Composing at the Kitchen Table

| The kitchen table is an object that challenges notions regarding what counts as space for composing practices, in part because it is an object often associated with oppressive representations of domesticity. Therefore, women who choose or prioritize the kitchen table as a creative space practice a particular form of resistant cultural work that intertwines their composing practices with their everyday, lived experiences. The kitchen table then becomes a space through which feminisms are practiced and shaped by the table, making the table a space of resistance against hegemonic notions of what counts as feminist practice. keywords | feminisms, writing, tables, space, homeplace, resistance Figure 1: From April 26, 2018: the author's kitchen table as it looked when this article was first composed, scattered with her writing materials (laptop, paper, pens) and everyday ephemera. Copyright, Rhiannon Scharnhorst, 2019.

Turning the kitchen table into a composing space may be considered a privilege in the same way that having a desk of one's own suggests an intellectually-privileged space. Yet, historically, the kitchen table has not been given the same consideration as the desk. In the field of writing studies, the desk is still paramount, even when scholars turn to other writing spaces. For example, Nora Weinerth's "A Desk of One's Own" mentions a writer working at a kitchen table, but her analysis ends by suggesting the table as just another desk. 3 She does not pay homage to the table as a space integral to the work produced, the table as differently shaping the writing that happens on its changing surface. As the materiality of writing spaces changes, and continues to change, so do my questions.
I don't know that I can answer all of these questions about the kitchen table yet, or if they are answerable to any degree of certainty. This essay suggests that one starting point is to look at some of these tables through photos, poems, essays, presses, letters, or stories. What follows is a series of meditations on different kitchen tables. I begin with a focus on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) to orient myself and the reader in the materiality of writing, and from there, move in and out of different stories, particularly those of women of color, to make sense of how objects like the table also become spaces upon which we shape our writing and our writing shapes us. I use the vignette style not to separate these stories from each other but to offer multiple sites of beginning and not to privilege my own narrative as a white academic woman. 4 Although these stories are interwoven through my voice here, they are also the artistic practices of diverse and individual women, and I do not want to conflate their work and their feminisms into one monolithic narrative.
In writing this essay, I do not mean to minimize the importance of culinary artisanship, but I want to focus on art coming from the kitchen that is not strictly culinary. In each of the works I analyze, women of color use the kitchen, and particularly the kitchen table, as the canvas upon which they create expressive work that does not include food as its primary focus. This is not to say I want to divorce culinary or domestic work from the artistic forms of expression I analyze-just that my analysis does not originate from sole attention to culinary and domestic work. By starting at the table, we can ask larger questions about materiality and meaning: who uses the kitchen table?
Who abandons it? What gets put on, taken off, pushed aside from it? Who is around it, and who isn't?
A note here about my citation practice: in crafting this essay, I listened, a few times, to Toni Morrison's 1993 "Nobel Lecture in Literature" and walked away chanting: "Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge." 5 To wit, I see citational practice as one avenue to deny oppressive language. Thus, following Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life (2017), I claim citation as "feminist bricks" and "feminist memory," or "materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings." 6 In that spirit, this dwelling was created by reading work by women, and especially by reading work by women of color. I cite them to signal my own debt to their knowledges but also because any contribution I make toward feminist scholarship has been profoundly shaped and influenced by their words. To them, I give deep thanks. Table   I first center my material focus on space in a macro-sense (the room), but I want to continue to push further to consider, in a micro-sense, the surface upon which composition happens (the table). Scholars of composition like Hannah Rule suggest this turn, who writes:

The Feminist
The figure of the room is foremost meant to emphasize that writing activity is never not emplaced: composing processes only happen through things, spaces, time, action, and bodily movement. This point may feel obvious, but it has been concealed by long-standing incorporeal constructions of processes that, for example, see writing first as abstract thinking or as located first in social space or discourse communities. 7 Rule draws on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929), in part, because Woolf's argument for women writers to have their own writing space still influences feminist writing scholarship. While A Room of One's Own has its limits-such as its focus exclusively on women who are financially well-off and presumably white-it does draw my attention back to the critical meaning inherent in spaces. It participates in a conversation about how women were able to write in the small spaces of time between domestic duties. My question: who are the women who are thinking, writing, and composing art-and especially art that would identify itself as feminist-in spaces where Woolf would find it unlikely? I write this essay to further Woolf's close attention to the materiality of writing, and particularly how she draws my attention to the critical social and political capital of the room, to suggest that the writing experience is also influenced by the surfaces people write on, like the kitchen table.
Woolf's inquiries into writing in A Room of One's Own develop through a prolonged looking and studying, a systematic analysis that ties images and ideas together; I model this essay on that process. Her method involves looking for gaps in the archives and concocting a narrative to advance her inquiry. I see the kitchen table as a gap in the writing archive, an object integral to writing yet often overlooked in the vignettes that follow. Kitchen tables bear the weight of our lives in motion; in this way, they function as ephemeral archives. By an archive, I mean a record, even fleeting, of the things that matter, that need tending to, that are important enough not to throw away yet, that need to be handy. They bear the detritus of everyday living alongside the work of ourselves and others within our communities.
The detritus of the everyday appear in Woolf's asides-like what writers are served for lunch-which textures her writing with the mundane and dissolves the boundary between intellectual work and the everyday. Broadly conceived, Woolf's writing develops along parallel lines: look/study, gap/whole, inquiry/story, walking/eating. The writing process mimics the intellectual inquiry she engages in. This parallelism is also provided by objects like the kitchen table; while it physically stands as its own thing, its surface provides parallel spaces for writers' lives and art: eat/write, intellectual work/domestic work, mine/yours. Things and ideas become interwoven, twined together, inseparable. The work intertwines with interruption, making the table a space of constant change. While this parallelism could suggest a stagnant binary, I instead see it as laying bare the labor that goes into the writing process. Writing alongside ideas that do not seem integral becomes a part of the very story itself.
Writing with the interruption becomes part of the ebb and flow of process.
This writing practice does not divide the weightiness of lived experience from itself. Instead, the writer takes the images and emotions and weight of life and writes right alongside them. I imagine here Audre Lorde's Zami: A Biomythography claiming itself as literature, myth, biography. 8 Lorde's work refuses categorization just as writing at the kitchen table refuses the division between writing and not-writing, instead claiming not-writing as integral to practice. Or I hear Gloria Anzaldúa, writing in a letter to third world women writers: Forget the room of one's own-write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping or waking. I write while sitting on the john. No long stretches at the typewriter unless you're wealthy or have a patron-you may not even own a typewriter. While you wash the floor or clothes listen to the words chanting in your body. When you're depressed, angry, hurt, when compassion and love possess you. When you cannot help but write. 9 Writing at the kitchen table folds person and writer into one, demystifying the notion that writing can only happen in particular spaces or for particular people.
Writing happens because it must happen, it needs to happen. Writing, then, becomes a tool for feminists; it gathers emotion together with writing practice and combines them into one.
The kitchen table is a space within the figurative room of one's own that has been overlooked by writers who privilege clearly demarcated writing spaces.
Woolf herself overlooks the notion that some writers must snatch moments to write in between things, spaces, times. To further Woolf's own attention to materiality, I turn to the work of contemporary queer scholars of color, like Sara Ahmed, who writes in Queer Phenomenology (2006): "The table is not simply what Woolf faces but is also the 'site' upon which she makes her feminist point: that we cannot address the question of women and fiction without asking the prior question of whether women have space to write." 10 Writers bring their work into spaces, like rooms, but they also make their points upon those spaces, the tables. As writing happens, the surface of the table is changed, in ways small (like errant pen marks) and large (like the stacking of page upon completed page, raising the table). Kitchen tables, then, become archives of feminist tensions. They are objects that feminists often associate with patriarchal oppression because of their relationship to ideologies of domesticity. But for women who bring their writing to these tables, especially writing that they consider feminist, their surfaces are changed. The writers physically mark the tables' surfaces with their points of feminist tension. It is through these acts that the tables change from domestic objects to feminist spaces. No wonder some women writers need large spaces and strong surfaces to hold up their work.

The Shared Table
Think of the kitchen table as a surface that evokes the feelings of a "homeplace," the space that bell hooks describes as "the construction [by Black women] of a safe place where Black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination." 11 Through hooks's theorization, the table becomes a surface upon which Black women can both express care for themselves (through writing) and care for their communities (through storytelling). It is a surface that shapes Black women and their stories and that Black women shape for their own needs. hooks continues this notion in "An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional" (1990), where she describes how an object can tell a story about a community of Black women. She writes: "This is the story of a house. It has been lived in by many people. Our grandmother, Baba, made this house living space. She was certain that the way we lived was shaped by objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were placed around us." 12 In this configuration, objects themselves shape individuals and shape houses into spaces for living. If we extend this understanding of objects, it follows that the way writers make use of the kitchen Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press . . . [and] On the most basic level, Kitchen Table Press began because of our need for autonomy, our need to determine independently both the content and the conditions of our work and to control the words and images that were produced about us. As feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published except at the mercy or whim of othersin either commercial or alternative publishing, since both are white dominated. 13 The press's name also emphasizes that while individuals may experience oppression differently, feminist work begins in a shared place, such as around a kitchen table. Seeing the importance of the kitchen table to women of color in particular locates it in a history of feminist resistance demanding individual autonomy also rooted in community support, especially since that support is necessary for many women who do not come from the sort of privilege that white women writing into white-dominated publishing do. The press operates as the antithesis of the white woman writer locked away in her own room.
By naming their press after the kitchen table, Smith, Lorde, gusset, and Moraga make visible the labor that goes into creating an emblem of resistant cultural work. As Smith writes: "Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press is a revolutionary tool because it is one means of empowering society's most dispossessed people, who also have the greatest potential for making change." 14 While there is evidence to suggest that Smith originally felt a dissonance between the grueling, on-the-ground work of activism and the intellectual and cultural work of the press, she found the success of their publications, like This Bridge Called My Back (1981), to be indicative of the need for women of color, particularly queer women of color, to have a press devoted to their cause. By creating a space where women of color can respond to a culture that tries to oppress them, the press practices resistance that is just as integral to initiating change in the publishing world, both politically and socially. The press, in a sense, becomes the literal expression of the kitchen table of its namesake, operating as a feminist space for writing.
Kitchen  15 The anthology, which was the first major publication of Kitchen Table Press, is still in print today. 16 By keeping Bridge from going outof-print, the voices of the anthology, many of which focus on the importance of writing and collective action, were given shelter. The interwoven history of Kitchen Table Press with Bridge suggests the importance of the table as a space of creation, a shelter for voices that need to speak and that need to be heard. As Smith concludes, the table disrupts the hegemonic narrative of a singular voice crafting a singular history: We chose our name because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other. We also wanted to convey the fact that we are a kitchen table, grassroots operation, begun and kept alive by women who cannot rely on inheritances or other benefits of class privilege to do the work we need to do. 17 It was through the collective work of feminist artists who did not have access to the privileges engendered by race, class, and heteronormativity that Kitchen It is with the emblem of the table that Smith, Lorde, gusset, and Moraga honored that process, bridging the need for women to have a space to communicate with each other while also creating a volume filled with radical writing from a myriad of personal experiences. They made a new "image" of publishing through the evocative use of the table, extending in the form of a publishing house devoted to writings by women of color another possibility for hooks's "homeplace" to take shape in the world. Table   The scarred top of a well-used kitchen table records feminist tensions   alongside   In one of the most striking images, the woman stands alone, with her hands placed on the table, directly staring at the viewer. 23 Although the table is charged with multiple, sometimes conflicting, emotions, her gaze invites us into the space, invites us to feel all that she herself is feeling. Weems  Edwards's words, as a "support mechanism for daily life." 26 It is both refuge, homeplace, and revolutionary, resistant place. It is in the kitchen, and upon the table, where many rituals are shared among women, and it is through this collective experience, as Weems argues, that women eventually define and redefine their own image of feminist womanhood.

The Messy
The Table- But it is not until the very end of the memoir, in the "Continued…" section that I glimpse Smart-Grosvenor's kitchen table. In a short prose poem, she celebrates the way the kitchen functions as a space of creation. While the table lurks in the shadows, it seemingly appears as the surface behind the text (and yes, the following text is reproduced in all capital letters, just as it is in her work):

SOMETIMES THERE IS SO MUCH HAPPENING IN THE KITCHEN THAT I CAN'T GET TO THE STOVE TO COOK AND WE HAVE
TO CALL CHICKEN DELIGHT. 29 The surfaces upon which all this creation happens are not made explicit, but the embodied nature of creating certainly is. We can feel the vibrancy and motion in all the kitchen activities that Smart-Grosvenor lists, which highlight a creative life in motion. Even with the absence of the table in the poem, there are so many activities crisscrossing over each other that we can sense the table behind the words, holding up the sewing machine, the iron, the homework pages, and plates. It is an object that I can feel behind the pages, supporting and teasing out the relationships between creative acts and mundane, everyday acts of living.

The Next Table
It is through the objects we have in view-the objects that we use and prioritize-that we orient ourselves towards a certain way of being/becoming.
What does it mean to turn toward something in writing? To write your way across a table? To write a new way? The artistic works considered in this essay draw our attention to the surface of the table as one such space. This material turn emphasizes that writing is an emplaced activity, a thinking, communicating, ever-evolving practice that requires and is shaped by the surfaces upon which it happens. It also suggests that these surfaces have power, that they shape the women and the works that happen around them.
In thinking through my own experiences and in thinking through the writing of this essay, I have come to believe a few things to be true about the kitchen Kitchen tables are so rarely described in any detail by the artists and writers who make use of them, a conclusion I came to rather late in this writing process.
Kitchen tables are often just there, waiting for change to happen upon their surfaces. Why is it that a space that lurks behind the paper is so rarely described in any depth? Why is it that people know the minutiae of many writers' kitchens, of many chefs' kitchens, but not how they make use of kitchen tables?  30 This turn towards futurity implies the possibility for change; it indicates that "the terms of its appearance will be different. It might be that quite a different Biography R. Scharnhorst is a hybrid PhD student specializing in nineteenth-century English literature, feminist rhetorics, and composition at the University of Cincinnati (UC). Her work examines the intertwined relationship of food, feminisms, and writing practice. She most recently received a fellowship from the English Department at UC to continue her research in taste pedagogies as imagined through nineteenth-century American composition textbooks.

Notes
This essay took shape around a table of sorts, albeit not one in the kitchen. I'm deeply indebted to all my seminar peers who listened while I returned, endlessly, to tables in everything we read, and who offered terrific feedback on the many iterations of this essay. I especially extend gratitude to Laura Micciche, my own feminist hero. And finally, to another R. Scharnhorst, to my partner Ben, and to Lou, the cat that always interrupts at the right moment.