Introducing Tom McLaughlin’s ‘In Rooms of Falling Rain’: creativity, queerness and home

In Rooms of Falling Rain: creativity, queerness and home

 “At night the windows became more impenetrable and confining than even the walls…the walls were there but dimmed and softened, thinned by the lamplight, while the windows were a curious confinement – black and gleaming, and giving back to us darkened and [jagged] reflections of ourselves.” – Elizabeth Bishop, Reminiscences of Great Village

I write this from the Elizabeth Bishop house in Great Village, Nova Scotia. My week-long residency here marks the culmination of years of thinking about the relationship between creative work, queerness and home. The epigraph above is taken from notes Bishop wrote which would eventually cohere into the short story ‘In the Village’, a typed copy of which I find in the living room desk drawer. The notes circle around the trauma of losing her mother to institutionalisation at a young age, after the death of her father, and are rooted in descriptions of the house where she grew up. I am struck by how this quotation upsets the traditional image of the house: the walls become ‘dimmed and softened’, rather the firm barrier we construct to keep us safe inside. Contrastingly, the windows become ‘impenetrable and confining’; that portal to the outside world for Bishop here only reflects back a distorted version of the interior. She unsettles the domestic, then, and is interested in what happens when those reassuring structures we might take for granted no longer function as they should, which resonates with the preoccupations of my own work.

 Many of the poems that make up In Rooms of Falling Rain started life as part of my PhD project undertaken at the University of Surrey, in which I considered the relationship between queer domestic space and poetic form. Alongside my own poetry collection, I wrote a thesis on how the experience of home shaped the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Thom Gunn. The lives of these three poets span a period in the twentieth century during which poetic form and queer domesticity were both radically reimagined. I was interested in how their experiences of queer home-making might map onto the ways in which they reconfigured poetic forms across their careers. The book resulting from this thesis, Radical Residences is due to be published with Palgrave MacMillan late this year and feels very much like a companion piece to In Rooms of Falling Rain.

 As I neared completion of my PhD project, my partner and I adopted our son, and my own experience of home, family, and creativity were all completely upended. The literary pilgrimage I had planned here to Nova Scotia had to be postponed indefinitely as the adoption happened much more quickly than expected and we had one week’s notice to prepare for the arrival of our son. My days immediately filled with both the joy and the demanding emotional and physical labour of caring for an infant. As I grappled with nap schedules and infant formula, there was precious little time for the state of reverie I deem crucial to the production of poetry. Now, more than two years later, it feels fitting to finally be staying in the Elizabeth Bishop house on the brink of the publication of In Rooms of Falling Rain, as Bishop is very much the guiding force hovering over the collection. In fact, the title is taken from her poem ‘Squatter’s Children’ which is in part about the precarity which children living in a Rio de Janeiro favela experience. The poem ends with an image of their house during a storm: ‘Its soggy documents retain / your rights in rooms of falling rain.’ The image speaks to how the material failings of the home the children inhabit is not separable from their legal disenfranchisement: it is the leaky house that lets in water and ruins the ‘documents’ that record their legal status. And yet the poem is infused with a dynamism that seemingly stems from this very precarity. In my own work, I am interested in how unstable homes cobbled together in spite of the odds might generate a uniquely generative shelter for both intimacy and creative work.

 I can’t talk about In Rooms of Falling Rain without touching on my own experiences of the domestic. The first poems I wrote from the collection were produced during lockdown. I was living in a setup at the time which, while familiar, felt a long way from where I wanted my life to be by that point. The world had frozen and I had been asked to stay inside at a time when that domestic space did not reflect my own unfolding sense of self. As sources of inspiration, I began to research historic homes in which queer ways of living and creativity had flourished hand in hand, despite adverse circumstances. When lockdown eased up and life started to return to some semblance of normality, I made visits to some of these homes: Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst, Virginia Woolf’s Monk House, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House. Within my poems, these places began to function as imaginative spaces through which I could reflect more broadly on creativity, queerness, and home.

This led to another strand of poems that scrutinize my own experience of domesticity, from the formative shelters of the childhood home to the scrappy and provisional nature of queer homes in adulthood whose generative nature stems from that very instability.  Finally, there is a third strand of poems in the collection which looks at the ways in which queer people have been excluded from conventional notions of home. Historically, queerness has been viewed as antithetical to settled domesticity and, of course, LGBTQ youth are still severely overrepresented among people experiencing homelessness. I was interested in looking at the resultant forms of intimacy and creativity which take place outside of the home, and how that experience of exclusion might be a shaping force.

 Overall, the collection poses questions such as in what ways might the queer relationship to home be fraught and how does that register in the creative work we produce? In what ways have queer people reconfigured the organising structures of home to meet their own needs within a sometimes violently hostile world? How do homes speak to us across time and how might they be important in forging a queer lineage? How might contemporary innovations in what home and kinship mean relate to precarious domestic spaces carved out historically?    

More than a century after the unassuming white house in Great Village, Nova Scotia, sheltered the young Bishop’s first imaginative forays, I feel privileged to find myself developing new work within its quiet rooms. I very much hope that some of the spaces that In Rooms of Falling Rain forges provide shelters that the reader can linger within.