Writing From Home: Why This Blog?
This blog was inspired by living through two disasters: Hurricane Harvey in August of 2017, and the COVID epidemic—still, of course, ongoing. Harvey destroyed my family’s house by Braes Bayou in Houston, TX. This coincided with our sons leaving home, and after a long and stressful period of dealing with moldy belongings, a ravaged property, an unusually understanding insurance agent, dozens of online forms that did not work properly, and a strange feeling of placelessness, my husband and I bought another house and began a period of empty nesting. That nest is now full. My grown sons (a teacher and a college student) were caught here during what we had always wished for--coinciding spring breaks. They—and their dogs--are still here; we mostly stay at—and work from-- home. Anyone who has entered a house turned upside-down by a few hours of floodwaters will wonder about their relation to domestic space. Anyone who has stayed at home for 100 days and counting, will wonder about the limits and privileges of confinement within the walls of home.
I also had another, more professional interest in all things having to do with home. As a scholar and teacher of Victorian literature, I have been writing an academic book about the home as an ideal, and about how that ideal, which took shape in the nineteenth century, is still with us today. The book, as I envisioned it in 2014 would explore how homes—and particularly middle-class homes—came to be associated with safety, immunity from disease, and the exclusion of foreign elements. There is also a story to be told about the surprisingly recent association of home with women.
This blog is what happened to that academic book under the pressure of twin disasters. I like to think of this new version as a survivor of the floodwaters, the unhoming, and the exhaustion following Harvey. It is also a persistent companion to my extreme homing during the pandemic. Harvey and COVID profoundly changed my relationship to my work as I started writing shorter pieces meant for a broader audience—or sometimes for no audience at all.
As I hope to explore in the blog itself, both disasters, but perhaps especially COVID, also changed my relationship to time. My days during Texas’s stay-at-home order and afterwards, when my family decided to continue staying at home, grew simultaneously shorter and longer, as I struggled both with boredom and a sense of urgency. As the late summer evenings come to an end and the house darkens, I realize from looking at my Apple Watch that I have been busy all day. I rarely feel that I have accomplished anything. Shorter pieces fit better with the new rhythms of my life. My last book took 17 years to write, the one before that 5. I am no longer confident in a future for myself, for academic life, or, frankly, for the world, that relies on the postponement of expression and communication.
There is another, less exalted reason why I am writing shorter pieces. Harvey and COVID have also altered my ability to concentrate on long pieces: as I write this sentence, I am thinking not only of the words I am choosing, the shape of my syntax, or even of what I want to express, but also of the state of my house. I am thinking about the dog hair that is piling up on the stairs, caught like COVID itself in interior airflows, and I am resisting the gravitational pull of a messy kitchen. Home and its labors haunt every aspect of my work.
My new relation to writing is an exciting one. I have written an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle, and have contributed many times to the Rice Feminist Forum, a blog that invites contributions in response to timely prompts, from “The Woman Card” during the 2016 election, to “Hearing” during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, to “Social Distancing” (no explanation needed). I am learning to live with home in my writing, just as I am learning to write from home. Only a small part of me mourns the academic book that will likely never be written
This blog will offer pieces several times a week, some of them about Harvey and some about COVID. Some will be more polished than others. As with all bloggers I hope someone, somewhere will read what I have to say, but I look forward to the pleasures of the writing itself.