, being occupied only briefly on research trips as private places in which to work while traveling. For the writer, and perhaps JOURNAL OF INTERIOR DESIGN 43

2 especially the academic writer, life now often involves shifting locations and features the temporary adaptive reuse of hotel rooms, residence rooms, and rented apartments in a way that reconfigures these generic spaces into writing rooms. Sometimes, these rooms provide little more than the basics: a chair and a table upon which to place a notebook or laptop. What they share is that each of these interiors offers the inhabitant a quiet place in which to think and write. Place making is arrived at through the intervention of human activities and the familiarity that results with spending time in a space. Human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan states: What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value The ideas of space and place require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space, as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. 2 Geographer Tim Cresswell agrees, arguing that place is constituted through reiterative social practice place is made and remade on a daily basis. 3 Thus, through simple routines and daily rituals such as writing, we make place out of space. This essay, Writing Rooms, considers six photographs of such places in which I have written over the last few years while working on a book on the intersection of photography and the built environment. All but my home study (Figure 6) required revisions to their original design, each having to be adapted to serve as the kind of temporary solitudinous sanctuary so essential to my thinking and writing. Each room is in a different location, usually one that relates geographically to the text being written. Each room shared basic commonalities: a window, a chair, and a table upon which to work. Some of these interiors can be viewed as mise-en-scene, one permanent, created specifically to enhance the writing experience; others are more transitory, repurposed as required to serve as functional workplaces. They can be viewed as stage sets and analyzed using the concept of mise-en-scene, defined as the arrangement of actors, props, and scenery on a stage in a theatrical production or the environment or setting in which something takes place. 4 Furthermore, on the construction of mise-en-scene, W.J. Mitchell maintains: The most obvious way to create mise-en-scene to support communication is to gather objects in a space, such as a room, where they are simultaneously visible, and where not only the objects themselves but also the spatial relationships among them can assume significance. 5 Before considering the images and their implications, it is first necessary to understand more clearly the process of reading photographs lest the reader find the descriptions that follow too simplistic. READING WRITING ROOM PHOTOGRAPHS Isn t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life? Virginia Woolf 6 As Woolf noted, a careful study of the simulacra produced by photography can often yield more information than the viewer notices in real life. The act of close reading a photograph begins with a detailed description of what the photographer has included inside of the frame and concludes with the viewer undertaking a formal semiotic analysis to decode it. 7 In a methodology aligned with cultural analysis, a comprehensive analysis is made of the information discovered from this examination, which is considered in relationships to related theoretical concepts. As cultural theorist Mieke Bal argues, the object, in this case the photograph, must be allowed to speak back with its own voice as part of the interaction with the theory in its analysis JOURNAL OF INTERIOR DESIGN

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9 Such a photographic reading that requires the thick description of its contents is also similar to the methodology of the cultural ethnographer Clifford Geertz, who uses the term thick description to describe the consideration of possible meanings of the object, individual, culture, or space under interpretation. 9 This description shares some elements of the detailed descriptions that Woolf herself employed in creating context for her novels, such as The Waves, and are also apparent in the early chapters of her seminal essay A Room of One s Own. 10 The reading of the images below begins with an in-depth description of each image and then moves on to consider if and how they are informed by theoretical concepts such as place making and mise-en-scene. AFTERWORD Arundhati Roy, the noted author of The God of Small Things, has described her own writing place as being more a refuge than a studio. My writing room is like that too, a refuge, quiet, contained and a productive interior where most of my doctoral dissertation and first book were written. Despite, and perhaps even because of, the sometimes chaotic proceedings of daily life, it is my most productive location. Here, I can truly lose myself in my thoughts and words. Tuan s argument that space is transformed into place through familiarity resonates within this interior. This essay has featured a tour through just a few of the places in which I have written over the past years. These interiors feature many similar qualities. I always seek good natural light and, for inspiration, views into the larger world. Sometimes though, I must adapt and make do with less. All include simple basics, such as a chair and table for a workspace and some type of storage for reference books and materials. Most significant though, and always essential, is privacy and an assurance of being able to control intrusions from the outside world. For all their differences, what makes these writing rooms productive is that, in their own way, all have allowed writing to flourish by providing a calm and quiet environment free from intruding distraction. As a woman and as a feminist, I respond strongly to these interiors because of the agency that these spaces have given me. They provided quiet places to critically examine, interpret, and narrate all aspects of my academic research practice. They allowed for respite from the quotidian and provided the opportunity to tell stories. As Rebecca Solnit has explained, women tell stories to cope, build community, and even make new lives for themselves. She wisely counsels, Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place. 15 Now, let me return to the words of Virginia Woolf who advocated for the photograph as a significant tool that often facilitated a deeper understanding of its subject than what she termed real life. The descriptions born of close reading of these interiors allows the viewer to see and study the space or place depicted in a more analytical manner. Such detailed examination confirms a rich visual narrative that reveals both their shared characteristics and their diversity. These photographs help to shed light on how women make places in their lives to write and how these writing rooms impact what they write. The photographs that comprise the essay were made in rather than taken of the rooms they describe. As Hollis notes, usually, photographs taken of (rather than in) interiors show rooms that that have been styled within an inch of their lives before being committed to film. 16 Instead, these images exist on the border between social documentary photography or what, in his trialetics of spatiality, Edward Soja, drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, calls Firstspace, a realistic, mappable representation of space, and what he terms Thirdspace, a lived space that is a kind of hybrid of real and imagined space that is difficult to define. 17 This Thirdspace is evidenced in women s writing places, refuges in which they can think and develop their own voices. Solnit contends that when Woolf s book A Room of One s Own came out in 1929, it was an alarm that sounded about the practical, financial, social and psychological restrictions on women writing and, by implication, having a voice 18. Art historian Frances Spalding concurs that Woolf s text is an adroit bid for freedom as it develops the argument that women need money and a room of their own in which to write. 19 Clearly, very little has changed in that respect since that celebrated book was published. This essay underscores Woolf s timeless JOURNAL OF INTERIOR DESIGN 51

10 metaphor by showing that women are still searching for a place of their own and not just one in which to pursue their own writing. Many issues and challenges remain unanswered or unresolved for women; many complexities exist far beyond the scope of this brief essay. At this turbulent time in history, when women s voices are once again being silenced by retrograde patriarchal agendas, sanctuaries such as the writing rooms shared here provide spaces for critical thinking that facilitate the creation of women s narratives. Acknowledgments Thanks to Richard Holden, Julieanna Preston, and Mary Ann Steggles for discussions related to the development of this essay. Thanks also to Richard Holden for the use of his photograph. Notes 1 Rebecca Solnit, A Short History of Silence, in The Mother of All Questions (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. 3 Tim Cresswell, Introduction: Theorizing Place, in Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility, ed. Ginette Verstrate and Tim Cresswell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 6 Virginia Woolf cited in Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006), v. 7 See Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (Amsterdam: G B Arts International, 2001); Mieke Bal, Light Writing: Portraiture in a Post-Traumatic Age, The Photograph (special Issue) Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 27, no. 4 (2004): 1-19; and W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005) on reading images. 8 See Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) for a detailed discussion of cultural analysis. 9 See Clifford Geertz, Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973) for an analysis of the notion of thick description. 10 I am grateful to Julieanna Preston for her comment about the connection between thick description and Virginia Woolf s novel, The Waves. Personal communication, June Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), Giuliani Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), Penny Cousineau, Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination (Montreal: McGill-Queen s University Press, 2003), Mario Praz, quoted in Edward Hollis, The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors (London: Portobello Books, 2013), Solnit, History of Silence, Hollis, Memory Palace, Cresswell, Introduction: Theorizing Space, Solnit, History of Silence, Frances Spalding, Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2014), 150. Biography Dr. Susan Close is an Associate Professor in the Interior Design Department of the Faculty of Architecture and a Senior Fellow at St. John s College, both at the University of Manitoba. She received her doctoral degree from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Theory and Interpretation at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include photography and the built environment, gender, identity, visual culture, critical theory, and social activism and design. 52 JOURNAL OF INTERIOR DESIGN