I’m giving a paper at the Writing Urban Space conference at University of Surrey in Guilford on 23 April, (re)visiting the subject of interstitial practices and 2 Ennerdale Drive: unauthorised biography. Iain Sinclair is the keynote speaker, which I’m very excited about and I’m also going to see him give a talk at the Institut francais on 3 March. No more details yet.
Category: 2 Ennerdale Drive: unauthorised biography
I’m going to be one of the conversationalists, along with Sue Jones and Rick West, at Dr Thursday’s Salon on 25 February. The conversation I’m going to lead will be about the questions:
Who are you writing for and how does this influence what you’re writing?
For ‘writing’, substitute your favoured medium. When I was thinking about what to talk about, or what other people would like to talk about, I realised that lots of the questions come around to the same areas. So I was also thinking about titles for your work, titles for yourself (as in, what do you call yourself). It probably works because I’m still immersed in 2 Ennerdale Drive, even though it’s launched off into a new phase.
That said, I’m particularly sorry that I won’t hear Sue’s conversation. I’d be very interested to hear if she has anything to add to the notes in her e-interview where she talks about the desire to be both a curator and writer.
I finally felt finished enough (as in, good enough for the next stage) to deliver 2 Ennerdale Drive to Zer0. The last couple of weeks were really intense and exhausting, exhilarating, boom boom boom, keep going, don’t stop. From the vista of, phew, almost ten days later, it already feels like a great and productive time. It never quite stops feeling scary – or should that read, the adrenaline lasted out well – but what I’ve ended up with is, for now, both the book I wanted to write and the book that can be published. It’s changed enormously in three months, and happily stayed the same, got more itself. Less words, chapters, pictures; chapters moved around, picture texts moved around; chapter headings changed. Title stays the same for now, except that when Zer0, very speedily, sent me a cover proof, it had gained ‘an’. I can do without it, I think.
It took me ages dancing around the edges of my manuscript to get back into it. By November I’d started to find a way in. Plenty of time off from the AA over christmas allowed to get fully immersed in it again but it’s such a long process that you have to maintain your self-belief and keep your nerve – sometimes it just fails. The book is now about 15000 words shorter, I think it’s 15000 words better. I’ve taken out a lot of the ‘commentary’, where, I realised, I was writing about what the book is doing, rather than writing the book (describing it instead of doing it). And then sometimes I falter and think I’ve cut out what was special about it, I’ve lost my voice as it were.
Anyway, now it’s the last couple of weeks until I get it to Zer0. So I have to keep going. More later …
I’m working on my final rewrite for the book before I deliver at the end of this year. Today (when I’m working elsewhere on something else …) I think I know how to proceed with it, it’s all there and soon to be making the sense I want it to make. Other days, it’s a scary mess. I can take scant comfort in knowing that my descriptions of what I’m doing are good; if I’m actually doing it is something quite different.
One of the big questions I have to resolve is whether the book needs a new title. Has it grown out of the confines of the house? Or does the house still operate as a container for all the stories (which do emanate from it, organically speaking)?
Talking to myself again.
And just before I went to the launch I find out that I’ve got a publisher for 2 Ennerdale Drive: unauthorised biography, which is going to be published by Zer0 Books. I’m really really excited about it. My proposal got a very positive response from them, that they’ve got it and I have that feeling that this will work (which isn’t to say that it won’t be tortuous). It came about because I read one of their books, Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, who knows (now) ex-AA colleague Henderson Downing, so I contacted Owen who told Zer0 about my book.
Or rather, what do I want to do next??
Once 2 Ennerdale Drive is published (excerpts will be posted here soon), I’m looking for something new: a new project or venue perhaps.
I have two versions of a waiting room project – a continuation of my series the state, the activity, the architecture and the place of waiting that so far has has been published in short story and multimedia form and is designed to be delivered in different distribution formats.
The project is about representing online waiting and focuses on the metaphorical relationship to delays and lag on the web, going against received ideas of the online world’s velocity – I would be making work about using web-based facilities and artworks to be viewed/used/read during the waiting experience. I would like to produce this as a series of self-reflexive audio/image/text artworks about waiting, to be consumed while waiting for site elements to load and/or as a work of digital writing.
That was the title of my keynote presentation at the University of Warwick, Depatment of English and Comparative Literary Studies Department conference on 7 March 2009 titled Woman Writing Space: Representations of gender and Space in post-1850 British Women\’s Writing.
My paper concentrated on three interstitial spaces – doorway, hall and waiting room – as represented in three pieces of my work: A trick of the light (architexts.co.uk) , 2 Ennerdale Drive (unpublished book-length work in progress) and \’design for waiting room\’ (thelondongroup. com/outside/outside_3)
I had originally intended to write the paper in relation to – to give its full title 2 Ennerdale Drive: unauthorised biography. In the process of writing the paper, it occurred to me that both the types of spaces and my approach in writing them are mirrored across other works and other aspects of my practice. I describe my practice as existing in the interstices between fields such as architecture and literature, critical and creative writing (also known as art writing), irrigating highly territorialised borders between proximate subjects. It isn’t only the spaces I’m working with and the practices I use to describe them, interstitial works too as a description for where I situate myself as a writer/artist. Writing a space for myself to occupy, which, it occurred to me on the day, could be a kind of digital version of A Room of One’s Own.
The day’s programme was divided into panels on Contemporary Urban Spaces, Nation Spaces and Victorian Borders and Boundaries. Lynne Walker’s keynote paper ‘Going Public: Victorian Women, Identity and Domestic Space’ illuminated an area of London that I walk through every week. Her fascinating study of women writers echoed my steps through in Bloomsbury as I went to work at the AA. Other papers that stood out for me were Zöe Skoulding’s (Bangor) on the poets Redell Olsen and Frances Presley; Ann Hoag (Trinity, Dublin) on Rebecca West and Henriette Donner (York, Toronto) whose reflexive presentation on Villette also introduced me to the work of Daisy Al-Amir (The Waiting List).
As often happens, the process of producing the work for the day and the day itself – within the programme and discussion and conversation – gave rise to new insights about work completed and ideas for that in progress and forthcoming.
In April 2008 I gave a paper at the Architexture conference ‘Exploring textual and architectural spaces’. The conference, as the title suggests, was designed to bring together people working in and – best of all from my perspective – across the disciplines of architecture, writing and art (academics, practitioners, artists) and was organised across the Departments of architecture and English at the university.
‘The interdisciplinary conference investigates the relationships between architectural and literary constructions of space. It will explore the influence of spatial theories within literary texts; consider how writers evoke and represent a sense of place; and invite new perspectives on the aesthetic, physical, and social functions of texts in the design, production and consumption of the built environment.’
The paper, titled 2 Ennerdale Drive: paper, stone, scissors is based on the work-in-progress book of (almost) the same name. It concentrated on some of the aspects of the methodology of the writer and the architect; the enduring and permanent and the ephemeral and temporary; surfacing constituents of practice often considered beyond the purview of the public gaze. Through observations on work in progress and reading excerpts from the work I intended to contribute to a commentary on the ways in which the work of the architect, developer and writer constructs spatial narratives about public and private space, and their impact on class identities and gender roles.
I will be delivering a keynote presentation at this conference – full title: Women Writing Space, Representations of Gender and Space in post-1850s British Women’s Writing – in March 2009. Lynne Walker, the architectural historian who used to be head of the management committee when I worked at Women’s Design Service in the 1980s/90s, and who contributed to my edited collection New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender, will also be on the panel.
See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/wws/
My paper is (provisionally) titled ‘Interstitial spaces: Crossing the threshold in 2 Ennerdale Drive, a memoir of a house’.
Rosa Woolf Ainley / Writing and other works 