Dear friends, colleagues and lonely room storytellers,

I have created a website to ‘room’ a number of the creative submissions that were submitted for the loneliness room project: What's your loneliness room?

The overall aim of the loneliness room is to shine a critical and creative light on where, when, how and why loneliness is encountered. It intends to provide a new creative canvass with which to better understand how people ‘live lonely’, providing them with the artistic space to represent their loneliness.

The Loneliness Room is an example of participatory culture, of co-creation, since it is the lonely artwork of ordinary people which in part fill the ‘lungs’ of this website (and book). In so-doing, the project extends and enriches the boundaries of creative ethnography since these lifeworld practices newly re-imagine what it means to be lonely today.

For the purpose of this project the loneliness room is defined as a real or imagined space where we feel lonely or find loneliness. We may also prefer to call this quality or state one of aloneness, where it is solitude and isolation that we seek.

Each of us will have our very own version of the loneliness room: it could be the hills we walk on, a morning swim at the beach or the local swimming pool, listening to a certain sad song in our bedroom, the morning commute, writing in our diary, or the park we go to sit in at lunchtime.

The project explores not just the isolation of loneliness but the social, creative and experiential possibilities of loneliness in all walks of life: this is loneliness as a natural part of the human condition. The Loneliness Room explores, then, both the chronic and the existential conditions of being lonely today.

I asked those interested in taking part to respond to the idea of the loneliness room through sharing their creative responses and/or completing short questionnaires. These creative responses came in the forms of: photographs (with/without captions); short videos; drawings; paintings; poems; social media posts; and songs, composition, audio. A workshop was also held with men from the Coventry Mens shed, in England.

At times, the responses are confronting, challenging, wrapped up in the pain of the participant. At others, they catch the beauty and freedom of certain forms of loneliness.

In the website I have thematically divided up these loneliness room submissions. However, themes cross-connect in quite beautiful and moving ways.

Which room will you enter first?

To view the creative submissions: What's your loneliness room?

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“This wonderful book made me rethink loneliness. The loneliness room, which each of us can make our own embraces the isolation of loneliness and its creativity and regenerative potential. This creativity is manifest in the artistic expressions of art, photography, cinema literature poetry and music which frame the chapters. Beautiful stories of the routines of life from walking back alone after taking children to school, to inner city life, the alleys of Hanoi, are interwoven with artistic accounts. Loneliness rooms provide some escape from the constraints of poverty, social exclusion and patriarchy, but can also be chronic and compulsive. They are embodied and expressive; contemplative and scary; sad but joyous”.

Professor Kath Woodward, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, School of Social Sciences & Global Studies, Sociology, Open University, UK

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‘Loneliness is here both a bottomless well and a spring of joy’ – this quote from The Loneliness Room, is indicative of the way the meanings of loneliness explode on every page and take flight in new directions. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of artistic, creative, everyday, and contemporary interactions, the book wrestles with over-easy definitions, just as it challenges the uneven conditions of late capitalism. To understand the intellectual reach of a creative ethnography read this book, but to explore the complexity of our lonely hearts and their generative potential, you need to sit with it awhile, take on the book’s rhythm, and then set aside space for hope.

Helen Wood, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Lancaster.

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There is an elegant, elegiac, quality in the Loneliness Room, where Sean Redmond dwells upon the essence, reasons for and experience(s) of loneliness drawing on an exceptional methodological mosaic of creative participatory ethnography and autoethnography. The Loneliness Room, intended as a creative canvass where people talk about and (re)present their loneliness, is an academic piece of work about loneliness with unprecedented originality and artistry, poetically delivered and premised upon the audio-visual, sensory and artistic narratives of its participants, while also drawing from different kinds of media production (cinematic, documentary, photographic, music, sonic, social media) and is set within a ‘pandemic imagination’. Through its pages, the ‘ordinary lonely’ are given voice to ponder and discuss their loneliness, bypassing the academic ‘expert’. Redmond exposes and unravels the web of loneliness, making it palpable. Whether as a state of abject or a celebration of the freedom of the soul, the Loneliness Room explores the dialectic between the sadness and beauty of loneliness. The book is offered as a gateway into our understanding of loneliness, each chapter being envisaged as a separate room within the beehive of loneliness; in fact, each chapter is set as a ‘building block’ within the larger narrative of loneliness, each block being ‘threaded’ upon the next. This way, chapters work as conduits into the heart of what loneliness is, how it feels, sounds and tastes for us all. Being lonely will never be the same again!.

Professor Liza Tsaliki, Department of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

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The Loneliness Room is a stunning book of creativity and compassion that speaks in ways large and small to a shared experience – we all get lonely from time to time along life’s journey. Using a diverse archive that includes autobiographical writing, feature films, poetry, sound, gender and cultural theory, and the responses of ordinary people like you and me, Sean Redmond has here crafted a moving and innovative ethnography that gives shape and form to an ideology of loneliness that illustrates its broader connections to therapy culture, neoliberal capitalism, and the liquid speed of modernity. This book offers a much-needed reflection on the necessities of loneliness, the ache of existential space, and the solace we might provide one another through a community of words, images, and ideas.

Brenda R. Weber

Provost Professor and Jean C. Robinson Scholar, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

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