be. still.
I came to Camden FireWorks tired. After opening my second brick-and-mortar location, Ida’s Bookshop in Collingswood, New Jersey, I spent four years running it while also writing, publishing, parenting, partnering, teaching, volunteering, traveling and doing too much. Yet, my cup wasn’t running over. It was incredibly empty. Eventually, after years of fighting with my landlord, I closed Ida’s feeling embarrassed and defeated. I had hosted thousands of people, built something beautiful, made a place where people could gather and connect, and then suddenly I was bouncing with books from a town square to a train station trying hard not to abandon the shop.But sometimes pushing forward is persistence and sometimes it is self-abandonment.
After almost a year of feeling lost, I reached out to Jazlyne with a confession: I need a place to be. A place to be still. A place where I don’t have to fight or perform or look pretty. A place for me.
And I found that here.
For the first time I had a room I didn’t have to share with anybody: no sisters, no customers, no employees, no partners, no children, no lovers. I can close my door and be alone with myself. And listen. Listen to whatever is screaming to be heard. Or listen to nothing at all. It’s not always fun, but it is always necessary.
In my studio I started thinking about Dr. Maya Angelou and the hotel room she kept just to write. She didn’t sleep there. She would lie across an unmade bed with her yellow pad, read, write and disappear into the quietude of her own mind.
I understood that.
I am a writer and bookseller, but my practice has never stayed inside the lines. I build spaces. I teach. I gather people. I make with paper and music and books and food and words and rooms and conversation. The bookshop itself has always been a canvas for my art. Be Still is my re-imagining of Dr. Angelou’s hotel room, but it is also autobiographical. There is a bed and it is messy because it is our mess that makes us interesting. Books. A photograph. A suitcase. A yellow notepad. The evidence of a woman reading, thinking, resting, doodling, crying, dancing, writing, maybe doing nothing at all.
Come in. Sit on the bed. Lie down. Read something. Be quiet for a minute. Don’t do anything. Be still.
And then, if something comes, write it down. What did you hear or feel or remember when nobody was asking anything of you, not even yourself?
These aren’t props. Touch. Read. Buy a book. The installation can become a bookshop without exactly being a bookshop and without costing me myself. A monument to Dr. Maya Angelou can also be a place to lie down. A reading room can have a messy bed in the middle of it.
Maybe that is part of what I am figuring out too: how to be still. For years I made space for everybody else.
I needed this one for me. Now I’m opening the door for you to just be. Still.
