Hi! I’m an architect, and I compose spaces as perceptual, sensorial renderings rather than fixed containers. In ‘Tell Me About Home’, I take people through guided sensory walkthroughs of their childhood homes, attending to their emotional layers of home. I then craft their recollections with care as inhabitable sensorial spaces—not as documentation, but as experiential heirlooms of home they can revisit. This process honors their paths toward their present identities and reconnects them with the space-time that shaped how they perceive the world.
Tell Me About Home Archive:
Chapter 1: Twenty Blocks of Playground
Chapter 2: Playroom for Two
Chapter 3: The Double-Edged Perch
Chapter 4: We Always Sat in Circles
!!! Your support can bring this growing archive closer to becoming a book that reconnects us to the spaces that shape who we are:
J. is a writer of microfictions from Central Pennsylvania, USA, currently making her way into the world of editing in New York City.
J.
09/30/2025
New York City
We called it our Playroom. It’s a crafts room essentially where my sister and I made things together everyday. We moved from one thing to another, but always together; drawing, painting, building legos, microcrocheting. We eventually stopped finishing projects as we would be too eager to move to the next.
It smelled like a bookstore in a way because I had quite the collection of books.
We weren’t allowed to have toys, so we had books lined on one wall, cotton yarn balls stacked along the second, and a huge chalk board stretched all over the third. The chalkboard would collect so much chalk dust on the bottom, so our mom would make us move to another activity while she vacuumed it up. We got to keep whatever we had on the chalkboard for a week and only redo it then. So, we added a white board on the fourth wall.
As twins, we always saw each other as part of the same bigger person, and our shared identity was rooted in the Playroom. It was simply curated for us.
All of our memories are of us creating things together all the time, but only in that room and nowhere else in the house. We weren’t allowed to anyway. At one point my mom tried to migrate our craft area into a shed my dad built outside. We would play there, but we always brought the crafts back into the Playroom. My sister and I grew up differently in a lot of ways, but that room was our whimsical common ground.
I discovered I wanted to be an artist in the Playroom, with my sister, but I had to build my own to find my voice and grow into that identity.
As I explore the boundaries of creative writing as an adult, I dare to relocate the process of making beyond the Playroom, and beyond home; into the park, into a conversation or the local pastry shop. I don’t write in a designated space; writing is immensely experiential for me. While I still like having a place to create, the more I curate it the less it serves me. Thinking back, I realize I never wrote in the Playroom. Perhaps I was restricted by its physical boundaries, rules, and its shared function.
It’s my sister’s home office now.
We hang out there during her work hours when I’m visiting home, each doing her own thing. But the yarn is still there. The books are still there. The chalkboard still has calligraphy we made when we were 12, and although all my old notebooks are stored there, I still don’t write there.
J.
*Audio by Glass, Philip. Etude No. 2
Stay tuned for Chapter 3!
If you’re interested in being part of Tell Me About Home, I’d be thrilled to hear from you!
Warmly,
Sabine
Love this. The bond between flesh and concrete.
This is a beautiful piece that I read today. I can totally relate to this story. Some places create that special bond. It's hard to forget even if we move somewhere else. Thank you so much for sharing this.