When I moved into the house right off of campus in Kalamazoo I could never have imagined that I would spend my final two years of college in a room with a reading cave.
Just over a year ago on a hot day in August, I literally rolled up my sleeves in my attic room, and got to work. The best, and last project of my room was the reading cave. I bought floor pillows, and a furry rug, and collected old stuffed animals that would be happy to inhabit such a space, rescued from the confines of a storage unit in my hometown. Then I lined the back wall with a bookshelf.
I can’t decide which part is my favorite. Maybe it’s the fairy lights that remind me of my fairytale books of my childhood, maybe it’s my “cat eyes removed here” metal sign that rode front seat in a car my grandpa sent for from England, or maybe it’s my Emily Dickinson book passed down to me from poet Conrad Hilberry via Diane Seuss.
Right now off my shelf I’m reading Laura Kasischke’s new book of poems The Infinitesimals while I sit and attempt to create work for my poetry thesis (I’m taking a break from that to write this).
I think my favorite part may be that I have this space to exist in that honors all the little pieces of text that have made me who I am as a person and a writer.
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Kate Belew is an editorial intern at Sundress Publications and a student of Poetry at Kalamazoo College where she studies with poet Diane Seuss. She interns with the reading series at The Kalamazoo Book Center, and received the Nature in Words Fellowship at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute where wrote in the woods all summer. She has been published in journals such as The Minetta Review, Collision Literary Magazine, and Cliterature. When she’s not writing she’s dancing, hula hooping, or reading tarot cards. She is a firm believer in duende.
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