Anna Neima on Making a Home, Writing at 5am, & Painting in the Corridor
Parents Who Create
Hits this week
△ Designer Jenny Volvovski’s unsolicited book covers — commissioned entirely by herself.
△ The Guardian asked authors, critics, & academics to compile a list of the best 100 novels of all time.
△ Our children owe us nothing. We owe them nothing. Love is not based on debt.
Here’s my conversation with Anna Neima — on Making a Home, Writing at 5am, & Painting in the Corridor
Give us a snapshot of your life as it actually is.
I’m a mother, writer and artist. I have two children, 6 and 3, and a third on the way. I am currently hurrying to finish my third book, on the art and history of making a home, before that third child arrives…
Alongside this, I paint in gouache and oils, mostly in the afternoons and evenings when my brain is to tired to write. As with my writing, I love to focus on the details of everyday life.
Where can we find you?
Instagram | Website | Substack
Why do you create?
Ever since I can remember I have written and painted. Creativity functions as a diary – a snapshot of my experiences and perspective at a particular moment. And as therapy, helping me to understand the world and my place in it, including imagining myself into the lives of others.
I think it’s a kind of worship too. I have no specific faith, but I see close observation of the world around me as something spiritual. The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie writes about noticing what is around us as a ‘kind of prayer’, and I am very much with her on that.
What does the inside of your creative mind actually feel like?
It depends whether I am painting or writing. Here is an example of the different mental spaces.
The mug at my elbow has a human/verbal story: I have filled it with coffee, drunk it, and will, I hope, fill it again before the morning is over. There is a story of home that I connect intellectually, rigorously to my research on that subject and might write about.
But the mug is also an abstract/visual thing: a smudge of burnt sienna mixed with Vandyke brown and a little cadmium yellow, its rough, speckled curve catching the light just so... I want to sit down dreamily and capture that with my brush, no thoughts as such, just colours. There’s sometimes a blurring, disorientating effect to this double vision. But mostly I like it.
What has parenthood changed about your work — and what has it refused to change?
Before I had my first child, I had the capacity to work infinitely, and kind of thought that I *ought* to as well – that this was the right way to live my life. Being a self-employed creative, you can really lean into that obsessiveness. Fun, productive, but also a little unbalanced…
I came back to earth with a bump when my son arrived during the Covid pandemic. Life became all about the selfless act of looking after him, which I both loved and hated. I couldn’t immediately see how to fit in the person that I’d been before, which was confusing. Very gradually, with the help of reading and talking about other women’s experiences of combining motherhood and art, I got to a comfortable place.
I realised the mothering and creativity can feed off each other in productive ways. I draw inspiration from my domestic life and it also gives me the creative/intellectual downtime I was very bad at letting myself have before I became a mother. I make art endlessly with my children. I feel that my life is more balanced now – although, like most parents, I am also endlessly hungry for more time to myself!
Describe the conditions under which your work gets made.
I sit at the kitchen table from 5am to 7am. That is my best time for writing, when it feels like the whole world is asleep. Then, after the chaos of getting everyone ready for nursery/school/work, I either head out to the British Library for a day of research, or I continue to write at home until my mind’s given it’s best for the day.
In the afternoon I move to a plant-cluttered table in the corridor by the kitchen and paint for a couple of hours before picking my children up. If I’m not too tired, I might return to my painting after bedtime, or get on with some admin – I sell paintings, prints and cards in an online shop so there’s lots of packing involved with that.
That’s a smooth kind of day. The unpredictability of life with small children/life generally means days only happens this way maybe three days out of five.
What kind of work becomes possible when your children are nearby, and what becomes impossible?
Marguerite Duras writes: ‘Motherhood means that a woman gives her body over to her child, her children; they’re on her as they might be on a hill, in a garden; they devour her, hit her, sleep on her; and she lets herself be devoured’.
That’s pretty much how I experience it – though I feel less like a garden and more like a climbing frame. . . When my children are around, I cannot really work, though my mind is often storing away scenes to paint or ideas for my book, laying the groundwork for the future. The only exception to this is when they were babies, when I'd paint or write while they napped happily in the sling.
What have you had to become in order to keep creating?
I come from a big family that values worldly, practical achievement. Things like being a farmer, a doctor, a teacher, or making a lot of money. It was difficult for me to find my place in that when I was young since what I cared about was more abstract, less tangible.
I often felt I was failing at living in the right way. I tried to conform, becoming a lawyer, but I did not fit into that world and was lost and unhappy for several years.To keep creating, I had to become confident in the legitimacy of what I was doing, which was a long journey. Part of that was letting go of the values of my birth family (I still remain close to them but I do not mind what they think about what I do). I found a tribe that shared my own values and made me feel what I was doing mattered, that that has sustained me.
What is the part of your creative life that no one sees?
The deep crises of self-confidence ... The sense of being a charlatan ... The feeling that I am not taking my work in the right direction … I comfort myself that everyone who creates feels this way sometimes. It is the downside of trying to express yourself truly and freely and passes with time, as long as I keep moving.
Who or what has most shaped the way you create now, not at the beginning, but in the reality of your current life?
When I met my husband fifteen-odd years ago I was an unhappy trainee lawyer and he was interning in publishing. He believed in art – that pursuing it was a legitimate way of life. It was a belief that gave me the courage to free myself from a job that I disliked, and that continues to shape the way I create and live.
He has a closer understanding of my creative ambitions than anyone else, and supports them – and vice versa. He is a writer and an editor at a literary magazine, and we share everything we write, offering each other suggestions.
The support is also domestic: we split chores and childcare fairly and try to give each other pockets of freedom to create – which is challenging in our busy family life. I think, looking around, that this kind of equal partnership-in-art is not easily come by, and that my efforts to combine creativity and motherhood would be far harder and far less joyous without it.
What have you had to let go of (willingly or not) in order to keep creating?
I used to think that I needed to dedicate myself full-time, full-bloodedly, whole-heartedly to one thing to be a great success at it.
I still think that perhaps that might be the case. But now I am not aiming for great success; I am simply enjoying the process. That lowering of standards and accepting of my own personal reality has allowed me to keep writing and painting and parenting in relative contentment.
And contentment, for me, is the wellspring of creativity.
What are you in the middle of creating and what shape is it in?
I am writing a book on the experience of making a home, told through the eyes of twentieth-century writers. It's been the project I've most valued in my writing life because it speaks to something I believe deeply: that all our lives revolve around a home of one kind of another, and we might as well make the best of this place.
It's also proved one of the hardest of my projects, because I so want to get it right and I am writing in a new style which involves personal memoir. I am a historian with a PhD.
Leaving the academic approach behind for something more intimate feels very exposing – although also exciting. I am hoping to finish the book by the end of this year, before my third child arrives, but I am also trying not to hurry it, to make it as good as I can get it ... it's a difficult balance.
What does “a room of your own” actually look like in your life now?
I love the idea of a study so much that I have painted myself a dream one – green velvet curtains, book-lined, utterly peaceful.
The truth is that my study is a mishmash of places where I have temporarily found space and solitude. The kitchen table at dawn before it is used for breakfast. Lying in bed, tucked under the covers while my husband plays with the children downstairs. A table where I paint, but which I have constantly to clear of a tide of children's toys and accumulated clutter.
None of these places are private for more than a few hours, and I have a secret feeling that I might like working in them all the more for that. They are full of life in a way that a room of my own might not be.
PARENTS WHO THINK TO THE COMMENTS 👇🏻
Anna writes at the kitchen table at 5am, paints in a corridor, and sometimes works in bed while the rest of the house carries on around her. She loves that she doesn’t create in a fixed space.
What’s your version of the kitchen table/corridor/bed?
Next week: I’m bringing you Rebecca of Common Threads. Thank you for being here.
This interview was written up while listening to 400 Cities, eating lemon curd straight from the jar with my favourite silicone baby teaspoon.
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