Rosalind Harvey reflects on her Nest Residency

Recently I have been thinking a lot about space. The literal, physical space in which to do one’s work (Virginia Woolf’s ‘Room of One’s Own’), but also the mental space you need to carve out in which to write, to think, to create. I normally work from home and am very used to doing so (I’ve been a self-employed writer-translator for almost 15 years now), but after spending more time at home than even I am comfortable with during lockdown, my relationship to working from home has shifted.

The main thing my six-day ‘Nesting’ residency at Talking Birds granted me was space, in many senses. Look at the sky in this picture – so much space! 

The canal is the only large-ish body of water in this city that I moved to 6 years ago, and, as someone who grew up in Bristol and lived in London for 10 years, a visible body of water is something I miss a great deal, and so I gravitated towards the canal here when I discovered it. The water in the canal is its own space, too: a space that belongs to coots, moorhens, swans, the occasional narrowboat or kayak. Things move more slowly there, and in ways we cannot fully see. I also had the (novel, for me!) space of walking to work – thinking space, mulling things over space, space to transition from ‘domestic mode’ to ‘writing mode’ – and of course, the actual space of the studio.

While in this space, I considered the visual (spatial!) aspect of writing/drafting/composing. Sharing a studio space (although I never met her) with a sculptor whose materials were on and around the other desk, and generally being in a space that tends to host more visual artists and performers than writers, meant I was more conscious than usual, perhaps, of the non-literary, or rather, non-writerly, sides of my practice: I like to see what I have written, to print it out and lay it all down on the floor (I remember doing this years ago with the entirety of my master’s thesis) so I can connect certain sections to other sections, move bits around, scrawl on it with pen and get a sense of how it works as a whole, how big it really is, which you can never really see on a screen. I did some of this in Helloland, the studio I was in, which has big walls that are just crying out for some poster-paper-and-marker-pen action:

I love this way of working, and I can’t do it at home: at least, not in quite this way – I’d need to use drawing pins (the walls aren’t technically mine – a rented space of one’s own is never fully… well… one’s own), which somehow aren’t as satisfying as squidgy bits of white-tack. At some point, whatever it is I’m writing will have to be transferred to the glaring, digital space of a Word document, but for me, there’s nothing like scrawling big themes on a huge piece of paper in order to really feel and see what it is you’re trying to explore. You’ll see from the photo above that I also wrote fragments on lined paper, which I then tore up and stuck on the wall: I wanted, in this time (this space) to experiment with fragmentary forms of writing, a way of composing that involves adding space in between short sections of prose, or poetic prose. The spaces in between provide a place for a reader to take a breath, and for the writer to see each fragment as a discrete thought, free-floating (like a moorhen, perhaps?), while also being connected (through the place you choose to position them) to whichever fragment comes next or goes before. They build, slowly, to a whole.

I recorded a spoken piece of writing for a podcast a few months ago, comparing the development of a writing practice with the development of a yoga practice, and having the space at Talking Birds led me to reflect on this comparison further. I was unable on most days to arrive at 9am on the dot and work through until 5pm, and on the first couple of days this left me feeling guilty. But knowing that I had those 6 days meant I was ultimately able to relax and to allow myself to be reminded that it’s rare I can write for 6, 7, 8 hours a day, like a ‘normal’ job: I have maybe 2, occasionally 3 ‘creatively productive’ hours most days, and once I surrender to them, I can allow other more mundane work to fill the other hours. As long as I can carve out a few hours, keep them in mind, they are a shimmering space on the horizon of my mind that I know are for writing, just as I also have a space (usually an hour) for doing yoga always present in my mind. To keep a yoga practice going, I need that time, and the physical space of the mat. To keep a writing practice, I need that time and also that mental space, that awareness of the time that writing needs. Being at Talking Birds reminded me of the need for that space, the need to remind yourself you have it, and it just needs carving out.

Halfway through, my residency was interrupted, mentally, by unexpected news from my landlord and the resulting anxiety caused by the security of my actual residence (ie, my rented home) suddenly not feeling as secure as it had done for the past 6 years. I spent half of the day this news arrived in shock, unable to work, and then, propelled in part by the irony of being plunged into more instability in the midst of this particular residency (instability/insecurity being one of the things I am trying to write about), I sat down and wrote about that very irony, about how my landlord – ha, ha, how nice of him! – was giving me an impetus to create something, to go deeper into my examination of what instability does to the creating mind, especially when a significant part of creating translations involves sitting with uncertainty, being comfortable with doubt. Just how much uncertainty can we bear in our work if our lives are coloured with uncertainty – financial, romantic, medical – ? 

In response, I wrote a poem, which I don’t normally do, and so in an odd way, this sudden increased uncertainty around a space I had thought of as my own allowed me to move into a different space (the space of poetry as opposed to prose) and explore what I was feeling in the temporary-but-secure space Talking Birds had provided me with. Here it is.