Why I Write From the Tub
The world is dramatic. Families are busy. Emails are endless. Those are the first three reasons that pop into my head when someone asks me why I write articles, sermons and stories from the tub. I think it started almost 20 years ago after my first son was born and I had founded a community for women survivors. I found out that if I was in the tub, I was in self-imposed isolation and could lose myself in the words and steam.
It started off simple enough, a pad of paper and a pen. The tub itself is very humble, a shallow 1940’s tub with four handles (two for the bath, two for the shower). But by the time my second son was born, the ritual of retreating to a tub for an hour or two a day became a discipline I loved. I found myself putting in a small side table (12 cubic inches) to put my references and notes. I designed a small wooden plank to set over the tub and wrap in duct tape so it wouldn’t warp, and I could put in duct tape pockets to hold my pens on the side.
When my mother died in 1997, I grieved her in the healing waters of the tub that I began enhancing by adding essential oils and bath salts. When our third son was born in 2000, the tub became the source of inspiration to start Thistle Farms, a social enterprise for women survivors of trafficking, addiction, and prostitution. As I was soaking and storing up energy to go back and engage the world and my children, I thought that if I was healing in the water, women with PTSD and who were trying to recover would love all the potions and healing oils.
Beyond that history, there is a poetic metaphor in getting naked to write. Getting naked is a humbling journey you might not want to imagine on the 20 plus years I have spent religiously bathing and writing. I am in the tub when I am bathing. I can’t be anywhere else. It is the place to lose the sense of time and hunger and need. It is the place to dream lofty thoughts and tear up easily. It is the place I find a peace which passes understanding.
The nature of what I write is non-fiction, told with a bent on the optimistic nature of women and how they heal. There is no finer place to write with that hope than the healing waters from which we all were born. I don’t know that this is a call for writers to try to write from their tubs, or just an encouragement to all writers to write from the place where they find themselves naked enough to tell the truth. To celebrate and claim their sanctuaries. And to find your voice in a world full of noise. Here is to all the real and imagined tubs in our lives that help us find our words.
—
The Rev. Becca Stevens is an Episcopal priest serving as Chaplain at St Augustine’s at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and founder of Magdalene, a two-year residential community of women who have survived prostitution, trafficking and addiction. She is the author of the new book The Way of Tea and Justice.
Find out more about Becca on her website www.beccastevens.org
Follow her on twitter @RevBeccaStevens
*
About The Way of Tea and Justice:
What started as an impossible dream-to build a café that employs women recovering from prostitution and addiction-is helping to fuel an astonishing movement to bring freedom and fair wages to women producers worldwide where tea and trafficking are linked by oppression and the opiate wars.
Becca Stevens started the Thistle Stop Café to empower women survivors. But when she discovered a connection between café workers and tea laborers overseas, she embarked on a global mission called “Shared Trade” to increase the value of women survivors and producers across the globe.
As she recounts the victories and unexpected challenges of building the café, Becca also sweeps the reader into the world of tea, where timeless rituals transport to an era of beauty and the challenging truths about tea’s darker, more violent history. She offers moving reflections of the meaning of tea in our lives, plus recipes for tea blends that readers can make themselves.
In this journey of triumph for impoverished tea laborers, hope for café workers, and insight into the history of tea, Becca sets out to defy the odds and prove that love is the most powerful force for transformation on earth.
Category: On Writing
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
I can honestly say I have never heard of anyone writing from the bathtub. How interesting. And how lovely. What a decadant way to treat yourself and luxuriate in words and sensations.
Enjoyed your post and learning about your work. Cheers.
I don’t physically write in the tub, but I plot, plan, and imagine so that when I sit down to write, the story is already flowing. I think there is something inspirational about water. Good to know I’m not alone.
Boy, can I relate. My family has teased me endlessly about my hours-long soaks. I read, I dream, I cry. What I haven’t done is write from there. I used to “take a shower” which was a euphemism for standing at the back of the tub, reading a book, with the shower spray going to cloak my leisure time. It was the only escape. Such industry you showed in fastening the duct tape desk. Had I thought of that, I might be further along in my writing journey. Thank you for sharing!
Your poetic metaphor of being naked when you write really resonated with me. Thanks for writing such an evocative piece. All week I have been trying to “start” my next novel, and being naked is exactly how I feel! It’s all part of the process.
-Martha