On...A Room of One's Own

So this is how it usually works. I know I need to be writing. So I do everything else that I can think of: I clean the bathroom, hoover the living room, wrap tape around my hands and “de-fur” the sofa. I even take the trash to the tip. When I’ve exhausted all my excuses, I take myself off to my tiny office off the kitchen, find some inoffensive classical on the radio, and begin to write. I get up for Triscuits and coffee, but I write until I have a first draft…or taste…of something. When I’ve finished, I’m back in love with writing and I have a nice clean house.

But what to do now? I’ve moved in with my man into his wonderful restored 19th century flour mill—all open plan and reclaimed wood—and my rituals are useless here. He’s a neat-freak, so there is no accumulated crap to distract myself with. His couch is tabby-coloured, so there are no scads of fur that need my attention. And the city pick up the trash on Fridays. Plus, I can’t find a place to actually write. The available perches are beautiful: a huge breakfast bar, a Danish modern 10-seater table, recliners galore, but none are as antiseptic and “closed off” as my old little office with its table’s legs pasted with Ginsberg poems and its top covered in rejection slips. It’s not “a room of my own.”

So, what to do? Bose headphones? Go and retrieve my old table and set myself up in the store-room next-door? Get up 5:00am and face the wall?

I hadn’t realized how wonderfully selfish my old solo life was for writing and for the rituals that I surrounded it with. I’ll have to work out a new way forward, new rituals, a new way to move into the writing.