Sina Queyras - Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf

The book cover has a beige paper-like background with stacked navy blue trapezoids that are overlapping and semi-translucent. The cover text is in a large serif font with one word in each trapezoid.

Sina Queyras

Coach House Books, Toronto

copyright Sina Queyras, 2022

first edition

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: Rooms : women, writing, Woolf / Sina Queyras.

Names: Queyras, Sina, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210296755 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210296828 | ISBN 9781552454336 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770566903 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781770566910 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Queyras, Sina, 1963- | LCGFT: Creative nonfiction. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC PS8583.U3414 R66 2022 | DDC C818/.607dc23

Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 690 3 9 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 691 0 (PDF)

Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling.

Virginia Woolf, February 1922

The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Framing is how chaos becomes territory.

Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch beyond the next wise crack.

Katherine Hepburn, Stage Door

Shall I ever finish these notes let alone make a book from them? The battle is at its crisis; every night the Germans fly over England; it comes closer to this house daily. If we are beaten then however we solve that problem, and one solution is apparently suicide (so it was decided three nights ago in London among us) book writing becomes doubtful. But I wish to go on, not to settle down in that dismal puddle.

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

I was alone, blissfully so, in the early morning of my writing life. I was trying to complete an assignment about Virginia Woolf for my Introduction to Literature class and the more I read, the farther the scaffolding of college, professor, paper, slipped away from me. I, whatever I is, was aquatic, song-filled, but not only joyful, the salt of loss, too, rose and fell in me; no writer had ever evoked in me such a response; nothing had ever felt so familiar and outrageous, so foreign and close. The Waves swelled and in them all of time swirled. For some hours after setting the book down I lay on the floor unable to move my body, but inside my mind my body was swimming through time simultaneously in several Londons and in many childhoods and countrysides, in forests with felt edges and padded skies, with figures moving through the air like crows.

It was the winter of 1988 and I was grateful to be alone in the little prefab home in Parksville, British Columbia, that I shared with L., my then partner, and her brother, because I felt so naked suddenly, and my body brazen, blinding, without gender or the constraint of sex. Shame followed me everywhere in those days; I was often even when I stood limp with it. I can see it now, in context, a shady, ill-lit place of narrow thinking.

The vastness of the space Woolfs texts had created in me didnt so much shock me as soothe, even as they upended everything. Everything should be upended, I thought, regularly; the lie of propriety oppressed me in every direction. How accumulation mattered. Who had power around me? Over and over again the lack of care for others was rewarded. Those who could turn a blind eye to the damage they caused gathered more and more status, power, and wealth.

What Woolf s text seemed to offer wasnt conventional world-building like how intimately I felt I knew the shire, for example, a world that takes up but a few pages at the beginning and end of The Hobbit; or the smell of the riverbank where the child in Joyce Carol Oates haunting short story The Molesters plays and how it had mingled with my own childhood memories of men taking me into forests, so much so that it made me feel nauseated and powerless; or in The Handmaids Tale, Offreds thinking in the rooms she is forced to circulate in that made me feel so trapped I sometimes felt I couldnt see beyond my own skin and I threw the book across the room in anger and then stomped on it and then tore it apart. What good is a world that isnt an answer to the one we are inhabiting?, I wondered.

I did not want to toss or tear anything of Woolfs, I simply wanted to sink into it. What was this world Woolf was building? It was interior, but not trapped. It was world-building but not realism; it was active, outward world-building; it was, as Jeanette Winterson later described, elegiac; it was, I thought, elational.

This was the tenor of thought that thrummed under the surface of my hours. Waves came, and came again, but the sea I was in was not unpleasant; I was buoyed by it, floating through the life that had come to feel so mundane and so far from my values, and yet it was not a sea of depression and passivity. It was molecular and alive; it was ecstatic in its interior reorienting and also revelatory in how I felt about the relationship of thinking to the natural world.

I knew the power of the natural world. I had at times seen waves on the ferry back and forth from the mainland reaching so high that they seemed like fists punching at us through the windows four or five storeys up. I had stepped off the path in the forest and slid thigh-deep into moss and rotted cedar; I had seen the miniature forests of the West Coast, trees that would normally tower, bonsaied by the wind; I had witnessed salmon muscling upriver so thick they looked like a Mediterranean rooftop you might walk across. I had seen anger, and fear, not only in the eyes of deer, but in owls, frogs, the indignant fox.

Not to mention the interiority of my own mind, suddenly staring back at me.

The waves were all around the little house with its basement filled with pot plants. Perhaps, if a text like this existed and was worth studying, I thought, my yearning wasnt crazy after all.

Finally, the cat put her paw on my cheek, then the dog with her nose on my forearm and her gentle, plaintive growl, and then my partners dog with his howl. I sat up. Perhaps, like Orlando I had also read that I had been asleep for some years and was now someone else, another gender or a gender of my own, and time was somewhere else. Perhaps when I went to the window, I would see that I had entered a new world? Certainly, having left the city, we had done that. Maybe life was a series of such unfurlings?

When I got up and tried to step out of the water with my dogs, it did not seem possible. The sea was all around me, but of course, you understand, it was in me; the waves were me. I made it to the door. There it was still. The forest. The trees like a battalion of stewing creatures. The animals launched themselves, two blond shapes swimming through sword ferns and salal. We sloshed across the yard to the greenhouse where I was starting plants for the garden; we sloshed to the river for our walk; and, later, the dogs and I piled into my boat of a car (a 1964 teal-green Rambler station wagon) and sailed to my sister-in-laws for dinner; the next night I was off to the restaurant where I worked on the weekends, but everywhere I went I was inside Woolfs mind looking out at the strange world I inhabited with its resistance to all things prickly and queer.