Somebody has to do it: writing, housework, and being at home

Abstract

For Creative Writing students, feeling at home with writing and with the identity of being a writer can be difficult. Many try to separate their writing life from home life which can lead to a sense of not being at home with the writing process. As life necessarily involves care and a generative process of maintenance and repetition within the principles of living, so too, being a writer calls for a process of making that is embedded in acts of care and maintenance. By recounting a personal story of a home held together by my grandfather's daily acts of care and reflecting on a student writing workshop that transformed stories of cleaning domestic homes into a shared representation of a ‘creative' house, I consider homeliness as a ‘writing method that is less like writing and more like living’ [Samatar, S. 2024. Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 3]. Rather than treating the complexities of everyday life as interruptions to creative practice, I argue that these are the spaces in which creative work can emerge and be initiated. Framing homeliness as integral to creative practice can illuminate artistic process and make writing more like living.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. New Writing, 2026 · DOI ↗