Where We Make: Yours Truly
Earlier this year I accepted a position as a resident assistant at an ESL school in a Boston suburb, which means I get room and board in exchange for easy part-time work. I've made some very dear friends here and I get to save my advance money (YAY!), but other aspects of life on campus are, needless to say, less than ideal. I am living in a dormitory—not nearly as nice a dorm as those I had at NYU!—and I know many of my friends and colleagues (who are living, y'know, responsible grown up lives) find this state of affairs somewhat horrifying, though they are too polite to say so. Yes, in my private space there are cinderblock walls, chipped linoleum flooring and a long-forgotten flip-flop gathering dust under the window seat. At any given moment, day or night, I might hear teenagers shouting and singing in any of a dozen languages in the commons outside my window. But there's also plenty of built-in shelving, a sufficient number of electrical outlets, and an abundance of sunlight for my maidenhair fern and basil plant to revel in.
I became a writer, a real writer, in a room I shared with three other girls at La Pietra, so life at Pine Manor feels like coming full circle in a way that actually amuses me. I'm reminded on a daily basis of just how little I need in order to do what I do best: I have my own desk, my own chair, my own room, and money to keep me. Virginia Woolf would concur that I am absolutely set.
No matter how temporary, though, I do like to make a space my own. I've crammed the shelves with books for research, pleasure, self improvement, and all combinations thereof. I've put up a bulletin board my dad gave me, and it still sports a Spag's bumper sticker from when my aunt Kathy lived in Shrewsbury in the '80s. Funny thing: when I look at that sticker, I think not of the past, the ersatz golden days of dowdy Christmas sweaters and are we there yet?, but of how right it feels to be living in Massachusetts here and now.
Where We Make will be a weekly series on creative workspaces, appearing each Friday. Read the submission guidelines here. If you'd like to contribute a profile of your own space, please email me at cometpartyATgmailDOTcom.