Dustin R. Tabeta

Before I post my journal entry, I'd like to say a few words to Clem's son, Gregory.

"Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept."
~ Simon Van Booy

Gregory, it was a pleasure to share a classroom with your father these past couple semester. His insight and wisdom was always well received and greatly appreciated. I was heartbroken when I heard the news. Thank you for sharing his poem and journal entry, they were lovely. I hope these words find you. My heavy heart goes out to you and your family.

My journal entry

Journal Entry #1
My first read through chapter one of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own was a confused one; a lost one filled with anxiety. I felt the narration haphazard, scattered, and puzzling. Then I realized the narrator’s puzzling ways was an emphasis to her thesis. The title refers to a woman and fiction and what is needed in order for those two elements to coexist (she speaks about writing, but I feel reading is just as sacred a process), but my personal reading of it (being on the train) proves her title is not closed to just women, but can ring true all who try to enjoy fiction. Fiction, the reading and writing of, allows one to leave the place they are in and enjoy another for a while, and a room of one’s own is a fundamental necessity. Chatter, television, traffic, and visuals are distractions that disable your full concentration. Even a silent room full of people can be distracting to some. It brings to mind one of my favorite author’s, Simon Van Booy. In his short story compilation, Love Begins in Winter, at the end of his book in a section titled, “How to Find a Story,” he writes:
I go somewhere (generally in winter when tourism lulls) with no idea whatsoever for a story. Then after I’m settled into a hotel, I begin walking the streets. Sometimes I walk all day - sometimes all night, sometimes in the rain (Stockholm for “The City of Windy Trees”), sometimes heat (Las Vegas for “The Missing Statues”) and occasionally in heavy snow (Quebec City for “Love Begins in Winter”). This is one of the most enjoyable parts to building a story because the key is NOT to look for a story but to simply be open to the idea of wandering around and just lingering - like a peculiar odor…For a place to yield a story, I must travel to it alone, always alone. If I am to meet a friend there, it must be someone who will allow me to be alone and who understands the need for silence and total secrecy. All writers live a secret life. All writers are spies…Only in solitude do I realize the true value of life.
He continues, reverberating Woolf’s necessity for privacy. I returned to my apartment and gave the chapter another go, but this time in the solitude. It must have been the combination of having read it once before and the comfort of my apartment that allowed me to better digest the work. Woolf’s character is continually distracted by some entity or another which bars any though process to fully develop. Reading is the same; your mind is engaged and developing thoughts about what is being read, and for distractions to pop every now and again forbids any engagement or development of thought. Woolf maybe should have began her book with a disclaimer; a sort of subtle forewarning: Listen to the Title or something to that degree. She ends the chapter with thoughts about entrapment: “how unpleasant it is to be locked out…how it is worse perhaps to be locked in” and continues with ideas of the lack of tradition and how writers must create some for themselves. It seems as if Van Booy is a student of Woolf’s essay; she says one needs money and a room of one’s own and Van Booy has just that: money to travel (neither locked in or locked out) and a room of his own in every city he visits.


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Dustin R. Tabeta