Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf

by Sina Queyras

From a Lambda-winning poet, Rooms shows the defining spaces a queer writer moved through as they found their way to a life of words.

Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after they’d 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.

Rooms, bodies, Beadles: using Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone, this book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of one’s 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 social medias.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Queer, Literature, Literary Criticism, Writing, Canada

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 8, 2022

About the author

Sina Queyras' last collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award, and she is the winner of the 2012 Friends of Literature Award. She is a blogger for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.

Reviews

[Tia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisitely written and so alive to all of the ways in Woolf enchants, challenges, provokes, and moves the mind and body. I love the attention to a Woolf that has otherwise been overshadowed by her suicide and mental illness - of a woman described by friends as being so intense, passionate, full of laughter, joyous, strange, always in motion. This is also a fabulous journey through the writing life. Both in terms of style (rhythm!) and content, this helped me unlock some writing with which I have been struggling for three years now. Thank you, Sina Queyras! My favourite of the year so far.

“Perfection has never been the point of loving Virginia Woolf, it has always been pleasure, and map-making. Her room is my room. My room is your room. I see a long line of writing moving forward through waves of linked individuals. Connected.… I see forms, interlocking arms, pools of time buoying us. Determined. Fluid. Ready. Receptive, not only reactive, but proactive. Ever undoing the knots of pain we inherit. Ever creating space for new minds to take root. That is, to me, the future.”

[Dramatika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent study of doest it mean to be able to write, on while one women of upper class dreamt of the study room another from different class might just wish for the roof over one’e head. It gets deeper than that. Great book on how our class environment and geography shapes ourselves

[Kate]

*CANADIAN*
"I preferred silence to the possibility of saying something over the raw, or revealing, or prickly. I never knew what shape is sentence might take, what it might reveal, or how to change it once the utterance was out. I realize now how uncomfortable this made people, but I did not know why, or how, to change, hide, or dim the situation other than to completely silence myself, which was a choice I often made."~pg.73
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"If I close my eyes, I could feel the energy, the hum at the centre of the work I so desire to do. It reminded me of my first encounter with Woolf, with The Waves. Now I was here again, but the waves, this time, I could see where all edgy; they were filled with childhood, bubbling, innocent, and brutal, the harsh lines and assistant, repetitive as morning. It was here, the points connected and the line staying free. I had only, I thought to get out of my own way. Let a logic assembled before me. But how? How was I doing that on the page and could I do it, too, and life? ~pg.117
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Thoughts ~
An absolutely wonderful read about a queer writers journey to define a space for their craft.

Queyras blends genres, writing styles and beautiful poetic prose drawing parallels between Wolf's work and their own life, exploring their queerness in body and coming of age as a writer. Through their own troubled personal history, writing and work we explore these 'rooms' literally and figuratively defining a space of their own.

I was blown away by this book. I havent read much Woolf, but I appreciate everything she brought to feminism and literature. I just loved how Queyras took their love of Woolf's work and propelled it into their own facinating exploration, self discovery, and non binary journey. I have no words. This is one of thoes books that will leave you thinking, appreciating, and rereading.

A great read for pride, if you enjoy insight into writers lives, Virginia Woolf and personal journeys.

Thank You to @coachousebooks for sending me this book opinions are my own.

For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong

[Lillian Lippold · Rating 5 out of 5]

full review here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRpmx2Ct/

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

For someone who spends several of the early pages of their book lamenting the difficult task of writing yet another book about Woolf, Queyras sure doesn't write that much about Woolf.

[Laurie Siblock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've long been an admirer of Virginia Woolf, so I suspected I would enjoy Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf, but I've never read anything by Sina Queyras so I didn't know what to expect. I found beautiful writing, vulnerability, and surprising new insights into Woolf and her writing.

Queyras entwines her own process of learning and growing into her own confidence and sense of belonging in a writing life with that of Woolf's process, texts, and life story. As she does so, she examines the impact of reading Woolf, particularly A Room of One's Own, on her own sense of identity, and what it takes to be a writer and a woman seeking a writing life.

Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf made me want to read again some of my favourite Woolf books, read more Queyras, and write, write, write.

[Yumei Gu · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this poetic book, Sina explores, examines, writes, and shows how she lives her life with Virginia Woolf.
It is about queer bodies and queer existence.
It is about how to live a writer's life, how to have a room of one's own, a frame of mind of one's own.
It is about how the Academy has failed and how it could be built better.

The "room" is not the point; Afterall, "the room is in me." The room is in us.

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book somewhat randomly at the queer-run bookstore in my city. It was randomly extremely important to me--I am in grad school for creative writing, and I've been struggling to feel like I understand my "why" or what I want out of my program. I think I need to sit with this book for a while, but it will be one I return to sooner rather than later.

[Wei Chang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sina Queyras' prose isn't as magical as her poems, but it does convey a moving and provocative story telling.
I really thought this would be a book about (objectively) women, writing, and Woolf, yet it is rather a text about the interwoven-ness of herself, women, writing, and Woolf. It's quasi-autobiography, with a sufficient sense of literary critics; while it is reflective, it's actually entertaining (maybe she would say wtf). There are paragraphs that makes me felt (it is) redundant and repetitive, yet it is full of some of the most ineluctable first hand emotions.
I normally is not a reader that would pay much attention to those biographical information of an author but those records, even trivial, do provide me with more attachment to the other works of the author (SQ), so I really appreciate the kind of honesty and truthfulness in this book.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best quote: page 8, re: reading
"What good is a world that isn't an answer to the one we are inhabiting?

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

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