A Room

It started last November with Virginia.

And her essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” a compilation of two lectures she gave on the value of fictional stories and the societal structures that made it difficult for women to have the freedom to write. Her core argument is that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

We need security (a room) in a Maslow’s hierarchy sense, but we also need space (a room) to dream.

I imagine her in her room the way I find myself in mine, sidestepping a castle made of notebooks, restlessly reworking a thought until it’s a foundation for a world.

I imagine her making and being remade in the process. Reading six books at once. Altering focus. Staring at the ceiling, or at the dancing glimmering space between the shadow of a tree branch.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”