Borrowed Rooms, Six Months On

Borrowed Rooms came out in February, in the coldest week of the winter, and I have been thinking about it on and off ever since. Guest editing an issue is a strange job. You spend months with a set of texts, reading them more closely than anyone else ever will, and then one morning they belong to readers and you are not needed any more.

What I did not expect was how much would come back.

In the weeks after the issue appeared, several readers wrote to tell us about their own last days in rented flats. One described the pencil marks on a doorframe that she photographed before the landlord painted over them. Another sent a picture of a biscuit tin, not unlike my grandmother's, full of keys from twelve addresses in three countries. A man in Lisbon wrote a long, funny letter about a landlady who had forbidden him to move a wardrobe for seven years, and about what he found behind it on the day he finally left.

None of these letters were submissions, and none of them will be published. But they did something to the issue that I had not anticipated. They made it feel less like a finished object and more like the first half of a conversation.

What the issue got right

Reading it again now, I think the strongest thing about Borrowed Rooms is how little it complains. It would have been easy to make an issue about tenancy that was only about insecurity: rising rents, bad landlords, sudden letters. Those things are all in there. But the writers were more interested in what people build in borrowed places anyway. Joaquim Brandeiro's narrator keeps a radio on for a woman who is no longer there. Noor Castellane's balconies are gardens and offices and confessionals. Sami Okafor-Reyes carries a lemon cutting through four windows.

What I would do differently

I would have included more voices from people who have never owned anything and never expect to, and I would have asked for at least one piece from a landlord. Not to balance the issue. To complicate it. Several readers pointed out that the people who own rented rooms have their own stories about them, and that we did not ask to hear any.

Six months on, the issue sits in the archive with the others. I hope it keeps being read. And I hope that whoever is reading it now is doing so in a room that, for the moment at least, is theirs.

Aurelia Stanek, guest editor of Borrowed Rooms