In Which I Build a Writing Tower with Alcott & L'Engle (a free chapter on mother-writers)
On having your feet on the ground while your head is in the clouds, perspective, proportion & flash back to when I lived in a tinyhouse!
Hello dear friends!
This newsletter is about a week overdue, because life has been full in all the best ways. Family visiting, a new nephew, Christmas and summer holidays - hurrah!
Below, I’m sharing with you a chapter from the book that I pitched last year on mother-writers in history. It didn’t end up with a publisher, and I moved on because other people are writing about this and I have a million other projects, and also, I’m so excited for Catherine Rickett’s new book Mother Artists: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity! If my essay is remotely interesting, her book is going to be x10🔥
My initial idea after I stopped pitching my book was to reformat my chapters into essays and pitch them to magazines. So far, it’s been 15mo and I haven’t. This month was full of 12th Night bonfires, and Christmas movie marathons, and now we are thick in the “get ready for first day of school!” panic of labelling stationary and new school uniforms. In other words - life, and motherhood is full. Interestingly, although this chapter was written when we were still living in a tinyhouse on wheels in the pandemic, its theme about that constant turning between “life on the ground” and “creativity in the tower” feels very timely for this “mad-rush-before-school season”. I’m in a “feet on the ground” moment, and I want to lean into it without too much writing pressure.
Yet, I want to honor those of you who are paid subscribers! And this essay/chapter is just sitting on my computer, serving no one right now. I hope that it can encourage you wherever you are — whether you are supporting a mother-writer, dealing with your own limitations on your creativity, or just want someone to tell you: yes. You’re normal. I’ll return to my usual format next month! :) xx Steph PS, it’s long, so read online or in the app to get the full essay.
In which I build a writing tower with Alcott and L’Engle
It’s 4:45am. Our neighbour’s rooster is crowing, the mosquitoes are whining in my ears, and I have to go to the bathroom. The problem with peeing at 4:45am is that there is a chance our three-year-old will hear me and decide to get up, since it’s slightly too close to his 5:30am wake up. He can sleep through anything at 7pm: laughter, music, his little brother screaming about his bath, dropped dinner plates, TV shows with loud explosions, my singing, the apocalypse. This, of course, is a survival skill in a tiny house–being able to block out background noise. But as soon as anything interesting starts to happen in the morning: I flick on the tea kettle, flush the toilet, or squeak open my laptop, his little face appears at the top of the loft steps, asking (in what he thinks is a whisper), “IS IT TIME FOR MY MORNING TEA YET?”
I sit on the couch under our loft, hang a blanket above me to try and block the light from seeping up the stairs into the kid’s loft, then carefully open my laptop. All I really want is coffee, but that’s out of the question, too noisy. The conversation I had last night with my husband is like a loose tooth that I can’t stop wiggling, and it’s keeping me from writing. Essentially, the problem is this: we are in the middle of a pandemic, and we don’t have childcare for the month, because our country’s infection rates just jumped up again, and oxygen is dwindling at hospitals. We feel the most responsible thing we can do to help our neighbours in South Africa’s fragile healthcare system is to stay home. But staying home means that he gets to keep working, and I get the kids. So we had a conversation in which I gave up my three hour writing window every day and reduced it to an hour. I know it’s needed. And my husband feels incredibly guilty about this, but the fact is that his job pays, and at this point, my writing could be called a hobby. (An expensive one, actually, as the Amazon bill for research books and submission fees to poetry magazines is steadily growing). We had a planning meeting, our schedules spread out, trying to hunt down minutes through the shifting piles of paper containing doctors appointments, project deadlines, nap schedules, and meal plans, trying to figure out when I could fit this hour in when I’d still be awake. Could he quit work a bit earlier in the afternoons? Perhaps he could take a long lunch break? Would I still have any energy left if I tried to write after the kids were in bed? In the end, I decided I’d just get up early.
In my little writing “tent” squished under the loft, I feel a bit like a fake. I’m not some inspired author; I’m not even a doctoral student, or a university lecturer, I’m just a mom who likes writing things. It feels as though a real author should at least have a desk. I have a laptop. But the same computer that houses this manuscript I also use to search for things like, “Is this rash on my kid’s leg a problem?” “What recipe has only noodles, three zucchini and a carrot?” and “What is the best brand of lunchbox if I can’t afford that fancy metal kind?”
Having a desk would be much more official. I have this feeling that inspiration will strike when everything is perfect. I’m not even asking for the dreamy spires of Oxford out of my window, just literally a clean surface without peanut butter residue on it.
Karen Morash — playwright, lecturer, and mother — writes about this need for space, for a defined place where she can just be an artist. She says her computer is “a messy space for a messy narrative in which I am an academic/artist/parent. I can only embrace these identities collectively, because the spaces I inhabit never allow me to embrace them singularly. And, truth be told, I don’t really want to identify as only one of those things. But it does mean that I never feel fully academic, fully an artist, fully a parent.”
This, I suppose, is the trade-off in trying to be “all the things” instead of compartmentalising. I said I want to be a mother-artist-writer. But in the space in my mind where I conjure what that actually looks like, I come up blank. Writers are solitary individuals, filled with importance and deep thoughts. Mothers are right in the middle of multitasking mundane affairs and solving relational disputes. Writers create from calm reflection, honing their craft, choosing their words with precision. Mothers are queens of improvisation, talking toddlers off of melt-down cliffs, responding minute-by-minute to teen angst or middle school friendship drama.
If I want to be both mother and writer, it means I’m always going to be carrying the other part of me into that new space, even if I want to compartmentalise them, I can’t. I may try to enter the space of writer, but I will wear, “mother” not only in my sleep-fogged brain and my ability to conjure snacks from my purse no matter where I go, but in the words I choose to write, the relational web of being, the children coming with me into my writing whether I mean to leave them at the door or not.
It can feel like a mistake. Like I’m a bit of a cliché for writing about children, or motherhood, that if I were a serious writer I’d have some kind of universal truths to unpack, cleanly divorced from my experience as a mother. But then, I realise, that must be the men talking again. Why shouldn’t this thing which has completely re-made my life be talked about? Why shouldn’t the work of mothering which I am neck deep in, which takes hours of time and demands skill and energy come out in the words I choose?
I made the mistake of studying abroad in Oxford for a month when I was in college. It was a mistake because this is now the image that springs to mind when I imagine the perfect writing conditions. I could wander around the cobblestone streets, in and out of the confusing library system with it’s dapperly dressed little guards admitting you when you flashed your card (something Virginia Woolfe did not have, actually). It was late winter, the grass was that shocking new spring green, but the leaves were not back on the trees in the parks. The library had little wooden carrels, and high ceilings, and windows which looked like the glass was slowly wavering and thickening after hundreds of years. It felt like great ideas were growing inside the stone arches, the flaps and rustles of books and whispers of inspiration fluttering around the ceiling.
It all sounds very romantic, but it was also incredibly cold, and we weren’t allowed any food inside. So, since I was studying Victorian children’s literature, I ended up reading books at a local bookstore which had a coffee shop. It was much warmer than the library and, of course, there was coffee, and I would gently pry open books from the shelf to get the quotes that I needed without bending the spines, slipping them back without anyone noticing. I would pause over my (quite terrible) literary analysis to peer down on students and professors and old women with little dogs who looked like they had survived World War II on the street below.
All this is to say, the perfect writing conditions: a historic library or a cozy corner table with endless coffee refills, or even just a solid desk with good lighting - all of them seem denied to me in my present circumstances. 170 square feet is just not much to work with. I shouldn’t keep complaining about the size of our house. Even someone as famous as Jane Austen didn’t have a writing room of her own. She wrote in the living room, with people coming and going. She didn’t have privacy, or a shutting door. It was her father who gifted her with a writing desk. I looked up a photo of it on the internet. It’s a smallish wooden box with a slanted lid to “whisk away her papers” when people walked in on her in the sitting room. I sigh. It looks suspiciously like a laptop to me.
I try to search out other writers and their writing conditions. Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women (1869) and my literary heroine, Jo March, had a little half-moon desk in her own room, with a door that closed. It stuck out of the wall between two windows. When I visited Orchard House, her family home turned museum, on a sharply cold Massachusetts Spring day several years ago I remember crowding into the room with the eight other tourists and gazing at the little wooden desk built by her father. The tour guide explained this desk was of huge importance. By building her this desk, her father was showing her he valued her work as a writer, during a time period when this would have been a bit scandalous. I thought it was quite progressive of him.
Later in the tour, we all squeezed down the creaking steps into the study where her father worked. We were met with a large wooden desk, a comfortable armchair. A fireplace. Artwork on the walls, and space for busts of famous philosophers peering down for inspiration. Louisa’s moon desk upstairs with her little sister’s doodles around it on the wallpaper seemed a bit insignificant by comparison.
Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father, never really made any money. Today we’d probably call him a philosopher of education. Then, I guess he was a “gentleman” in a time when those didn’t really exist anymore. The family was constantly in financial straits, moving twenty-two times during her childhood. Louisa’s father was a transcendentalist, and friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Henry Thereau, and the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He tried starting multiple schools based on his philosophies, but all of them failed. Emerson bailed him out financially several times. Bronson started a utopian commune with some other families (involving things such as a vegan-and-water diet, and no use of artificial light) which failed after about seven months. He tried going on speaking tours to share his philosophies, and these went slightly better, but when he tried writing down his thoughts and getting them published, even Emerson admitted Bronson was a great conversationalist and a terrible writer. In the end, Little Women was only published because Bronson Alcott wanted to publish some of his philosophy and the publisher agreed on the condition Louisa write something for girls. Until Louisa’s literary success with Little Women, she was out supporting her family though teaching, serving as a maid, and nannying.
They were a progressive family for the time. Really, they were. The daughters were encouraged in their pursuits. Louisa’s mother was an educated social worker, and kept a very detailed diary, in her later years often retiring to her room to read and write (something Louisa was pleased she could provide for her). Bronson was extremely proud of both Louisa and Annie, Louisa’s artistic sister.
But I can’t stop thinking about that sprawling dark wooden desk, and how because he was a man, he was allowed the time and space and write to think like it was his full-time job, and yet never get paid for it. Meanwhile the women in his home were downstairs in the kitchen, hand washing his laundry, trying to cobble together meals that matched his idealistic vegan diet, doing menial labour in other people’s homes, then dashing upstairs to scribble away at a little half-moon desk with what energy they had left.
I keep thinking about the women who needed to squirrel away time, to dash off and grab a bit of space. Who feel the need to justify their writing time with paychecks. Who try to claim it back from the relentless demands of the men who were sitting downstairs thinking. And yet- he did build her a desk. And without that, we might not have had Little Women.
My husband David built me a desk. It’s a small little desk at the end of our loft (well, the end of our bed, our entire loft is our bed). I have a window. The struggle is figuring out what to sit on so I can type and not get a backache. But it’s a desk. I don’t have a closing door, but my perch by the window is just as good. It’s interesting how a little bit of height makes me feel removed from the noise and chaos below. I won’t call it an Ivory tower, because that sounds like I’m some secluded, elite intellectual, shrouded from humanity below -- and if anything, motherhood has forced my feet directly onto the ground. But maybe it’s true you have to get a bit of height sometimes. Sometimes the air really is clearer higher up.
Looking back, I realise I’ve always gone up to get away. When I was younger, I would take my notebooks and pen in my teeth and climb one of the avocado trees on the campus of the Bible College where I grew up in South Africa. Hidden in the dome of green-blue leaves, it was quiet. I was away from my parents and three siblings, and although I would eventually get pins and needles from sitting on the hard branches, it was worth it to write. When it was raining, I would climb up on top of the wooden cupboard at the end of our hallway. There was a small window up there, too, and just enough room to cross my legs, my knees touching the opposite wall.
So really, I’ve always been trying to escape my family to write. I think of Louisa, whisking upstairs to write, then clattering back down to do the laundry and attend to her little niece who she adopted when her sister died. The bouncing between spaces -- now I’m writing, now I’m parenting, now I’m cooking -- it’s a constant spin between them all. I get the sense that Bronson Alcott did not oscillate between the mundane daily duties of homecare and childcare while thinking through his philosophies of education. He had the closing door, the desk, the hundred hours of thinking. Perhaps this constant shifting back and forth between writing and life is something the women writers have fought with and mastered in ways that the men haven’t. Virginia Woolf might say all this interruption lessens their writing, but I guess what I’m wondering is perhaps it can enrich it? Perhaps this constant turning -- turning upwards towards the abstract world of our minds, our stories and ideas, then turning back down to the real life of dirt and food and people – perhaps it makes for better art. Perhaps Louisa was a better writer than her father because she was grounded in the world of forgotten bread dough rising over the pan, worries about how to get more money, and the fierce love of sisters.
Louisa wasn’t a mother, but I find another prolific writer who was a mother and had a tower: Madeline L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time (published in 1960, almost 100 years after Alcott wrote her famous novel). L’Engle wrote upwards of sixty titles, and this does not include all her unpublished journals, letters, forwards and afterwards, contributing essays and public addresses. She also had three children.
As a teen in boarding school, she detested the lack of privacy. She was terrible at netball, and all she wanted to do was write. She learned how to tune out her surroundings and go into her own writing world, calling it her “force-field” of silence. She didn’t have a real desk, a real space to claim as private, but she could create it for herself in the midst of the chaos through her mind. This skill continued to help her write later in life. “The result of this early lesson in concentration is that I can write anywhere, and I wrote my first novel on tour with a play, writing on trains, in dressing rooms, and in hotel bedrooms shared with three other girls.”
There was a period in her life; however, when even the force field failed her. During the time she was working on Wrinkle, she was also parenting small children, and describes this time as ‘the tired thirties”. “In the decade that we lived at Crosswicks year round, all kinds of things happened to knock my sense of humor out of joint. There were two years where illness or accident kept someone in the hospital so constantly that it became a joke: “Oh not you again!” Friends would telephone, laughing, and ask, “What’s happened now?” Sometime, during those years, I read ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit’. What I remember from it is the reference to “the tired thirties.” I was always tired. So was Hugh. During the decade between thirty and forty, most couples are raising small children, and we were no exception. Hugh was struggling to support his growing family in the strange world outside the theatre. And there was I, absolutely stuck in buccology, with the washing machine freezing at least once a week, the kitchen never about 55* when the wind blew from the northwest, not able to write until after my little ones were in bed, by which time I was so tired that I often quite literally fell asleep with my head on the typewriter.”
L’Engle finally got her writing tower -- they converted an old room over the garage that used to house chickens into an office. “It was supposed to be Absolutely Private. Nobody was allowed up without special invitation. The children called it the Ivory Tower, and it is still called the Tower, though it is neither ivory nor private nor, in fact, a tower.”
This is the problem with these Towers, this space I’m trying to create that is separate enough and quiet enough to think straight: they never stay quiet. They never stay private. Everyone always manages to find you, no matter how far away you get. It’s a strange compulsion-- this need to get away from everyone I love most in the world, and their need to be with me (and my need to be with them, I should add). Whenever I am given a day away from my family, it seems to start all enthusiastically and productive, and end with me compulsively checking my phone for updates on how they are all doing, longing to be back in the midst of the chaos and fun.
I am 31 this year. With two children under the age of four, I can feel in my bones I am entering the “tired thirties.” I feel oddly comforted knowing that L’Engle went through this, too. She talks about this feeling she has sometimes, the need to get away. “Every so often I need OUT; something will throw me into total disproportion, and I have to get away from everybody--away from all these people I love most in the world--in order to regain a sense of proportion.”
I like this word proportion. That’s what it is, right? You can lose perspective like Bronson Alcott, too high above reality, but if you’re always too close, it becomes impossible to see what you’re doing. There’s a kind of blind survival mode I can enter into, frantically dishing out snacks and cuddles, wiping tears and snotty noses, separating fights, being pulled and touched and yelled at from the moment my feet hit the floor in the morning. It all becomes a race to the end of the day, and living in the moment becomes a series of disconnected actions. When I get out, and manage to step away for a moment, climb up to my little lofted desk above the fray below and pop in my noise canceling headphones, take a walk at dusk around our neighbourhood, or write about something that happened-- suddenly things snap back into position. My actions aren’t just repetitive and mundane, they are infused with meaning, they are woven into this larger story of what I believe God is doing in the world, in me and through me. When I step away from them, my children become precious, their quirks delightful, not irritating. Their needs are reasonable, not manipulative. Maybe, if I am to be a mother-writer, I need to lean into my feet on the ground and my ivory tower. Embrace my family while also plotting ways to escape from them.
I did, of course, have a period in my life where I didn’t have to escape my family. The eight years during college and before children. Then, the peace and quiet surrounded me. I had a huge desk that was mine to write on whenever I wanted. But, I didn’t write. I mean, I wrote. I wrote academic articles. I wrote assignments. I wrote my masters. I wrote for my communications job. I found some time to write on my blog. But one would think that the sheer amount of flexibility, space, and quiet would have been my dream. But somehow, it was too quiet. I used up all my energy writing for other people, and when I was home it was much easier to just pick up a book and read instead of being creative. I could always do it later.
There was too much time, and not enough pressure. My best writing in highschool always happened during exam season. Blocks of time off school when we were supposed to be studying for cumulative exams (which my American parents didn’t really understand the purpose of) had ideas popping around my brain and itching to get on paper. But as soon as summer break arrived, with endless days for writing, it all just turned back to dreaming. I have a feeling I’m not alone.
As much as we writers think that we’d be better off like Keats and , roaming the wilderness in solitude, free to think and write-- we probably wouldn’t do much except get sunburned. Writers need a bit of pressure to write. And if writers need pressure, why can’t my demanding three-year-olds nap-time schedule be the pressure to force me to sit myself in the chair and write, instead of an editor’s artificial deadline? Who is telling me that’s more important, more official? I tell myself things like this as I climb up the ladder to my tower-desk this morning, anxiously looking at the clock, feeling that precious minutes are being wasted. I am important. What I want to write about is important. This pressure is good for me. This is possible.
This conferring of significance to my work through my tools, whether it is an office or a desk, makes me feel conflicted. I feel I should be strong enough to believe mothering and writing is “real” work whether I have some kind of concrete evidence of it or not. When I don’t believe in the importance of a thing, I get a bit frantic looking for external validation, as if my fancy planner or editing software or my expensive stroller and the mother’s group on the internet is somehow going to tell everyone else (myself included) that I’m not an imposter.
But on the other hand, it’s dignifying to have the tools and support that I need to do things well. No one expected Bronson Alcott to write on a sliver of a desk in his bedroom, and perhaps they shouldn’t have expected Louisa to, either. Mothers and unpaid writers aren’t supposed to have needs. Starving artists are meant to be grateful for any exposure, mothers should be glad that fathers do the dishes once a week. But I’m a human, with a body, with real hands and wrists that get cramps from writing on my laptop propped up on my lap. And so I need a desk.
And maybe, maybe this is how God made us. We’re not entirely self-sufficient. Our bodies have real edges and hungers, we need things: time, space, sleep, flat places to write for a good chunk of time. We need ways to get OUT when we’re losing all sense of proportion, just as much as our children need snuggles and cuddles. We need desks and lists and computers just as much as we need internal drive and inspiration.
God made from nothing. He created with just words. But he made humans like me from dust, and in our work, including our creative work, we need not just words but shovels and paint brushes, washing machines, laptops, lists, and yes, desks.
My three-year-old’s face appears at the top of the steps. Today, he decides to quietly climb down and sit next to me. “Are you working?” he asks.
“I’m writing.” I say.
“Can you get me my journal, too?” he asks.
It only lasts about five minutes before he loses concentration and wants tea, and the blanket pulled exactly correctly over his knees, and something crunchy to dip into his tea, and did I know that certain trucks use hydraulics? And the little window of quiet is gone.
But for a moment, I had it all.
ENDNOTES:
Creative spaces:
Morash, Karen. “Dear Virginia.” Literary Mama, Literary Mama, 2018, literarymama.com/articles/departments/2018/11/dear-virginia.
For More on Alcotts:
Orchard House: https://louisamayalcott.org/
John Matteson (2008), Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father
Madeline L’Engle
“The result of this early lesson...{“ page 161) Madeleine. A Circle of Quiet. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.
“Every so often I need OUT; page 4: L'Engle, Madeleine. A Circle of Quiet. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.
“It was supposed to be Absolutely Private…” page 7 L'Engle, Madeleine. A Circle of Quiet. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.
“In this decade...” (page 19)
For more on L’Engle:
Arthur, Sarah. A Light so Lovely: the Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time. Zondervan, 2018. -
I'm saving this to come back and savour later ☕