Season 3, 007: use a room in your current house or a former home to tell us a story of your values, your habits: where you've lived, what you've lived for...
Pretty blue wallpaper. How I loved it. And the clean white paintwork. I moved from a tiny room to the large room with views over the park. Lots of floor space, and my desk. Being quite studious it eventually took centre stage in the middle of the room, and I sat with my back to the window, which meant I was less easily distracted from my studies. I enjoyed my senior school years, and my favourite subject was biology. I can still see those drawings and diagrams of the different animal and plant species that formed the syllabus, and the natural world continues to be a great passion.
My ‘new’ bedroom had an open fireplace with black shiny ‘leadwork,’ and in the winter I would have a coal fire, topped up by my mum and dad. How they must have treasured me, an only child, whose younger sister died within twenty-four hours of birth. Only when my mum was spiralling downhill with dementia did I find out about my sister, and I went with mum to her GP to allow me to know the basic details of my sister’s way too short life.
Life wasn’t always wonderful but thinking about that room surfaces happy memories. Listening to the wind soughing in the Willow trees just beyond the fence. Pinning back the net curtains to allow the views of the park full rein. Completing homework and studying and the sense of satisfaction that brought me.
And then, leaving that room behind on a Saturday morning, walking out of the door with my about to be husband, and heading to the registry office and the start of a new life, the one that I am happily living now. Such clear, happy memories.
Oh Eileen, what a wonderfully warm and loving contribution from you as your first - and I hope not last - piece for our project here. Your bedroom fire topped up by your parents... how much love and care this speaks of, as you recognised, then and again now in the revisiting. I was always pierced by a detail in Vera Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth - do you know it? She came from a well-off family who were shocked by her determination to become a nurse following her beloved brother's death in the First World War. Her mother told the maids that no fire was to be lit in her daughter's room - with the hope that by making it physically hard for her daughter to study, Vera would give up or fail. How cold, how cruel. And how beautiful to read a story of the very opposite here from you.
And how wonderful to walk out from one loving home to another via the registry office.
Beautiful. I will be back again on Sunday or Monday with your link once I've curated your piece into the permanent project archive.
And thank you for being the first person to respond to this month's prompt!
Hello again Eileen - sorry for the delay in returning with your link to your piece in the story archive over on the book site. I'm three weeks in to battling vertigo and an infection - I think I'm doing better, then back into bed I go. Very hard to do screen work at the moment.
Here is the link to your gently beautiful story. I hope it will be the first of many you share with us...
Ah! This is why I run the project this way instead of only replying to comments here within substack (even though it increases the workload ten fold, more): it's because I agree that seeing our work published beyond us, by someone else, in a different format than the one we created it in... this is a big part of experiencing how it is to be a published writer instead of a private note-maker. I like to think this is a safe platform for testing this out. Occasionally people find they're not ready after all for how it feels to have their work 'out there'. But even that is still a useful experience I can offer them! xx
It took me six months to acclimatise to the dark. As my circadian rhythm performed its nightly imbalance I’d blink, trying to break through the pitch.
Waking up in the night started long before we moved here, when I was pregnant. ‘It will take you a year’ had actually only taken one half-hearted attempt. Surprise turned surprisingly quickly to dread.
The generous time estimate had been my buffer. One year to cement my fledgling career enough to come back to it. One year to make sure Tom was father material. One year to grow up.
My breasts swelled and insomnia became the third figure in our London bed. A silent and cumbersome guest as the city barged past the window. Otherwise paralysed, my eyes would track the car headlights that blanched the ceiling, intermittently breaking up the street lamps until it all faded into the dawn.
In my fifth month, during a rare unconscious moment, I dreamt that I was trying to win a horse race astride a dachshund. The tiny dog, sweating and exhausted, couldn't reach the finish line. I woke up to an unsettling sticky warmth between my legs.
A scan confirmed the miscarriage. In the amber nights that followed, resentment and doubt morphed into a turgid wrestle between relief and guilt. It took several months to deal with everything, and then we limped northwards towards the reassuring embrace of wild air, peace. A Fresh Start.
Like a dog with a rag, insomnia held my scent and followed us up the road.
In the seventh month Tom bought a clock radio. Then the neon glow of the numbers cast a ghostly sheen through the water glass, etching an outline of the duvet.
Catharine... what a powerful first piece from you, giving such a compelling sense of those distortions of time and space and dreaming that happen during pregnancy. And then the way you manage - in so few lines - to convey the 'turgid wrestle' of emotions after your miscarriage. You've given me such an embodied sense of that time, that place. It leaves me with the same lasting impression as Plath's Parliament Hill Fields (which she wrote after miscarriage, as you may know).
I will be back here again on Sunday or Monday with a link to your piece once I've curated it in the permanent story archive over on my book's website. But I wanted to be in touch already to thank you for joining us as a writer here, and to give you my immediate reaction as a reader.
Thank you Tanya and Faye for your warm encouragement, I'm very grateful for it. I've been building up to making a contribution here for some time. When I fell pregnant (almost three years ago now) and overnight found myself staring into a future that threatened my entire career and identity, both of which I held very close, I had a vivid epiphany that the way I'd been spending my time to date amounted to nothing anyway: I should be writing. I don't remember exactly how I came across a piece about 'Wild Woman Swimming', but it coincided almost to the day with this thunderbolt. I can't tell you how enlivening (and to be perfectly honest, earth-shattering) it was to learn about your own journey into writing, and to read of your revelation that so closely mirrored my own - albeit with a very different inciting incident. What I'd interpreted miserably as wasted time was reframed as bursting with potential, and so I am very grateful to you for this as well. Your generosity in sharing your own experience made a profound impact here. I haven't read Parliament Hill Fields, but I shall. I admire her writing very much. Like Joan Didion, so direct and unafraid with her language. Very best wishes, Catharine x
I'm so very moved to think that the work I did with/for Wild Woman Swimming (the extraordinary Lynne Roper) was of use to you. It was an unrepeatable time in my life - as with each of my projects. The scrolls, Lynne's book, my own: I could never do anything like them ever again - but they yield me lasting quiet pride as well as these connections with you and others, which means the world to me. Thank you.
Here is a link to your fine piece, now that I've curated it. I do hope you will write for more of the prompts in the project - I will enjoy seeing how your mind/prose style responds to them.
Thankyou for your kind words Tanya. My first contribution and also first writing about self. My passion is nature writing - or attempting to! I don't know Vera Brittain's memoir, and the piece about not lighting a fire is sad and horrific . Thanks for sharing it Eileen
This theme resonates well. I have spent the past eight months living in 5 different homes as I wander and wonder in the Centralian Desert. And I have come to know this: no matter the physicality of a place, no matter the condition, location, size, or grandeur of a home, I make it my own. This typically involves all things sensory – a bedroom with light, living plants, fresh inviting bed linen; a kitchen with enough things to create and nourish my body and soul; an altar – light from a window, candles, incense, flowers, stones, feathers and other found objects that have significance; all is swept, dusted, and cleaned with photos of my own ones on the walls. Oh, and my stove top coffee pot and cup accompany me unfailingly, everywhere.
I have a recent history of moving about. I have lived in apartments and villas in Italy, a pokey flat in Scotland, a caravan in Switzerland, a camper van in Australia, a tent in Ireland, other folks’ homes, my own house. I have lived alone and also shared space – with a lover, with strangers. And in every one of those abodes, I have felt at home. My home is where I am - and my most comfortable place is within me. That is the room that will tell you of my habits, my values, my reasons for living, my why. From there I describe the scenes and routines that give meaning to my every-day.
Every morning has a ritual – independent of place: tea first, journal writing, a series of stretches to meaningful music, breakfast, and coffee. I take note of the birdsong, thank them. My soul needs this to set the rhythm for the day, to wind up my energy and move outward towards the things that I live for. I live for adventure, connecting with people in moments to be remembered and cherished. Without people in my home, in my room, there is no value, no context, no relativity, nothing from which to reflect.
Maurni! How happy I was to see your name in my notifications for this prompt, as I guessed it would - as your two previous pieces did - be sending a delicious warm draught of life from afar my way in a week that is cold and confined here on the Sussex Downs.
And so it is. And I realise that even though I love the cultural richness and expansion of your work, given the languages you speak, the countries you have travelled to (so in contrast to my life), I would also quite happily read pages and pages by you just describing the making of coffee, the movements of you in a room. What I love in Knausgaard's work (even though much of his My Struggle project infuriates me!), what I love in Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry: writers how can impart interest to the everyday - give it colour and rhythm.
Thank you for being part of what we're doing here. Your link below:
And you have made my day with such a reply! Thank you so much Tanya - it is once again hugely motivating to have your feedback and interest. Your generosity is greatly appreciated at this end. With temperatures climbing to a steady 37 every day, I envy a little your location...but I do love the sunlight here. Funny you should mention the coffee making - I was tempted to write a piece on that for your prompt on impossible objects. My pot follows me wherever I go, an evocation of Italy in the morning, with every brew.
I love this Maurni - it’s so beautifully written and I can so relate to it. I once gave up my flat to travel and lived in tents etc and felt like you, that my home was where I was. I search for that feeling now. Love your piece a lot!
Ah! Too kind you are. Thanks for your comment Helen .. it is so lovely to be sharing some words finally, thanks to Tanya’s platform.
I hope you get to wander again one day, and that in the mean time you can hunker down within your own space and dream of where you might find your future self.
I will return “home” after Christmas and then ... start to wonder of my next wander. We wander with our words
On the 3rd floor of my childhood home, a walk-in attic with a wooden door opened to the cedar-lined room with slanted ceilings. The scent of cedar was grounding and soothing as it wafted from the rafters. It was a hidden room I would return to at least once a week for over 20 years.
The attic was like an old pressure cooker with over-done things. It was filled with treasures: my father’s sailor suit, my mother’s bridal gown, and honeymoon negligees. Cummerbunds, bowties, and overcoats. Lacy veils and crowns. Leopard skins from my father’s Bass drum, highland kilts, and argyle jackets. Remnants of childhood memories: costumes, leather ballet slippers, pink tutus, tap shoes, communion dresses, ice skates, wool sweaters, and mittens. Handmade blankets, crocheted tablecloths, and linens. Stacks of books, old magazines, and photos lingered.
It was a magical place of reverie, a quiet, secluded space where I could hide. I had complete privacy to contemplate whatever idea was percolating in my head. I cherished this solitude with all my heart.
What drew me to this room was my father’s United States Navy Medical Manual of Injuries and Diseases of War. My father was a Field Medic in the Navy. I would climb three flights of stairs to look at this manual of horrific war wounds and amputations, peeking with one eye, to scare myself by viewing these gruesome pictures. I would return to this room, sitting on the floor for hours, leafing through the pages of this book.
In this attic of dissociation, I witnessed horrendous physical injuries that provided comfort as a distraction from family tension. My mother was intrusive and physically abusive. The adrenaline charge of this repetitive behavior was stored in the trauma of bodily memories held in this room.
Anne... what a compelling piece. You've created such a concentrate of that time and place - made all the more disquieting once we reach the end and understand that the long span of time you spent there, being comforted by the objects and that book full of horrors, was because of a need to escape from what was happening down below. And there is a deep truth you've shed light on here that is true of you but many others of us who did not feel safe around an adult who raised us: because we cannot escape the place, we find strangely creative ways of containing or shrinking that difficulty - my equivalent to your absorption in those pictures of amputation was a nightly meditation on the coming of nuclear war: what I would pack, what I would loot, where I would run to. It was only in my forties, a mother myself of children who have never been mistreated and who have rarely had a nightmare, that I could really see and feel how sad it was that this was my nightly self-soothing ritual.
Thank you for joining the project and I hope you will continue to respond to themes in the three-season archive.
Tanya, Thank you for your feedback and sharing your nightly self-soothing ritual. Amazing how we try to comfort ourselves by increasing adrenaline to distract from overwhelming early trauma. ❤️
Indeed. This last year - around the unavoidable stress and heartache of helping my mum to end of life - I have in every other way sought to learn to live a quieter life, minus of difficulty and drama. I realised after the compulsive nature of my attachment to my 'Other Love' (as described in the book) and then a female friendship that didn't sustain after that, that I have always had at least one hard-to-understand friendship at the heart of my life: one where I've had to work and work to earn my place in their lives, quite differently to the measure and equality in all my other friendships. It was a real watershed moment to understand that drama, difficulty, and all the adrenalin that goes with that is my earliest form of feeling - a familiar state, but not a good one. And so now I'm learning to live a far gentler more measured life. No fierce attachments!
Interesting, I am unwinding from a similar friendship that has the fierce attachment style you mentioned along with the drama and adrenaline. Thank you for showing how this familiar state weaves through our lives and pops up in other intense relationships! Happy you are finding a more gentler way of being the the world! Especially after opening to such vulnerability in your mothers end of life vigil!❤️
It's helped me to see it not as the other's 'fault', or some failure in me to keep them in my life. It was me being drawn to what in them was troubled or hard to read, as that uncertainty is what I'm most familiar with. I'm learning that the people I'm less immediately drawn to are turning out to be better and more durable fits - for me and for them!
My son's room is bright yellow. The shade 'Tibetan Gold' - actually he dreamed of a golden room but that felt like an impossibility. Yellow walls and yellow floor, in the morning, the sunshine streams across the floor creating welcoming joyful patterns.
The lights are yellow too. The dedication and desperation for sleep means we go to bed always in a glow of yellow, orange and red. No blue light allowed except of course the glare of the fought over phone. Single bed covered in cuddly toys, a weighted blanket, books, Lego. All the trappings of a cosy, homely room for a joyous boy. But a bed and a room shunned and unslept in.
Seven years of this boy sleeping by my side. Refusing to budge despite the chosen yellow room. Seven years of feet kicking into me, teeth grinding next to me, continuously fighting off sleep. Of tears and exhaustion, of closeness and of love. I wonder how it would be to sleep languorously every night in my own bed? A grown up once more, master of my own domain, the possibility of new love. How it would be to have a child who slept alone?
When will the time come that we are both able to put the tumult and terror of your arrival finally to bed? That we are both safe and secure enough and no hidden fear lingers in the darkness to tease us, just gentle all-embracing night and peace.
I crave the space, the time for me, the possibility of a life opened up once more and yet your closeness in the night gives me comfort. To know that you are alive and well, my anchor through the storm. Who knew that mothering would be such paradox, would be like this? Certainly not I.
Thank you so much for joining the project, and with this powerful piece. I admire how you convey the literal tug of love that happens in your nights with your son: the yearning for it to end, entangled with an understanding that this time will pass and that the freedom it leaves you with will also be complex.
The way you use light is compelling - and it makes me think of books like Kate Zambreno's Light Room (a memoir set in pandemic, when she was working and mothering while confined to close quarters) and - from an earlier era - Yukio Tshusima's extraordinary and unsettling I-novels Territory of Light and Woman Running in the Mountains. Do you know Tshushima's work - if you don't and you give it a try, I'd love to know how you find it...
Here is your link to your piece in the story archive, and I hope you will write for other themes in the three-season archive. I love watching how each writer's sensibility approaches each prompt...
Hi Tanya, thank you so much for your considered response. It feels exciting to finally be writing out in the world. I haven't read any of those novels and am looking forward to exploring them. I will definitely be writing more.
I love to have made this space where that excitement of first publication can happen in a safe way! And very glad you've joined us here. More please! xx
A yew tree grew in the garden of the house where I was born. Needled, bitter green, studded acid red with berries tempting as fruit. Some remnant of Victorian planting, incongruous in our moss green northern valley of Beech and Oak.
I’d climb, high into its wide embrace, of sun dapple, skin shadow, branch, twig and scented bark. Beneath the tree, slippery flagstones, slimed with fallen berries and the leaf matter of years.
The tree loomed high above valley slopes so precipitous I felt, if I only ran fast enough, I could leap from our side to the other, high over the river, the stony fields, and weaving walls, to where sheep grazed on ridges grooved horizontally into the sloping earth.
I knew my way down to the river pool; the damp home smell of lime plaster, and scorched tang of the electric fire. Knew, when the sheep began to bleat incessantly in summer, that their babies had been taken. I wondered, when they stopped, whether they had forgotten.
I was eight when we left. To brick cul de sacs, borrowed army furniture. Straight privet hedges and neat flat lawns. The smell of hot tarmac made soft by a southern sun.
I returned only once. Walking down the steep track from the Shap Road, where my parents once cleaved a path through deep snowdrift, my new sister in a carrycot on my father’s shoulders. Down the ridged valley, past the river pool, where in summer we swam naked in clear water, emerging, dripping, at dusk.
The Yew tree was gone, leaving only a raw wound of naked wood, ringed with stone. The house had the vulnerable, naked look of a newly shorn sheep without the dark old tree centring it, and the flagstones were dry and clean.
Sally... what an exceptional piece of short form place writing this is. It makes me feel you must already be published in other places - and if so, I'd love to have links to more work by you. It has the kind of quality I respond to in Ted Hughes' writing about the physical and psychological shock to his system when his family left the valley bottom of Mytholmroyd for a shop-keeping life in the industrial town of Mexborough when he was 7 or 8 - do you know his writing on this? I've just gone downstairs to find which book of his it's in, in case you don't... and I can't seem to find it. Perhaps it's in Poetry in the Making. How - even though he developed a rich life in the fields beyond Mexborough - those first 7 years and the view of the big hill opposite his first home remained fixed in memory...
And I'm reminded too of Plath's truly luminous essay about her seaside childhood, Ocean 1212W (the only prose of hers I really enjoyed).
Yes, this by you makes me hope you will write for many other themes in the three-season archive. I will enjoy seeing what you make of them.
What a gorgeous piece of prose. There is so much sensory detail and it brings this piece alive for me. I love the contrast between the sensuality of your young life, then the "...brick cul de sacs ... Straight privet hedges and neat flat lawns." You've expertly conveyed the effect on the child of this harsh shift from a natural, sensual place to a more sterile one. There are so many good lines and phrases, but I'll just choose one that jumped out at me: " The house had the vulnerable, naked look of a newly shorn sheep ..." That's a great line.
Thank you so much for your response. This is the first piece of writing I've put out into the world. I took my daughter to see you interview the wonderful Natasha Carthew at the Bath Literature festival a few months ago. I was really inspired by your own story and the archive of writing you are building. You gave me the confidence to submit something.
I started writing as an unexpected aspect of my ongoing practice based PhD research into Ceramic and Print processes and what potential they have to extend our understanding of landscape. Writing about landscape and place was never intended to be part of my research but has increasingly become an integral part and something I want to continue and develop.
So thank you for the recommendations. I have searched out my very old copy of Poetry in the Making... I was given this book, age 11, as the school poetry prize in July 1988, so a lovely feeling of circularity. I will try and find the piece you mention by Sylvia Plath.
Thank you again. I feel very excited to be part of this.
How wonderful to think we were in the same room back in May, and that some of what I said then has been of use to you since. And it's even more exciting to be receiving your stories and thoughts in turn now. I really did respond to your piece as I do ones from others here who are already published. It's often so difficult for PhDs and academics to write literary prose, direct from experience - so many of my mentees are struggling with that - and so it's a rare and wonderful thing to encounter someone who hasn't been tied up in knots by it.
Really do look forward to receiving more pieces from you when you have time/interest.
I live always in a room full of intentions. This might be a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, or the room I am writing in now.
The room I am in now has long shelves on two walls. Another wall has a long desk; the last wall is door and window.
On the shelves are books and file boxes. That makes the space sound neat. It’s not neat. Closest to me, on the desk, are the things I should be doing, should be replying to, should be responding creatively to. Books, pamphlets, postcards that interested me, that sparked something. But gradually they become covered in other things, and become forgotten.
Occasionally, I have a burst of tidying, but as I tidy – shelve books in the right place, put the cards with the other unsent cards, put the lists with all the other lists – the set of circumstances that made those things interesting is disturbed, dissolved by the end of their proximity.
Shelving the books is what you are meant to do, to put the poetry ones in alphabetical order, anthologies at the start; to separate out the non-fiction into “nature”, “walking”, “mythology”. But once on the shelf they become just another book, another reminder that I was interested in something, then forgot about it.
So as I sit here typing, I have all this at my back. It could feel like a library of possibilities, but at this point in the season – my life season, the year’s season – it feels like everything I didn’t do, all the things I began and let fall.
Saying this out loud, in this space, I know that I’m not alone. To have intentions, but not the time; to dream, but not know how to begin. I live in a room full of intentions: now to act.
My brother left home and my parents took his bedroom for its panoramic view over the city to the sea. I got their room. Huge and luxurious with a white carpet, an electric wall fire and gigantic windows that opened quietly onto the garden.
It was the early seventies. I was twelve but aspirational and they indulged me. Mandarin coloured ceiling, white space-age-eyeball spotlights (with dimmer switch!) and a built-in, Formica desk. With my brother’s bed repurposed as a settee, and mum’s dressing table turned into a music centre, my new space was less bedroom, more bedsitter. I absolutely adored it. Which was fortunate because then I caught glandular fever and was forced to isolate for three months.
The view of the garden sustained me through the difficult and debilitating illness. Two giant trees and a trapeze waited patiently. The doves cooed sympathetically.
The picture I pinned above the wall-fire was less bucolic. Not Donny Osmond or David Cassidy but a caveman clutching a spanner atop a pile of burning ruins. I wanted to stare at the apocalypse and listen to dissonant music. Again and again.
For me, what you look at in a room and what you observe outside must constantly change. Traffic, birds, trees, people are always on the move therefore ornaments, books, pictures should shift and mutate too. As a small child I would spend a Saturday rearranging toys, and still, when sad, I like to do a rehang or curate shelves.
We’re living in limbo in an Air BNB at the moment, waiting to start a new life in a bungalow with a view. I cannot change anything in this tiny holiday let, although I would like to. My space is restricted. My imagination isn’t.
'I was twelve but aspirational and they indulged me' - love this (and all what follows): feels like the start of a novel or the narration from a Wes Anderson film...
Then there's that lovely bit of authorial statement 'For me, what you look at in a room...' It's always exciting for me here when contributors find a way within the necessary word constraints to mix description, reflection, direct statement.
My first bedroom was a tiny box room at the front of a suburban new build semi- detached house with a yellow door. The 80’s dream. It overlooked a manicured world of flowers and neatness, bookended by a newly built garden wall. Pink flowery walls with matching curtains and duvet. John Lewis don’t you know. Handmade by my mother in between the nightly arguments. Unsettled, sleepless evenings listening to endless circular, repetitive rows in my tiny room, I loved that it was mine. Safe, cocooned. It didn’t last.
When we had to move out, leaving my Dad broken into pieces on the green sofa, it was into a soulless rented flat with cream wood chip walls and shared bunk beds with my sister. No room of mine. No pink. Weekends back and for between my parents, my childhood room was no longer safe. Empty, one parent, sad and broken.
I moved back with my Dad for a while for school. He re-decorated the box room with thick pink candy stripes and it was mine again, but only in the week. Not forever. Back and forth, pillar to post, sharing bunk beds with step- siblings we barely knew, to my mothers in an adjacent town.
I lost my virginity in the pink candy box room one fumbling afternoon when my Dad was at work. Doing things with my boyfriend too young in my tiny childhood room, I searched for a home in him.
My Dad remarried and I was shunted to another pink box room in another suburban semi with my mother and stepfather. Smoking in that pink room with the lead windows open in defiance, playing angry protest songs, it was never mine.
I still often choose pink for my bedroom, for duvets and curtains. Still searching for a home that never was.
I'm amazed at how you tell a story that spans such a length of time (as @MaurniOBeirne said) -- you tell the story of your childhood in so few words, and all through the motif of pink walls, pink rooms. I love "... leaving my Dad broken into pieces on the green sofa ..." and "...one fumbling afternoon...", to name just a couple of the gems in this piece.
I can see why others here in the community have been in touch after reading your piece. I've just felt the day shift around me, as it does when we read something that so precisely conjures up time & place... and also time, place, passing. What is lost, what we search for. You've done something hard and rare here, I feel - given a huge sense of what you had, what you lost, what you still search for - in so few words.
This clause in particular is quietly heartrending: '...I searched for a home in him.' I always had a serious boyfriend on the go from the age of twelve onwards - the boys' homes and people more important to me than the boys themselves. The gran of the boy I was with at 15 was still sending me birthday cards well into my early forties!
Thank you so much for sharing this piece into the collection. Here is your link:
Thankyou Tanya as always for your thoughtful and supportive feedback. It’s so interesting looking back at those early relationships being an adult now & reflecting on what they meant at the time. And for me what I was, and still am, searching for! As ever, this writing project is fascinating for what comes up and for me, finding ways in writing to express these themes! Xx
The photograph of me in bed, reading my Garfield book, just my face & hands peeping out of the deliberately arranged Marks and Spencer rosebud covers. My father must have tucked me up and taken the photograph, when he was visiting one weekend, when there was still tenderness.
Arranging the bedding just so, so nothing that wasn’t rosebuds could be seen in the photo. The whole room in fact, decorated to within an inch of its life in that rosebud theme – printed wallpaper, pillowcases, counterpane – even a clock, a jug, a china bunny with a hole for cotton balls to be its continuously available tail. I tried so hard to make it look like the adverts, what it should be.
The house suited the antiques favoured by my mother and stepfather. Amongst the relentless rosebuds of my bedroom was mahogany freestanding furniture and my bed. When mess threatened to overwhelm, I’d blitz it back to precise tidiness. I’d often move my furniture around to see if, finally, could this configuration be the one in which I could maintain order?
I moved my room around so frequently that eventually a leg broke from my bed. I removed the other three to create a mutated bed that wasn’t like anything my friends had. But this time, from the shame yet again of my bed, my room, my life not being what it should be, I started to try on how it might feel to actively choose something different.
How lovely to have you return with a second piece for the project, Becs.
You've made it so that I can see and feel your childhood room so clearly - and feel too how it was to be that girl whose life wasn't matching the advertised-version of what our teens are supposed to be.
'My father must have tucked me up and taken the photograph, when he was visiting one weekend, when there was still tenderness' - how moving that line is, but also - from a craft perspective - how accomplished. Those final two clauses a sort of untucking, so that we feel the warmth of the bed, your father... and then immediately share your loss of it.
And it's a strange sort of soul company I'm getting from your piece and Helen Louise's - all three of us using the placing and replacing of furniture, fixtures and fittings as a way to feel some control over our lives, even while the adults around us made changes we couldn't influence.
Thank you for sharing this piece for the collection.
Thank you so much for your response and for understanding exactly what underpinned this piece - and much of my life!! It's appreciated very much. Sending you a lot of love. Bxx
There are two resident cats with their multiple cat beds, cat tree, overstuffed toybox, water fountain, tipi. Their private toilet area is marked off by a handsome, dark wooden screen topped by a wooden sign that reads: “Toilette des chats.” (Somehow the French comes off as more regal than the English.) My boys Emmet and Onslow owe their names to characters from a British comedy, Keeping Up Appearances—the shenanigans of would-be social climber Hyacinth Bucket, and her relationships with neighbors (Emmet) and family (brother-in-law Onslow) inspires laughs a-plenty. These resident felines, though, are not the only nod to the United Kingdom here in this space.
There is the red ergonomic desk chair and the red book cabinet with glass-paneled doors, and the electric tea kettle. These call to mind the buses journeying along London streets, and the iconic phone booths which have now turned into coffee stations and little libraries.
Hanging over my writing desk:
Three woodblock prints of the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Swimming Pond. I’ve swum in its frigid waters only once, but the experience has stayed with me, and I aim to submerse my body again when I get the chance.
A print of a beloved grove of trees on Hampstead Heath that an artist rendered based on one of my photographs.
A photo I snapped of Oxford’s Christchurch Meadow during my brief time as a student in the city of spires. The meadow green, the sun shining as cattle munch or lay partially hidden in the vegetation, and all those hallowed stone buildings peeking above the trees.
An inspiration board peopled by 20 artists, thinkers, and writers, half of whom are British.
Go to my bookshelves and you’ll find Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and C.S. Lewis. Agatha Christie. And countless other volumes snatched up during my UK travels which pushed my suitcase well over the weight limit.
There’s usually a sleeve of digestive biscuits or Hobnobs in the pantry, and Cornish tea bags in the jar next to the aforementioned kettle.
Less tangible is the subscription to BritBox that allows me to stream British TV classics like Mr Humphries and Mrs Slocombe on Are You Being Served? and of course dear old Hyacinth.
And many more touches of Blighty besides.
Why?
One definition of kingdom is ‘a basic group of natural objects’ such as minerals or plants. These things I’ve mentioned might not be natural objects, but they are a collection of items that have their origins in a common place and they have a singular purpose: they constitute my own personal kingdom within these four walls here in the U.S., which makes me less heart sick for the Kingdom where I feel most at home.
I hung on every word, each detail of this, Amy. So beautiful to get this still-deeper sense of your home and what matters to you. I've never encountered it articulated before so clearly either - this sense some of us have (myself included) that I am supposed to be in a place where I've never yet lived before. In my case, it's Japan and the Swiss Alps: both only reached for three weeks a piece in 2017 and 2018. Yet all my life they've felt so central to my identity and values. And when I was there - for all I couldn't speak the language or lay claim to any ancestry in either of them: a feeling that even as complete outsider, socially disconnected, I could still feel at home there, however anonymous and friendless I might remain. I think your connections to the UK have a lot more foundation than mine for those places, but I love how you show that we can be in more than one place/culture at once.
Have you ever eaten Devon clotted cream or Cornish saffron buns? If we ever do get to meet over here, it will be my pleasure to buy the first for you to serve with the buns, which I will make! And if I ever travel to you... I will make room in my bag for the biscuits of your choice!
Always lovely to get a new piece through from you, one of our founding members here... here is your link:
Dear Tanya, thank you for your lovely response--its given me such a lift. I remember yearning to reach England/UK, for so many years, and when I finally landed there in 2012 it was every bit as magical and beautiful and ‘homely’ as I’d imagined it. Was it the same experience for you re: Japan and the Alps? For me there was such a sense of ‘rightness’ about it.
I am a huge fan of clotted cream in general, and have been known to eat it by the spoonful in whatever flat I happen to renting whilst across the pond, though I have not had the pleasure of Cornish saffron buns--my mouth is now watering with the thought.
My last trip to the UK was in 2019, just before COVID struck. I stationed myself in Hay-on-Wye, the town of books, for part of it; the rest of the time I was in London. I’m regrouping now and planning a somewhat epic trip for hopefully the upcoming year--some time in Italy and then England. It would be so wonderful to finally meet you if it works for us both .
Catharine, There's so much in this piece to commend. It tells a story so succinctly, and then there are phrases and lines that really stick with me, e.g.: " ... the car headlights that blanched the ceiling...", "The tiny dog, sweating and exhausted, couldn't reach the finish line", and "... the neon glow of the numbers cast a ghostly sheen through the water glass..." Really lovely and powerfully evocative writing.
On Valentine’s Day, they went to the Italian deli in Mount Storm to buy salami and cheese, baguettes, olives, and red wine. They bought cheesecake slices or a French tart with caramelized pears. They laid all of this out on their coffee table, a few feet from the TV, and sat on the floor, their legs extended under the table. They poured wine into each other’s thick, stumpy water glasses, and watched a movie they’d rented from the library. His long, black, wavy hair was pulled back in a pony tail. Her hair was pixie short and brown. She looked younger than 26. She had put on weight in the past few years, often saying, “Love makes me fat.” She did love him, but she needed to leave.
She knew this for years, but the orange lamp kept drawing her back. Who would keep it? He had bought it for her last Christmas, a wrought-iron base with an orange lampshade. It balanced perfectly in a little scene on the north side of their living room. Next to it was his favourite antique chair, with crimson velvet upholstery on the seat, tattered at the corners, and thick, sturdy arms and legs. There was an oak end table and a framed abstract print of a cyclist in France, in shades of peach, blue and black. The whole scene was perfect. It calmed her to look at it on an anxious day. Who would keep the lamp?
She wrote this all down in the noisy, dim lunch room at work. Outside it was snowing. Giving up their life felt like too much to bear during those cold winter months. They should be buried together in their house under feet of snow. They should be cuddling, huddling under their goose-down duvet.
What a tender scene from a relationship nearing its end... it has the sort of loving-while-leaving detail and perspective I admire in Ray Carver's work. And I enjoy it when regular writers for the project work in a variety of tenses across their pieces - three years in and I'm still being surprised by how much you and others do with the 300-word brief!
Thanks for all your comments Tanya. I really appreciate the wonderful space you've created here and am so glad I finally decided to join in with writing. It hadn't even occurred to me that this piece was in third person -- I originally wrote it, a year or so ago, in first person, then tried it in second and third, and found third was the one I preferred. I guess it helped me get a bit of distance from the scene and be a bit more objective. The 300 words is such a challenge, but I think it helps me to remove what's not necessary and get to the meat of subjects -- so thank you!
This is a tale of two kitchens. The first, from my childhood, is vast, like the nave of a church, and airy. It has enormous sash windows, impossibly high ceilings, thick stone walls. It has, everyone agrees, huge potential. They say this instead of saying that it is dank, filthy and cold.
My father spends hours explaining to the few audiences he can muster all the difficulties involved with renovating the kitchen. The difficulties are many, so we must make do. Mildew on the walls, mouse droppings in the butter, the oven door propped shut with an angled pole. Cupboards hold long-expired packets with long-hardened contents. Only one hob ring works. My father buys the cheapest bread and calculates its cost per slice. He does not need to do this.
This is the room where, once, my father flung open a window and hurled the Sunday joint across the garden, its arcing bascule in stark contrast to our frozen horror within. It is the room where he taught me to waltz, my girlish feet balanced carefully upon his slippered ones. It is the room where, one winter’s night, my mother, cooking in coat, hat and gloves, finally decided that enough was enough.
My kitchen today is bright with rows of small round lights. We have five hob plates of varying sizes, two ovens, a multitude of tools and contraptions, nearly all of which we use. Oils and vinegars and herbs crowd onto surfaces. The fridge is full of colour. Even the floor is heated. Am I compensating, I wonder? Probably, I decide. And? Here we host, talk, laugh and argue (though neither of us has ever thrown a roast). Here I define myself by what I no longer am. Here I define myself by love.
Tania, how good to have you join us here as a writer for the project. Thank you. I love how you've structured this piece with the then and the now. And there's a novelistic quality to it - feel like I'm at the start of a longer story, even while it works as a complete piece. It feels like a lot of stories could be told out of and through that vast childhood kitchen, I mean.
Here is your link, and I hope that you'll be tempted to try other themes in the archive:
Thank you so much, Tanya. I’ve been thinking about contributing for ages but hadn’t been able to get up the courage before now. I really appreciate your welcome and look forward to being brave a little more often in the future!
Ah! Glad to think I and others here might be reading more from you. And that's exactly why I made this space - a place for testing out how it feels to share work/words. xx
A room in the house where once I lived
Pretty blue wallpaper. How I loved it. And the clean white paintwork. I moved from a tiny room to the large room with views over the park. Lots of floor space, and my desk. Being quite studious it eventually took centre stage in the middle of the room, and I sat with my back to the window, which meant I was less easily distracted from my studies. I enjoyed my senior school years, and my favourite subject was biology. I can still see those drawings and diagrams of the different animal and plant species that formed the syllabus, and the natural world continues to be a great passion.
My ‘new’ bedroom had an open fireplace with black shiny ‘leadwork,’ and in the winter I would have a coal fire, topped up by my mum and dad. How they must have treasured me, an only child, whose younger sister died within twenty-four hours of birth. Only when my mum was spiralling downhill with dementia did I find out about my sister, and I went with mum to her GP to allow me to know the basic details of my sister’s way too short life.
Life wasn’t always wonderful but thinking about that room surfaces happy memories. Listening to the wind soughing in the Willow trees just beyond the fence. Pinning back the net curtains to allow the views of the park full rein. Completing homework and studying and the sense of satisfaction that brought me.
And then, leaving that room behind on a Saturday morning, walking out of the door with my about to be husband, and heading to the registry office and the start of a new life, the one that I am happily living now. Such clear, happy memories.
Eileen Anderson
Oh Eileen, what a wonderfully warm and loving contribution from you as your first - and I hope not last - piece for our project here. Your bedroom fire topped up by your parents... how much love and care this speaks of, as you recognised, then and again now in the revisiting. I was always pierced by a detail in Vera Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth - do you know it? She came from a well-off family who were shocked by her determination to become a nurse following her beloved brother's death in the First World War. Her mother told the maids that no fire was to be lit in her daughter's room - with the hope that by making it physically hard for her daughter to study, Vera would give up or fail. How cold, how cruel. And how beautiful to read a story of the very opposite here from you.
And how wonderful to walk out from one loving home to another via the registry office.
Beautiful. I will be back again on Sunday or Monday with your link once I've curated your piece into the permanent project archive.
And thank you for being the first person to respond to this month's prompt!
Tanya xx
Hello again Eileen - sorry for the delay in returning with your link to your piece in the story archive over on the book site. I'm three weeks in to battling vertigo and an infection - I think I'm doing better, then back into bed I go. Very hard to do screen work at the moment.
Here is the link to your gently beautiful story. I hope it will be the first of many you share with us...
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#eileenanderson
Txx
Hello Tanya. Thankyou for the link through - I can't quite believe it is my writing. I love how the layout looks!
I hope you feel much better very soon - take care of yourself X Eileen
Ah! This is why I run the project this way instead of only replying to comments here within substack (even though it increases the workload ten fold, more): it's because I agree that seeing our work published beyond us, by someone else, in a different format than the one we created it in... this is a big part of experiencing how it is to be a published writer instead of a private note-maker. I like to think this is a safe platform for testing this out. Occasionally people find they're not ready after all for how it feels to have their work 'out there'. But even that is still a useful experience I can offer them! xx
It took me six months to acclimatise to the dark. As my circadian rhythm performed its nightly imbalance I’d blink, trying to break through the pitch.
Waking up in the night started long before we moved here, when I was pregnant. ‘It will take you a year’ had actually only taken one half-hearted attempt. Surprise turned surprisingly quickly to dread.
The generous time estimate had been my buffer. One year to cement my fledgling career enough to come back to it. One year to make sure Tom was father material. One year to grow up.
My breasts swelled and insomnia became the third figure in our London bed. A silent and cumbersome guest as the city barged past the window. Otherwise paralysed, my eyes would track the car headlights that blanched the ceiling, intermittently breaking up the street lamps until it all faded into the dawn.
In my fifth month, during a rare unconscious moment, I dreamt that I was trying to win a horse race astride a dachshund. The tiny dog, sweating and exhausted, couldn't reach the finish line. I woke up to an unsettling sticky warmth between my legs.
A scan confirmed the miscarriage. In the amber nights that followed, resentment and doubt morphed into a turgid wrestle between relief and guilt. It took several months to deal with everything, and then we limped northwards towards the reassuring embrace of wild air, peace. A Fresh Start.
Like a dog with a rag, insomnia held my scent and followed us up the road.
In the seventh month Tom bought a clock radio. Then the neon glow of the numbers cast a ghostly sheen through the water glass, etching an outline of the duvet.
CG.
I love your writing Catherine- I’m eager to read more!
Catharine... what a powerful first piece from you, giving such a compelling sense of those distortions of time and space and dreaming that happen during pregnancy. And then the way you manage - in so few lines - to convey the 'turgid wrestle' of emotions after your miscarriage. You've given me such an embodied sense of that time, that place. It leaves me with the same lasting impression as Plath's Parliament Hill Fields (which she wrote after miscarriage, as you may know).
I will be back here again on Sunday or Monday with a link to your piece once I've curated it in the permanent story archive over on my book's website. But I wanted to be in touch already to thank you for joining us as a writer here, and to give you my immediate reaction as a reader.
Tanya xx
Thank you Tanya and Faye for your warm encouragement, I'm very grateful for it. I've been building up to making a contribution here for some time. When I fell pregnant (almost three years ago now) and overnight found myself staring into a future that threatened my entire career and identity, both of which I held very close, I had a vivid epiphany that the way I'd been spending my time to date amounted to nothing anyway: I should be writing. I don't remember exactly how I came across a piece about 'Wild Woman Swimming', but it coincided almost to the day with this thunderbolt. I can't tell you how enlivening (and to be perfectly honest, earth-shattering) it was to learn about your own journey into writing, and to read of your revelation that so closely mirrored my own - albeit with a very different inciting incident. What I'd interpreted miserably as wasted time was reframed as bursting with potential, and so I am very grateful to you for this as well. Your generosity in sharing your own experience made a profound impact here. I haven't read Parliament Hill Fields, but I shall. I admire her writing very much. Like Joan Didion, so direct and unafraid with her language. Very best wishes, Catharine x
I'm so very moved to think that the work I did with/for Wild Woman Swimming (the extraordinary Lynne Roper) was of use to you. It was an unrepeatable time in my life - as with each of my projects. The scrolls, Lynne's book, my own: I could never do anything like them ever again - but they yield me lasting quiet pride as well as these connections with you and others, which means the world to me. Thank you.
Here is a link to your fine piece, now that I've curated it. I do hope you will write for more of the prompts in the project - I will enjoy seeing how your mind/prose style responds to them.
Txx
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#catharinegrayburn
How exciting! Thank you, thank you. Cxx
Thankyou for your kind words Tanya. My first contribution and also first writing about self. My passion is nature writing - or attempting to! I don't know Vera Brittain's memoir, and the piece about not lighting a fire is sad and horrific . Thanks for sharing it Eileen
Hello again Eileen. I've just curated your beautiful piece - you will see another comment from me under your original submission giving its link xx
This theme resonates well. I have spent the past eight months living in 5 different homes as I wander and wonder in the Centralian Desert. And I have come to know this: no matter the physicality of a place, no matter the condition, location, size, or grandeur of a home, I make it my own. This typically involves all things sensory – a bedroom with light, living plants, fresh inviting bed linen; a kitchen with enough things to create and nourish my body and soul; an altar – light from a window, candles, incense, flowers, stones, feathers and other found objects that have significance; all is swept, dusted, and cleaned with photos of my own ones on the walls. Oh, and my stove top coffee pot and cup accompany me unfailingly, everywhere.
I have a recent history of moving about. I have lived in apartments and villas in Italy, a pokey flat in Scotland, a caravan in Switzerland, a camper van in Australia, a tent in Ireland, other folks’ homes, my own house. I have lived alone and also shared space – with a lover, with strangers. And in every one of those abodes, I have felt at home. My home is where I am - and my most comfortable place is within me. That is the room that will tell you of my habits, my values, my reasons for living, my why. From there I describe the scenes and routines that give meaning to my every-day.
Every morning has a ritual – independent of place: tea first, journal writing, a series of stretches to meaningful music, breakfast, and coffee. I take note of the birdsong, thank them. My soul needs this to set the rhythm for the day, to wind up my energy and move outward towards the things that I live for. I live for adventure, connecting with people in moments to be remembered and cherished. Without people in my home, in my room, there is no value, no context, no relativity, nothing from which to reflect.
Maurni! How happy I was to see your name in my notifications for this prompt, as I guessed it would - as your two previous pieces did - be sending a delicious warm draught of life from afar my way in a week that is cold and confined here on the Sussex Downs.
And so it is. And I realise that even though I love the cultural richness and expansion of your work, given the languages you speak, the countries you have travelled to (so in contrast to my life), I would also quite happily read pages and pages by you just describing the making of coffee, the movements of you in a room. What I love in Knausgaard's work (even though much of his My Struggle project infuriates me!), what I love in Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry: writers how can impart interest to the everyday - give it colour and rhythm.
Thank you for being part of what we're doing here. Your link below:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#maurniobeirne
Txx
And you have made my day with such a reply! Thank you so much Tanya - it is once again hugely motivating to have your feedback and interest. Your generosity is greatly appreciated at this end. With temperatures climbing to a steady 37 every day, I envy a little your location...but I do love the sunlight here. Funny you should mention the coffee making - I was tempted to write a piece on that for your prompt on impossible objects. My pot follows me wherever I go, an evocation of Italy in the morning, with every brew.
May your days be blessed with wonders
Maurni
...and your days in return, Maurni. So glad that this is a place where we can meet!
I love this Maurni - it’s so beautifully written and I can so relate to it. I once gave up my flat to travel and lived in tents etc and felt like you, that my home was where I was. I search for that feeling now. Love your piece a lot!
Ah! Too kind you are. Thanks for your comment Helen .. it is so lovely to be sharing some words finally, thanks to Tanya’s platform.
I hope you get to wander again one day, and that in the mean time you can hunker down within your own space and dream of where you might find your future self.
I will return “home” after Christmas and then ... start to wonder of my next wander. We wander with our words
Attic of Dissociation
On the 3rd floor of my childhood home, a walk-in attic with a wooden door opened to the cedar-lined room with slanted ceilings. The scent of cedar was grounding and soothing as it wafted from the rafters. It was a hidden room I would return to at least once a week for over 20 years.
The attic was like an old pressure cooker with over-done things. It was filled with treasures: my father’s sailor suit, my mother’s bridal gown, and honeymoon negligees. Cummerbunds, bowties, and overcoats. Lacy veils and crowns. Leopard skins from my father’s Bass drum, highland kilts, and argyle jackets. Remnants of childhood memories: costumes, leather ballet slippers, pink tutus, tap shoes, communion dresses, ice skates, wool sweaters, and mittens. Handmade blankets, crocheted tablecloths, and linens. Stacks of books, old magazines, and photos lingered.
It was a magical place of reverie, a quiet, secluded space where I could hide. I had complete privacy to contemplate whatever idea was percolating in my head. I cherished this solitude with all my heart.
What drew me to this room was my father’s United States Navy Medical Manual of Injuries and Diseases of War. My father was a Field Medic in the Navy. I would climb three flights of stairs to look at this manual of horrific war wounds and amputations, peeking with one eye, to scare myself by viewing these gruesome pictures. I would return to this room, sitting on the floor for hours, leafing through the pages of this book.
In this attic of dissociation, I witnessed horrendous physical injuries that provided comfort as a distraction from family tension. My mother was intrusive and physically abusive. The adrenaline charge of this repetitive behavior was stored in the trauma of bodily memories held in this room.
Anne... what a compelling piece. You've created such a concentrate of that time and place - made all the more disquieting once we reach the end and understand that the long span of time you spent there, being comforted by the objects and that book full of horrors, was because of a need to escape from what was happening down below. And there is a deep truth you've shed light on here that is true of you but many others of us who did not feel safe around an adult who raised us: because we cannot escape the place, we find strangely creative ways of containing or shrinking that difficulty - my equivalent to your absorption in those pictures of amputation was a nightly meditation on the coming of nuclear war: what I would pack, what I would loot, where I would run to. It was only in my forties, a mother myself of children who have never been mistreated and who have rarely had a nightmare, that I could really see and feel how sad it was that this was my nightly self-soothing ritual.
Thank you for joining the project and I hope you will continue to respond to themes in the three-season archive.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#annecalajoe
Tanya xx
Tanya, Thank you for your feedback and sharing your nightly self-soothing ritual. Amazing how we try to comfort ourselves by increasing adrenaline to distract from overwhelming early trauma. ❤️
Indeed. This last year - around the unavoidable stress and heartache of helping my mum to end of life - I have in every other way sought to learn to live a quieter life, minus of difficulty and drama. I realised after the compulsive nature of my attachment to my 'Other Love' (as described in the book) and then a female friendship that didn't sustain after that, that I have always had at least one hard-to-understand friendship at the heart of my life: one where I've had to work and work to earn my place in their lives, quite differently to the measure and equality in all my other friendships. It was a real watershed moment to understand that drama, difficulty, and all the adrenalin that goes with that is my earliest form of feeling - a familiar state, but not a good one. And so now I'm learning to live a far gentler more measured life. No fierce attachments!
Interesting, I am unwinding from a similar friendship that has the fierce attachment style you mentioned along with the drama and adrenaline. Thank you for showing how this familiar state weaves through our lives and pops up in other intense relationships! Happy you are finding a more gentler way of being the the world! Especially after opening to such vulnerability in your mothers end of life vigil!❤️
It's helped me to see it not as the other's 'fault', or some failure in me to keep them in my life. It was me being drawn to what in them was troubled or hard to read, as that uncertainty is what I'm most familiar with. I'm learning that the people I'm less immediately drawn to are turning out to be better and more durable fits - for me and for them!
Yes, can identify with that intensity of the draw! The mystery that really isn't a mystery! Big signal to be aware of!
My son's room is bright yellow. The shade 'Tibetan Gold' - actually he dreamed of a golden room but that felt like an impossibility. Yellow walls and yellow floor, in the morning, the sunshine streams across the floor creating welcoming joyful patterns.
The lights are yellow too. The dedication and desperation for sleep means we go to bed always in a glow of yellow, orange and red. No blue light allowed except of course the glare of the fought over phone. Single bed covered in cuddly toys, a weighted blanket, books, Lego. All the trappings of a cosy, homely room for a joyous boy. But a bed and a room shunned and unslept in.
Seven years of this boy sleeping by my side. Refusing to budge despite the chosen yellow room. Seven years of feet kicking into me, teeth grinding next to me, continuously fighting off sleep. Of tears and exhaustion, of closeness and of love. I wonder how it would be to sleep languorously every night in my own bed? A grown up once more, master of my own domain, the possibility of new love. How it would be to have a child who slept alone?
When will the time come that we are both able to put the tumult and terror of your arrival finally to bed? That we are both safe and secure enough and no hidden fear lingers in the darkness to tease us, just gentle all-embracing night and peace.
I crave the space, the time for me, the possibility of a life opened up once more and yet your closeness in the night gives me comfort. To know that you are alive and well, my anchor through the storm. Who knew that mothering would be such paradox, would be like this? Certainly not I.
Thank you so much for joining the project, and with this powerful piece. I admire how you convey the literal tug of love that happens in your nights with your son: the yearning for it to end, entangled with an understanding that this time will pass and that the freedom it leaves you with will also be complex.
The way you use light is compelling - and it makes me think of books like Kate Zambreno's Light Room (a memoir set in pandemic, when she was working and mothering while confined to close quarters) and - from an earlier era - Yukio Tshusima's extraordinary and unsettling I-novels Territory of Light and Woman Running in the Mountains. Do you know Tshushima's work - if you don't and you give it a try, I'd love to know how you find it...
Here is your link to your piece in the story archive, and I hope you will write for other themes in the three-season archive. I love watching how each writer's sensibility approaches each prompt...
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#chloejones
Tanya xx
Hi Tanya, thank you so much for your considered response. It feels exciting to finally be writing out in the world. I haven't read any of those novels and am looking forward to exploring them. I will definitely be writing more.
Chloë x
I love to have made this space where that excitement of first publication can happen in a safe way! And very glad you've joined us here. More please! xx
A yew tree grew in the garden of the house where I was born. Needled, bitter green, studded acid red with berries tempting as fruit. Some remnant of Victorian planting, incongruous in our moss green northern valley of Beech and Oak.
I’d climb, high into its wide embrace, of sun dapple, skin shadow, branch, twig and scented bark. Beneath the tree, slippery flagstones, slimed with fallen berries and the leaf matter of years.
The tree loomed high above valley slopes so precipitous I felt, if I only ran fast enough, I could leap from our side to the other, high over the river, the stony fields, and weaving walls, to where sheep grazed on ridges grooved horizontally into the sloping earth.
I knew my way down to the river pool; the damp home smell of lime plaster, and scorched tang of the electric fire. Knew, when the sheep began to bleat incessantly in summer, that their babies had been taken. I wondered, when they stopped, whether they had forgotten.
I was eight when we left. To brick cul de sacs, borrowed army furniture. Straight privet hedges and neat flat lawns. The smell of hot tarmac made soft by a southern sun.
I returned only once. Walking down the steep track from the Shap Road, where my parents once cleaved a path through deep snowdrift, my new sister in a carrycot on my father’s shoulders. Down the ridged valley, past the river pool, where in summer we swam naked in clear water, emerging, dripping, at dusk.
The Yew tree was gone, leaving only a raw wound of naked wood, ringed with stone. The house had the vulnerable, naked look of a newly shorn sheep without the dark old tree centring it, and the flagstones were dry and clean.
Sally... what an exceptional piece of short form place writing this is. It makes me feel you must already be published in other places - and if so, I'd love to have links to more work by you. It has the kind of quality I respond to in Ted Hughes' writing about the physical and psychological shock to his system when his family left the valley bottom of Mytholmroyd for a shop-keeping life in the industrial town of Mexborough when he was 7 or 8 - do you know his writing on this? I've just gone downstairs to find which book of his it's in, in case you don't... and I can't seem to find it. Perhaps it's in Poetry in the Making. How - even though he developed a rich life in the fields beyond Mexborough - those first 7 years and the view of the big hill opposite his first home remained fixed in memory...
And I'm reminded too of Plath's truly luminous essay about her seaside childhood, Ocean 1212W (the only prose of hers I really enjoyed).
Yes, this by you makes me hope you will write for many other themes in the three-season archive. I will enjoy seeing what you make of them.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#sallywetherall
Tanya xx
What a gorgeous piece of prose. There is so much sensory detail and it brings this piece alive for me. I love the contrast between the sensuality of your young life, then the "...brick cul de sacs ... Straight privet hedges and neat flat lawns." You've expertly conveyed the effect on the child of this harsh shift from a natural, sensual place to a more sterile one. There are so many good lines and phrases, but I'll just choose one that jumped out at me: " The house had the vulnerable, naked look of a newly shorn sheep ..." That's a great line.
Thanks so much Wendy. It’s been so encouraging submitting this piece and getting such support from other writers.
Hello Tanya,
Thank you so much for your response. This is the first piece of writing I've put out into the world. I took my daughter to see you interview the wonderful Natasha Carthew at the Bath Literature festival a few months ago. I was really inspired by your own story and the archive of writing you are building. You gave me the confidence to submit something.
I started writing as an unexpected aspect of my ongoing practice based PhD research into Ceramic and Print processes and what potential they have to extend our understanding of landscape. Writing about landscape and place was never intended to be part of my research but has increasingly become an integral part and something I want to continue and develop.
So thank you for the recommendations. I have searched out my very old copy of Poetry in the Making... I was given this book, age 11, as the school poetry prize in July 1988, so a lovely feeling of circularity. I will try and find the piece you mention by Sylvia Plath.
Thank you again. I feel very excited to be part of this.
Sally xx
How wonderful to think we were in the same room back in May, and that some of what I said then has been of use to you since. And it's even more exciting to be receiving your stories and thoughts in turn now. I really did respond to your piece as I do ones from others here who are already published. It's often so difficult for PhDs and academics to write literary prose, direct from experience - so many of my mentees are struggling with that - and so it's a rare and wonderful thing to encounter someone who hasn't been tied up in knots by it.
Really do look forward to receiving more pieces from you when you have time/interest.
Txx
I live always in a room full of intentions. This might be a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, or the room I am writing in now.
The room I am in now has long shelves on two walls. Another wall has a long desk; the last wall is door and window.
On the shelves are books and file boxes. That makes the space sound neat. It’s not neat. Closest to me, on the desk, are the things I should be doing, should be replying to, should be responding creatively to. Books, pamphlets, postcards that interested me, that sparked something. But gradually they become covered in other things, and become forgotten.
Occasionally, I have a burst of tidying, but as I tidy – shelve books in the right place, put the cards with the other unsent cards, put the lists with all the other lists – the set of circumstances that made those things interesting is disturbed, dissolved by the end of their proximity.
Shelving the books is what you are meant to do, to put the poetry ones in alphabetical order, anthologies at the start; to separate out the non-fiction into “nature”, “walking”, “mythology”. But once on the shelf they become just another book, another reminder that I was interested in something, then forgot about it.
So as I sit here typing, I have all this at my back. It could feel like a library of possibilities, but at this point in the season – my life season, the year’s season – it feels like everything I didn’t do, all the things I began and let fall.
Saying this out loud, in this space, I know that I’m not alone. To have intentions, but not the time; to dream, but not know how to begin. I live in a room full of intentions: now to act.
I love “a roomful of intentions” how about a lifetime?
I hope you act. Loved this.
My brother left home and my parents took his bedroom for its panoramic view over the city to the sea. I got their room. Huge and luxurious with a white carpet, an electric wall fire and gigantic windows that opened quietly onto the garden.
It was the early seventies. I was twelve but aspirational and they indulged me. Mandarin coloured ceiling, white space-age-eyeball spotlights (with dimmer switch!) and a built-in, Formica desk. With my brother’s bed repurposed as a settee, and mum’s dressing table turned into a music centre, my new space was less bedroom, more bedsitter. I absolutely adored it. Which was fortunate because then I caught glandular fever and was forced to isolate for three months.
The view of the garden sustained me through the difficult and debilitating illness. Two giant trees and a trapeze waited patiently. The doves cooed sympathetically.
The picture I pinned above the wall-fire was less bucolic. Not Donny Osmond or David Cassidy but a caveman clutching a spanner atop a pile of burning ruins. I wanted to stare at the apocalypse and listen to dissonant music. Again and again.
For me, what you look at in a room and what you observe outside must constantly change. Traffic, birds, trees, people are always on the move therefore ornaments, books, pictures should shift and mutate too. As a small child I would spend a Saturday rearranging toys, and still, when sad, I like to do a rehang or curate shelves.
We’re living in limbo in an Air BNB at the moment, waiting to start a new life in a bungalow with a view. I cannot change anything in this tiny holiday let, although I would like to. My space is restricted. My imagination isn’t.
'I was twelve but aspirational and they indulged me' - love this (and all what follows): feels like the start of a novel or the narration from a Wes Anderson film...
Then there's that lovely bit of authorial statement 'For me, what you look at in a room...' It's always exciting for me here when contributors find a way within the necessary word constraints to mix description, reflection, direct statement.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#rosalynhuxley
Txx
My first bedroom was a tiny box room at the front of a suburban new build semi- detached house with a yellow door. The 80’s dream. It overlooked a manicured world of flowers and neatness, bookended by a newly built garden wall. Pink flowery walls with matching curtains and duvet. John Lewis don’t you know. Handmade by my mother in between the nightly arguments. Unsettled, sleepless evenings listening to endless circular, repetitive rows in my tiny room, I loved that it was mine. Safe, cocooned. It didn’t last.
When we had to move out, leaving my Dad broken into pieces on the green sofa, it was into a soulless rented flat with cream wood chip walls and shared bunk beds with my sister. No room of mine. No pink. Weekends back and for between my parents, my childhood room was no longer safe. Empty, one parent, sad and broken.
I moved back with my Dad for a while for school. He re-decorated the box room with thick pink candy stripes and it was mine again, but only in the week. Not forever. Back and forth, pillar to post, sharing bunk beds with step- siblings we barely knew, to my mothers in an adjacent town.
I lost my virginity in the pink candy box room one fumbling afternoon when my Dad was at work. Doing things with my boyfriend too young in my tiny childhood room, I searched for a home in him.
My Dad remarried and I was shunted to another pink box room in another suburban semi with my mother and stepfather. Smoking in that pink room with the lead windows open in defiance, playing angry protest songs, it was never mine.
I still often choose pink for my bedroom, for duvets and curtains. Still searching for a home that never was.
I love the sense of time in your writing Helen - and colour, movement. I can sense your journey from it. Pink is a snug colour for a home 💕
Thankyou! It’s funny but I am not sure I even like pink but I am drawn back to it!
I'm amazed at how you tell a story that spans such a length of time (as @MaurniOBeirne said) -- you tell the story of your childhood in so few words, and all through the motif of pink walls, pink rooms. I love "... leaving my Dad broken into pieces on the green sofa ..." and "...one fumbling afternoon...", to name just a couple of the gems in this piece.
Thankyou, that’s very kind! It’s strange the things we recall when writing for this project isn’t it!
Oh wow!
I can see why others here in the community have been in touch after reading your piece. I've just felt the day shift around me, as it does when we read something that so precisely conjures up time & place... and also time, place, passing. What is lost, what we search for. You've done something hard and rare here, I feel - given a huge sense of what you had, what you lost, what you still search for - in so few words.
This clause in particular is quietly heartrending: '...I searched for a home in him.' I always had a serious boyfriend on the go from the age of twelve onwards - the boys' homes and people more important to me than the boys themselves. The gran of the boy I was with at 15 was still sending me birthday cards well into my early forties!
Thank you so much for sharing this piece into the collection. Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#helenlouise
Txx
Thankyou Tanya as always for your thoughtful and supportive feedback. It’s so interesting looking back at those early relationships being an adult now & reflecting on what they meant at the time. And for me what I was, and still am, searching for! As ever, this writing project is fascinating for what comes up and for me, finding ways in writing to express these themes! Xx
It's so good to have you be part of the project, and I'm glad to see others in the project reading and responding to your piece. More please! xxx
The photograph of me in bed, reading my Garfield book, just my face & hands peeping out of the deliberately arranged Marks and Spencer rosebud covers. My father must have tucked me up and taken the photograph, when he was visiting one weekend, when there was still tenderness.
Arranging the bedding just so, so nothing that wasn’t rosebuds could be seen in the photo. The whole room in fact, decorated to within an inch of its life in that rosebud theme – printed wallpaper, pillowcases, counterpane – even a clock, a jug, a china bunny with a hole for cotton balls to be its continuously available tail. I tried so hard to make it look like the adverts, what it should be.
The house suited the antiques favoured by my mother and stepfather. Amongst the relentless rosebuds of my bedroom was mahogany freestanding furniture and my bed. When mess threatened to overwhelm, I’d blitz it back to precise tidiness. I’d often move my furniture around to see if, finally, could this configuration be the one in which I could maintain order?
I moved my room around so frequently that eventually a leg broke from my bed. I removed the other three to create a mutated bed that wasn’t like anything my friends had. But this time, from the shame yet again of my bed, my room, my life not being what it should be, I started to try on how it might feel to actively choose something different.
I loved that weird bed so much.
How lovely to have you return with a second piece for the project, Becs.
You've made it so that I can see and feel your childhood room so clearly - and feel too how it was to be that girl whose life wasn't matching the advertised-version of what our teens are supposed to be.
'My father must have tucked me up and taken the photograph, when he was visiting one weekend, when there was still tenderness' - how moving that line is, but also - from a craft perspective - how accomplished. Those final two clauses a sort of untucking, so that we feel the warmth of the bed, your father... and then immediately share your loss of it.
And it's a strange sort of soul company I'm getting from your piece and Helen Louise's - all three of us using the placing and replacing of furniture, fixtures and fittings as a way to feel some control over our lives, even while the adults around us made changes we couldn't influence.
Thank you for sharing this piece for the collection.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#becsmackenzie
Txx
Thank you so much for your response and for understanding exactly what underpinned this piece - and much of my life!! It's appreciated very much. Sending you a lot of love. Bxx
Kingdom
There are two resident cats with their multiple cat beds, cat tree, overstuffed toybox, water fountain, tipi. Their private toilet area is marked off by a handsome, dark wooden screen topped by a wooden sign that reads: “Toilette des chats.” (Somehow the French comes off as more regal than the English.) My boys Emmet and Onslow owe their names to characters from a British comedy, Keeping Up Appearances—the shenanigans of would-be social climber Hyacinth Bucket, and her relationships with neighbors (Emmet) and family (brother-in-law Onslow) inspires laughs a-plenty. These resident felines, though, are not the only nod to the United Kingdom here in this space.
There is the red ergonomic desk chair and the red book cabinet with glass-paneled doors, and the electric tea kettle. These call to mind the buses journeying along London streets, and the iconic phone booths which have now turned into coffee stations and little libraries.
Hanging over my writing desk:
Three woodblock prints of the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Swimming Pond. I’ve swum in its frigid waters only once, but the experience has stayed with me, and I aim to submerse my body again when I get the chance.
A print of a beloved grove of trees on Hampstead Heath that an artist rendered based on one of my photographs.
A photo I snapped of Oxford’s Christchurch Meadow during my brief time as a student in the city of spires. The meadow green, the sun shining as cattle munch or lay partially hidden in the vegetation, and all those hallowed stone buildings peeking above the trees.
An inspiration board peopled by 20 artists, thinkers, and writers, half of whom are British.
Go to my bookshelves and you’ll find Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and C.S. Lewis. Agatha Christie. And countless other volumes snatched up during my UK travels which pushed my suitcase well over the weight limit.
There’s usually a sleeve of digestive biscuits or Hobnobs in the pantry, and Cornish tea bags in the jar next to the aforementioned kettle.
Less tangible is the subscription to BritBox that allows me to stream British TV classics like Mr Humphries and Mrs Slocombe on Are You Being Served? and of course dear old Hyacinth.
And many more touches of Blighty besides.
Why?
One definition of kingdom is ‘a basic group of natural objects’ such as minerals or plants. These things I’ve mentioned might not be natural objects, but they are a collection of items that have their origins in a common place and they have a singular purpose: they constitute my own personal kingdom within these four walls here in the U.S., which makes me less heart sick for the Kingdom where I feel most at home.
I hung on every word, each detail of this, Amy. So beautiful to get this still-deeper sense of your home and what matters to you. I've never encountered it articulated before so clearly either - this sense some of us have (myself included) that I am supposed to be in a place where I've never yet lived before. In my case, it's Japan and the Swiss Alps: both only reached for three weeks a piece in 2017 and 2018. Yet all my life they've felt so central to my identity and values. And when I was there - for all I couldn't speak the language or lay claim to any ancestry in either of them: a feeling that even as complete outsider, socially disconnected, I could still feel at home there, however anonymous and friendless I might remain. I think your connections to the UK have a lot more foundation than mine for those places, but I love how you show that we can be in more than one place/culture at once.
Have you ever eaten Devon clotted cream or Cornish saffron buns? If we ever do get to meet over here, it will be my pleasure to buy the first for you to serve with the buns, which I will make! And if I ever travel to you... I will make room in my bag for the biscuits of your choice!
Always lovely to get a new piece through from you, one of our founding members here... here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#amymillios
Txxx
Dear Tanya, thank you for your lovely response--its given me such a lift. I remember yearning to reach England/UK, for so many years, and when I finally landed there in 2012 it was every bit as magical and beautiful and ‘homely’ as I’d imagined it. Was it the same experience for you re: Japan and the Alps? For me there was such a sense of ‘rightness’ about it.
I am a huge fan of clotted cream in general, and have been known to eat it by the spoonful in whatever flat I happen to renting whilst across the pond, though I have not had the pleasure of Cornish saffron buns--my mouth is now watering with the thought.
My last trip to the UK was in 2019, just before COVID struck. I stationed myself in Hay-on-Wye, the town of books, for part of it; the rest of the time I was in London. I’m regrouping now and planning a somewhat epic trip for hopefully the upcoming year--some time in Italy and then England. It would be so wonderful to finally meet you if it works for us both .
I forgot to include
This with my response to your comment!!
https://opuszine.us/posts/feeling-homesick-for-a-place-youve-never-been
Catharine, There's so much in this piece to commend. It tells a story so succinctly, and then there are phrases and lines that really stick with me, e.g.: " ... the car headlights that blanched the ceiling...", "The tiny dog, sweating and exhausted, couldn't reach the finish line", and "... the neon glow of the numbers cast a ghostly sheen through the water glass..." Really lovely and powerfully evocative writing.
On Valentine’s Day, they went to the Italian deli in Mount Storm to buy salami and cheese, baguettes, olives, and red wine. They bought cheesecake slices or a French tart with caramelized pears. They laid all of this out on their coffee table, a few feet from the TV, and sat on the floor, their legs extended under the table. They poured wine into each other’s thick, stumpy water glasses, and watched a movie they’d rented from the library. His long, black, wavy hair was pulled back in a pony tail. Her hair was pixie short and brown. She looked younger than 26. She had put on weight in the past few years, often saying, “Love makes me fat.” She did love him, but she needed to leave.
She knew this for years, but the orange lamp kept drawing her back. Who would keep it? He had bought it for her last Christmas, a wrought-iron base with an orange lampshade. It balanced perfectly in a little scene on the north side of their living room. Next to it was his favourite antique chair, with crimson velvet upholstery on the seat, tattered at the corners, and thick, sturdy arms and legs. There was an oak end table and a framed abstract print of a cyclist in France, in shades of peach, blue and black. The whole scene was perfect. It calmed her to look at it on an anxious day. Who would keep the lamp?
She wrote this all down in the noisy, dim lunch room at work. Outside it was snowing. Giving up their life felt like too much to bear during those cold winter months. They should be buried together in their house under feet of snow. They should be cuddling, huddling under their goose-down duvet.
What a tender scene from a relationship nearing its end... it has the sort of loving-while-leaving detail and perspective I admire in Ray Carver's work. And I enjoy it when regular writers for the project work in a variety of tenses across their pieces - three years in and I'm still being surprised by how much you and others do with the 300-word brief!
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#wendyknerr
Txx
Thanks for all your comments Tanya. I really appreciate the wonderful space you've created here and am so glad I finally decided to join in with writing. It hadn't even occurred to me that this piece was in third person -- I originally wrote it, a year or so ago, in first person, then tried it in second and third, and found third was the one I preferred. I guess it helped me get a bit of distance from the scene and be a bit more objective. The 300 words is such a challenge, but I think it helps me to remove what's not necessary and get to the meat of subjects -- so thank you!
This is a tale of two kitchens. The first, from my childhood, is vast, like the nave of a church, and airy. It has enormous sash windows, impossibly high ceilings, thick stone walls. It has, everyone agrees, huge potential. They say this instead of saying that it is dank, filthy and cold.
My father spends hours explaining to the few audiences he can muster all the difficulties involved with renovating the kitchen. The difficulties are many, so we must make do. Mildew on the walls, mouse droppings in the butter, the oven door propped shut with an angled pole. Cupboards hold long-expired packets with long-hardened contents. Only one hob ring works. My father buys the cheapest bread and calculates its cost per slice. He does not need to do this.
This is the room where, once, my father flung open a window and hurled the Sunday joint across the garden, its arcing bascule in stark contrast to our frozen horror within. It is the room where he taught me to waltz, my girlish feet balanced carefully upon his slippered ones. It is the room where, one winter’s night, my mother, cooking in coat, hat and gloves, finally decided that enough was enough.
My kitchen today is bright with rows of small round lights. We have five hob plates of varying sizes, two ovens, a multitude of tools and contraptions, nearly all of which we use. Oils and vinegars and herbs crowd onto surfaces. The fridge is full of colour. Even the floor is heated. Am I compensating, I wonder? Probably, I decide. And? Here we host, talk, laugh and argue (though neither of us has ever thrown a roast). Here I define myself by what I no longer am. Here I define myself by love.
Tania, how good to have you join us here as a writer for the project. Thank you. I love how you've structured this piece with the then and the now. And there's a novelistic quality to it - feel like I'm at the start of a longer story, even while it works as a complete piece. It feels like a lot of stories could be told out of and through that vast childhood kitchen, I mean.
Here is your link, and I hope that you'll be tempted to try other themes in the archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/open-house/#taniaking
Tanya x
Thank you so much, Tanya. I’ve been thinking about contributing for ages but hadn’t been able to get up the courage before now. I really appreciate your welcome and look forward to being brave a little more often in the future!
Ah! Glad to think I and others here might be reading more from you. And that's exactly why I made this space - a place for testing out how it feels to share work/words. xx
Oh do write some more....so much more
Oh, Jean! Thank you so so much for this encouragement. It means the world to me!