Motherload

I asked myself another question. Should I accept my lot? If I was to buy a ticket and travel all the way to acceptance, if I was to greet it and shake its hand, if I was to entwine my fingers with acceptance and walk hand in hand with acceptance every day, what would that feel like? After a while I realized I could not accept my question. A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own  (1929)).  Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know (2013) I have gone on loving Deborah Levy's essays on why she writes, although 'loving' seems hardly the word for the world of pain she is illuminating in each essay.  Without ever saying so direct...

Virginia Woolf famously said that, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" ( A Room of One's Own , 1929). What Mrs Woolf omitted in her description of the ideal writing room for women… was a fire . When I arrived at my cottage for my month in the country, I thought that coffee would be the main operating principle of the whole shebang. Survivalist's coffee I might make a little too much and get the jitters, stay up all night, pen prose in my pyjamas, and feel ferally connected to reality by virtue of the caffeine in my system. Instead, the great revelation has been the fire. When I first arrived, I timidly assembled little fires with kindling, and the logs to hand. I copped out and used a fire lighter once, but after that I was off. The whole cottage gradually filled with warmth, and the beating heart of it was the woodburning stove. I dried my clothes and my trainers in front of it. I ate in front of it. I read in f...