Traveling with Virginia Woolf by Kristina Marie Darling

Reviewed by Jason Hinkley

Ungovernable Press, 2009

Kristina Marie Darling's forthcoming e-chap Traveling with Virginia Woolf is a short polemic that uses the travel essay to explore the literary tradition/baggage that falls onto the shoulders of aspiring writers. The narrator employs a trip to a vacant artists' colony as an opportunity to hone her artistic eye and flex her descriptive muscles, cataloging every detail of the place as if once the words started rolling the magic of the place would begin to infuse themselves into her sentences: “As I crawled into bed that night, I shivered in my sweats and wool socks, counting the knocks as an old tree branch brushed against my window.” With the physical world rendered, the essay turns to examine the cultural significance that lies under the barren landscape.

The history of the colony is recounted, with an emphasis on the marks that previous travelers have left. These creations the narrator can't help but admire: “After overcoming my initial shock and awe at seeing something the author of Slaughterhouse Five had actually hand-written.... To be surrounded by such artifacts and histories, I reasoned, would bear down on one's ability to create.” As she quickly realizes, such an encounter can leave a young writer simultaneously “inspired and paralyzed.” In her search for an approach with which to confront this paradox she inevitably turns to her predecessors: “As Virginia Woolf argues, workspace and solitude remain necessary in order to write, another set of experiences and questions face those who travel in order to find them.” It is these other, less tangible, necessities that she, like many others before her, may have trouble finding a steady supply of.

The tension created by being at once inspired and intimidated by cultural artifacts is felt much more acutely due to the fact that it is an empty building when she visits, and intentionally so. By visiting an empty facility she is, in a way, experiencing the place without the risk of participation; if she writes she writes but she will not have to face another with the questions like, What did you accomplish today? As Darling points out, her voice is that of “emerging artist,” one that is at once thrilled, but not altogether comfortable with the tradition that she aspires to join. At the end of her brief stay, the reader is left with a portrait that anyone who has harbored literary ambitions will surely recognize—a young writer struggling with both the idea and act of creation.

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