When Christin Lee moved to Detroit from Ann Arbor in 2017, she was on the hunt for the perfect place to write.
After graduating from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, Lee wanted a space where writers and other creative types could come and go as they pleased 24 hours a day.
“I had enough friends who were writers and thought, ‘Well if we all just pay into the rent, maybe one of us can rent a space,’” Lee said. “I thought we’d end up in a basement somewhere with no windows.”
Instead, Lee founded Room Project in a Woodward Avenue storefront in 2018. It began as a co-working space and later became a destination for women writers of color and non-binary writers for anything creative–poetry and fiction workshops, book releases, quilting events and yoga classes.
But in mid-November, after five years of providing a community for Detroit’s literary artists with membership blossoming to 200 members, Room Project closed the book on its New Center location. Lee said the organization could no longer afford to keep its space with Midtown Detroit Inc. and was unable to find a comparable rental.
The project was financially unsustainable, Lee told BridgeDetroit, and there are no plans for it to come back for the foreseeable future.
Room Project Director Kelsey Ronan has felt a mix of emotions about Room’s Project’s closure–sadness, but also anger, she said, because she believes rent prices are rising in New Center.
“We’ve lost the space but it was the people that made it so special,” she said. “I’m grateful for the hundreds of people that I have met in the last couple of years, some of whom have become my dearest friends and absolutely changed my life.”
Despite the challenges Room Project faced, the commercial real estate space in the neighborhood hasn’t changed that much in recent years, Susan Mosey, former executive director of Midtown Detroit, Inc., a nonprofit focused on economic development in Midtown and New Center, said in an email.
Mosey said some properties charge tenants $25 or more per square foot for rent, but Midtown Detroit allows businesses to pay an amount a little lower than market value, which ranges between $16 to $20 per square foot.
For Room Project, Mosey added, the rent was even lower. When Lee secured the 2,000-square-foot space, Mosey said she offered her a one-year lease at $1,200 a month. Lee clarified with documentation that her rent was $1,050 per month. When the lease was up, Lee was working to build membership and hoped to be in a better position to find a long-term space the following year. Midtown Detroit allowed her to remain in the building rent-free into 2020 when the pandemic hit, Mosey noted, and when the pandemic slowed Room Project resumed monthly rent. When Ronan took over the organization in 2022, Mosey said she was willing to work with her as she developed a business model and attempted to find another space. However, Room Project was unsuccessful in bringing in revenue, which led to its closure.
“We (Midtown Detroit Inc.) bought all this property to create a dynamic mix of small local businesses that mutually support each other from a market perspective: service businesses, food and beverage and retail. Frankly, co-working does not need to be in a prime space on Woodward,” Mosey said. “Room Project is a very worthy effort, however, they have had five years to develop a self-sustaining model. It is not our responsibility to do this for them. I greatly respect both Christin and Kelsey and wish them the best as they try to move forward with a model that can work.”
This year, African-fusion pop-up Little Liberia will open its first brick and mortar in Room Project’s former space. Lee said she’s happy for Little Liberia owner and chef Ameneh Marhaba, who won the 2022 Hatch Detroit Award, but Room Project’s closing is still bittersweet.
“It was a matter of giving a stage to the people in Detroit who were writing because it’s really hard to find community. Writing is such a solitary practice,” Lee said.
Finding community
Before she became director, Ronan was a member of Room Project from its beginning.
Ronan moved to Detroit from Flint and was having a hard time finding a community and was feeling depleted creatively with her first novel, “Chevy in the Hole,” getting multiple rejections from book publishers. She learned of Room Project from a friend via social media in the summer of 2018.
“Having the space where someone was so affirming and where there were all these opportunities, these readings, these members meetups, to connect with other writers,” Ronan said. “It was exactly what I needed.”
In 2020, while Room Project was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ronan began working part-time with Lee on the organization’s budget and applying for grants. When Lee was ready to step down as director in 2022, Ronan gladly took over.
Ronan created a fiction writers meetup, but primarily left the vision of the writing space up to members. Many came together to write a collection of poems and essays for the organization’s anthology, “Room Object,” which was released last year.
When “Chevy in the Hole” was finally released last year by publisher Henry Holt and Company, her friends were there to support her at a book launch at Room Project.
“It was a packed house,” Ronan said. “I just felt so loved and affirmed and exactly the space that I wanted to be.”
Learning to grow
Writer and former Room Project member MARS Marshall said they were able to hone their skills as an writer and launch a literary career due to Room Project’s impact. They edited the poetry portion of “Room Object” and released their first poetry book “Flower Boi” last January
As a non-binary writer, Marshall said Room Project was a safe space because they acknowledged that non-binary and transgender artists exist.
“Everything about how they cultivated that space, allowed there to be so much room for folks of all identities to be able to feel comfortable in their bodies, but also to have conversations through our art, through our writing about what our experience has been,” they said. “There are a lot of spaces that are hella gendered. They don’t even want to acknowledge anything outside of the gender binary.”
With Room Project closed, it raises the question of how literary arts can be supported in Detroit, Marshall said. They said local writers often are recognized on a national and global scale, but don’t have the arts infrastructure in their hometown.
“If we’re gonna see spaces like Room Project as really important to the city, then the city has to see they’re really important as well,” Marshall said.
A lack of writing services
Another writing organization in the city that no longer has a physical space is the Detroit Writing Room. Founded in 2019 by former Detroit News reporter Stephanie Steinberg, the organization offers workshops and professional writing coaches to assist customers with press releases, email newsletters, fiction and nonfiction works and other services.
In 2022, Detroit Writing Room closed its Washington Boulevard location downtown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The price of rent was a factor as well, Steinberg said, although rates were high downtown before the pandemic.
“We got some rent relief but it really wasn’t enough. Rent was probably the number one reason why we closed the space,” she said.
The Detroit Writing Room pivoted to offering its services virtually and has resumed some in-person events. Like Marshall, Steinberg agrees Detroit doesn’t have enough places where writers can congregate. She opened the Detroit Writing Room due to the lack of writing workshops, book talks and other literary experiences in the city.
“I was heartbroken to see the Room Project close. I didn’t consider them a competitor only because we’re all trying to achieve the same goal of promoting and uplifting the literary and writing community in Detroit,” Steinberg said. “There are wonderful book shops that offer writing workshops and open mic nights and do some of the things that we do, but Detroit has so much talent and the writers in the city deserve places where they can go and be creative.”
La Shaun Phoenix Moore, a poet and former steering committee member for Room Project, helped develop programming and hosted youth events for InsideOut Literary Arts, where she serves as an advanced youth programming coach. Moore also led workshops on healing the “mother wound” or intergenerational trauma that’s passed down from a mother to her children.
“I knew that I wanted to write some sort of memoir about my life and experiences, but I didn’t know that it would take me down the path of intergenerational trauma and helping other people work through that,” she said.
Moore also broadened her network within the Detroit art community.
“It not only brought me that diversity reach, but even teaching me respectful practices, like properly using pronouns, respecting people’s boundaries, creating openness and awareness for all of the different ways that beings are walking through life,” she said. “Room gave me some hippie vibes in order to be able to develop me into a kinder, gentler artist in the community.”
Moore hopes the connections she’s made with other artists will continue.
“I just hope that even though the building has had to move, they won’t lose the momentum,” Moore said. “I hope that they’re able to bring some iteration of Room (Project) back.”