VII: Seven Rooms

What if the rooms we build to survive are the very things that trap us?An architect stands among the models of buildings that should have proved him right.A film producer moves through Los Angeles while other people quietly keep him from collapse.A novelist fights to protect a fictional woman who has become more real than anyone suspects.A choreographer turns injury into discipline, and discipline into punishment.An actress waits outside an audition room, surrounded by every woman she fears she is not.A composer builds a work too large for any real stage to contain.A painter returns to a studio where the covered canvases know more than she can bear to see.In VII, rooms are not backdrops. They remember. They shelter. They bargain.Part prose poem, part chamber drama, part moral fable, VII is a dark literary sequence about art, ambition, appetite, devotion and fear — and the small bargains by which a life becomes a profession, and a profession becomes a room. Read more