Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf
English
By (author): Sina Queyras
SHORTLISTED FOR THE QWF MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022
From LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind
Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after theyd turned in an essay on Virginia Woolf.
Queyras returns to that contentious first encounter with Virginia Woolf to recover the body and thinking of that time. Using Woolfs A Room of Ones Own as a touchstone, this book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of ones own at the centre of our idea of a literary life.
How central is the room? And what happens once we get one? Do we inhabit our rooms? Or do the rooms contain us? Blending memoir, prose, tweets, poetry, and criticism, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind, and from a very private life of the mind to a public life of the page, and from a life of the page into a life in the Academy, the Internet, and on social media.
With Virginia Woolf alongside them, Queyras journeys through rooms literal and figurative, complicating and deepening our understanding of what it means to create space for oneself as a writer. Their hard-won language challenges us to resist any glib associations of Woolfs famous room with an easy freedom. Inspiring and moving, Queyrass memoir testifies to Woolfs continuing generative power.Mark Hussey, editor of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (2011) and author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (2021)
In this beautiful, perceptive book, Sina Queyras moves deftly between the words and wake of Virginia Woolf and their own formation as writer, lover, teacher, friend, and person. Rooms is expert in its depiction of personal and literary histories, and firmly aware of its moment of composition. Reading these pages, I was enticed by Queyrass curiosity and openness, thrilled by the sharp edges of their anger. Tight prose, electric thinking, self-discovery its all here, all abuzz. Rooms is alive. Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book
It is impossible not to question the world as we thought we knew it by the end of this book. Sina Queyras painstakingly aims their extraordinary nerve and talent at Virginia Woolfs idea of a room of ones own: 'Its a mistake to consider the room without all of its entanglements.' Taking Woolfs cue, Queyras explores writing that is not world-building but something far more generous and transformative; as Woolf wrote, 'Literature is open to everybody.' CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration