Index
- Essay by Kaylee Kepple
Sociology and Community Theory
1. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. (1912) — on collective experience and the sacred in shared gatherings.
2. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (2000) — on the social importance of communal connection.
Feminist Theory and Labor
3. Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. (2013) — on solidarity, capitalism, and the transformation of feminist movements.
4. Hooks, Bell. All About Love: New Visions. (2000) — for her framing of community as an ethical practice rooted in care and mutual recognition.
Vulnerability, Storytelling, and Emotion
5. Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. (2012).
6. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. (1984) — on the necessity of speaking, of transforming silence into language and action.
Cultural and Psychological Contexts
7. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. (1977) — for understanding how physical gatherings shape emotional landscapes.
8. Hooks, Bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. (2003) — on community as an act of pedagogy and resilience.
Community, as I’ve come to understand it, is not built in grand halls or committees, but in the murmur of overlapping stories. It happens when someone says, “ah, me too,” and the phrase becomes a bridge. Around the table, we begin to recognize that what we thought were private failures are, in truth, shared conditions — symptoms of a world that often asks us to be smaller than we are. The table thus functions not merely as a setting for conversation, but as a vessel through which empathy and understanding circulate. In the texture of conversations — the pauses, the laughter, the hesitations that reveal sincerity — we find the pulse of community itself.
Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence illuminates this dynamic: the sense of heightened vitality and connection that emerges when individuals gather and feel themselves part of something greater. It doesn’t require a cathedral — only a circle of chairs and the permission to speak. The table becomes our altar, reaffirming belonging while holding presence and possibility. The gathering becomes its own worship, where care is the offering. In the exchange of glances, stories, and laughter, we are both witness and worshipper.
Bell Hooks writes that community is the practice of love — an active commitment to nurturing one another’s growth. Around the table, that love takes form. The practice of listening, the gentle affirmations, and the pauses that make room for another’s truth become rituals of belonging. Audre Lorde reminds us that “without community, there is no liberation.” At the table, liberation begins with the small, radical act of showing up and being seen. Through conversation and care, we remember that to gather is to practice freedom together. The sacredness of the table, then, lies not in its material form but in its capacity to hold space for mutual recognition and the radical possibility of connection.
And then there is the labor of it all — the unseen work of preparation, invitation, and holding space. Arlie Hochschild’s “second shift” lingers here: the recognition that care often comes as unpaid, unacknowledged labor. Yet when this labor is chosen, not imposed, it transforms from burden into bond. Setting a table, stirring soup, arranging flowers — these are gestures of devotion, love translated into motion, evidence of our wish to make belonging visible.
To gather, then, is to build a language from gestures — a syntax of attention. It is to say: I will listen. I will bear witness. I will remember your story alongside my own. The table becomes a kind of text, teaching us that community is the living grammar of care, and gathering is its sacred speech.
By the end of the night, while we may not have solved the world’s problems, we have surely altered the atmosphere of our own. Community, I think, begins here — in the ordinary act of returning to the table, again and again. Weaving new worlds from conversation, the table keeps its memory waiting patiently for the next gathering, and for love to take its seat.
Haus Journal: The Third Room
- Essay by Kaylee Kepple
Primary Works by Virginia Woolf
1. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.
2. Woolf, Virginia. “The Third Room.” In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1942.
3. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. London: Hogarth Press, 1976.
4. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1931. (For its meditations on inner life and solitary creative perception.)
Works Resonant with the ‘Third Room’ Concept
5. Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. (Especially essays on personal interiors and public selves.)
6. Babitz, Eve. Eve’s Hollywood. New York: New York Review Books, 2015. (Memoir-as-room: the dreamy, sensorial space of the self.)
7. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt, 1974. (For metaphorical spaces as mental and emotional states.)
8. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. (Philosophical exploration of interior spaces and imagination.)
Contemporary Reflections on Creative & Sacred Spaces
9. Hooks, Bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995. (On art-making as an act of self-definition and sanctuary.)
10. Smith, Zadie. “That Crafty Feeling.” The Believer, 2008. (On the private process of writing and creative retreat.)
She was always circling the problem of consciousness which is to say the problem of living at all. She wrote as if time were a tide and she were both standing on the shore and already being carried out. She understood the undertow being the long illness of the mind, and stone in the pocket.
What remains is not only the work but the way she made the work feel inevitable — as if it could not have been otherwise, and the only way to survive the act of living was to write it down while it was still happening.
Virginia Woolf also taught us that a woman needs a room of her own. To write, think, and simply exist without being endlessly interrupted. In The Third Room, she takes it further — beyond the practical sanctuary into something subtler: the psychic annex. If the first room is the world’s, and the second is for rest, the third is a territory with no lease. It is the internal atelier where self learns to stretch without witness.
Haus of Terzetto feels like the architectural echo of that third room. Not simply a workspace, not merely a refuge — a place where the boundaries between “out there” and “in here” blur. You can paint until your coffee goes cold, talk to strangers in a language made of glances, or spend hours reading without shifting your chair.
In The Third Room, Woolf isn’t just protecting the artist’s time, she’s safeguarding the return. You go there to get lost — deliberately, luxuriantly — so you can find the thread that leads you home.
While we may say we are here at Haus to create and be inspired, we are really just following Woolf’s map. Walking into that third sacred space where the world loosens its grip and, when we leave, carry it with us. The room, the light, the unspoken permission to be entirely our own.
In this Third Room, you realize you’ve been rehearsing your return without even knowing it. Growing in circles, spiraling inward toward that private address where you keep the first drafts of yourself.
A sacred space (if truly sacred) is not where you end up; but where you turn back toward yourself, unhurried, and start the walk home.