A Room of My Own
I’ve been meaning
to write a spiritual musing on my writing room for years, but the idea never
possessed me until I read Lindall Gordon’s biography, Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Life, while I was in the middle of
painting my writing room this summer; and, of course, the idea was set free by
Virginia Woolf’s Victorian convention-breaking comment that sparked a fire in
the soul of women everywhere and set the stage for the modern feminist movement,
and which became the theme of her iconoclastic little book A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money and a room of her own
if she is to write fiction.”
That would apply
to any writer, and if they have the money to be free to write all the more
power to them; but life doesn’t work like that. Ask Alice Munro, who had to squeeze
her writing time between household chores (she was married with two small
children); but she persevered and wrote and wrote and wrote, and at the
respectable age of 82 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for
her “mastery of the contemporary short story.”
Which suggests
much more than having a room of one’s own to write in, and the money to be free
to write one’s fiction; it suggests that a writer will write no matter what the
circumstances, because if they do not write they will feel they have betrayed
themselves, something that my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest
“Papa” Hemingway explored in his famous short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
and which haunted me most of my life also because my call to creative writing
was superseded by my call to find my true self, and only when I had satisfied
the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness was I free to devote more
time to creative writing, which brings me to my writing room in the house that
Penny and I built in beautiful Georgian Bay, Southcentral Ontario…
I’ve always wanted
a room of my own to write in, and I went out of my way three times to
build a room of my own; the first time when I built an addition onto my
parents home in Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario when I opted to stay at home for
my mother’s sake after I left university to start my own contract painting
business, and for the next fourteen years I stayed at home in my attached but separate
apartment unit and worked my trade and read and wrote until my father died; and
the second time I built a room of my own was in the triplex that I built in
Nipigon by converting the loft of the top apartment unit of our triplex into my
writing room where I wrote every morning for fourteen years until Penny and I
built our new home in Tiny Beaches, Georgian Bay (on a street called Stocco
Circle, no less) in which I converted the empty space above our double garage into
my writing room but which I never got to finish painting until this summer,
fourteen years after our house was built.
So, a room of my
own to write in was precious to me, despite the fact that my writing room was
my sanctuary and haven of safety in my quest for my true self which began in
high school when Somerset Maugham’s novel The
Razor’s Edge struck me with the immortal wound that called me to become a spiritual
seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell; and I did most of my seeking through
reading in the privacy of my writing room until I found my lost soul that I had
come into this world to find and which I wrote about in my memoirs The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price. And after I
found myself and wrote all the books that my quest called me to write (the last
being my twin soul books, Death, the
Final Frontier and The Merciful Law
of Divine Synchronicity), I was finally free to do justice to creative
writing that I was called to in high school by the writer who became my
literary mentor, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway who, ironically, I’ve just finished
writing about again in My Writing Life,
which was inspired by the gift of an Indigo
Hemingway Notebook that I got from
Penny’s sister last Christmas and which creatively morphed into a sequel to my
literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed
Hemingway that I wrote three years ago.
Not that I didn’t
write creatively all these many years (my novel Tea with Grace is still my favorite of all my inspired fiction
writing), I simply could not devote all of my precious time and energy to
creative writing (which, as any writer knows, demands one’s full attention to
do aesthetic justice to writing poetry, short stories, and novels); I had to
work my trade to make a living first and foremost, and I had to also heed the
call to write the books that my quest for my true self demanded of me, which to
date numbers fifteen and counting.
But now that I’ve finally
told the story of how I found my true self, I am free to write all the poetry
and short stories and novels that I am called to write (not to mention my spiritual
musings which always come to me unbeckoned, like today’s musing on a room of
one’s own); and, in all honesty, I couldn’t wait to finish painting the boring
primed walls of my writing room because after fourteen years it deserved to be
dignified with a color best suited to the creative writer in me, a colour that
my life partner Penny Lynn chose—HOPEFUL BLUE.
And
why did Penny choose this colour, other than the fact that we both loved it? As
she said to me, without a trace of irony: “I just hope it gets on the walls,
that’s all.”
I just love her sense of humor!
———
