Avståndet mellan…

Det där med pendelstafetten, har jag berättat hur svårt det är? För ni som inte vet: Grundidén är att en massa författare skriver var sin pendeltågsnovell, en novell för varje station på linjen Nynähamn-Bålsta. Alltihop utspelar sig under en dag, vårdagsjämningen. Och (och det här är det viktigaste och knepigaste av allt) novellerna flätas ihop för att ge läsaren en oavbruten läsupplevelse. Varje huvudperson måste alltså, vid slutet av sin novell, på något sätt lämna över tids- och rums-stafetten till nästa huvudperson. Det här blir alltså ingen traditionell novellsamling, inte heller en kollektivroman. Utan någonting däremellan. Den heter Avståndet mellan.

Idén kom jag på för någon år sen, när jag höll på med Debutantbloggen. Det kändes som en kul grej, ett sätt att bryta författaryrkets ensamhet, ett sätt att ta pulsen på svenska samtida författare, ett sätt att få andra att hjälpa till med en romanidé som jag själv, som jobbar så långsamt på svenska, skulle aldrig hinna med på egen hand. XPublishing i Älvsö sa okej, varför inte… and the rest is (soon to be) history.

Men det har visat sig vara lättare sagt än gjort (annars hade någon annan redan gjort det). Det är bökigt och tids- och tålamodskrävande. Det är en sak att leta upp intresserade författare och få dem att skriva på kontrakt; det är en helt annan sak att få dem att lämna in sina texter i tid (inte ens jag har klarat av det!). Och så har olika författare olika stiler, vilket jag hoppades skulle öka trovärdigheten i de olika jag-personens narratativa röster. Men… även det har visat sig vara en aning problematiskt. Om målet är att läsaren inte ska störas alltför mycket, så utgör stilbrotten en störningsmoment. Språk, till exempel: en novell blir på engelska, den är superfin och skriven av den amerikanska författaren Anthony Grooms. Andra noveller innehåller ord och fraser på norska. Och min första novell (jag skriver två stycken) var som utkast helt enkelt på tok för komplicerad. Jag fick skriva om den flera gånger, på både engelska och svenska.

Men snart blir det ändå dags. Boken utkommer på vårdagsjämningen i år och blir nog fullständigt unik inom svensk litteratur. Jag hoppas folk förstår vilket job vi (mest Karin Mossed och Hanna Larsson på förlaget) har lagt ner. Och hur vi försöker krympa avståndet mellan.

Free trial class/Prova-på kvällen, Skrivarakademin

For anyone interested in creative writing in English in Stockholm 2012, I’ll be offering a free trial evening class Tuesday January 17th, 7:15-8:15pm at Folkuniversitetet, Kungstensgatan 45 (subway stop: Rådmansgatan).

We’ll start out with a brief writing exercise, briefly discuss our work, and finally I’ll introduce the group to a bit of narrative theory from a structural perspective.  I’ll have a list of topics to be covered in the course itself (which will meet Mondays 6-9:15pm, starting February 6th).

Hope to see you there!

Är dialogrutor litteratur? Bamse vs. böcker.

Ibland verkar det som om det enda barnen i Sverige läser är Bamse och Kalle Ankas Pocket. Och det är väl bättre än ingenting… men det känns lite begränsat. Bamse är ganska trevlig, pedagogisk, förutsägbar. Kalle Anka tycker jag är mest bara jobbig att läsa. Överdriven, känslolös, gäll. Nu har Tivoli i och för sig höjt ribban… men ändå. Det blir i princip bara dialogrutor, och minimalt med brödtext.

Jo Sverige är ju internationellt erkänt som serieland. Kulturhuset i Stockholm har Serietecket, Bonniers har köpt Galago –– det är big business och på allvar och ibland är serier till och med konst… men. Är dialogrutor litteratur?

Det hör till mina funderingar att jag för några år sen skrev en D-uppsats om litteratur som lek/teater för läsaren (se info-sidan här ovan). Att det börjar med bilderböcker, där läsaren står för replikerna medan illustratören står för scenuppsättningen. Att det allt eftersom övergår till mer text, mindre bilder, tills det enda läsaren inte behöver själv iscensätta är omslaget. Under processen tar läsaren ett allt större lingvistiskt och strukturellt ansvar. Men den utvecklingen begränsas om läsaren aldrig utvecklar sina egna bilder, aldrig gör sina egna tolkningar av narrativens möiljöer, känslor, händelser m. m.

Bamse må vara världens starkaste björn, men är han fullvärdig litteratur? Varför vill folk bara läsa dialog?

Creative Writing Sign-Up –– What Is a Course Worth?

Folkuniversitetets Skrivarakademin in Stockholm has just released its sign-up info for next spring’s course.  I’ll be teaching Monday evenings, 6-9:30 p.m., at Kungstensgatan 45.

The course is called Creative Writing and Narrative Theory.  It costs just under four thousand crowns for ten evenings @3 1/2 hours each, which works out to about 114 crowns per hour.

The next question is, what will people be getting for their money?  My goal is teach people everything I’ve spent the past twenty years painfully learning in classes and by hand, through trial and error and the hundreds of rejections I accumulated before becoming a published author.  Skills and theory, as well as updates on what’s going on in the publishing industry and the world of literature, so people won’t have to figure it all out by themselves.  Also: a sense of community, and a chance to take yourself seriously as a writer.  Visual artists often rent studios when they decide to really invest in their art; paying for a course can be a way to invest in your future as a writer.  I took a number of writing and playwriting courses at college, and what I learned wasn’t always apparent right then.  But now I’m glad for every one of them –– almost every time I sit down to write, I remember something I learned in one of my courses.

I hope it will be absolutely worth the investment.

Here is the info-page.  Let me know if you have any questions.

The Swedish Dad

Henrik Petterson i Malmö, ni vet, han som skrev den fina romanen Jehåvasjäveln, är hjärnan bakom ett nytt projekt. Det handlar om svenska pappor och blir en slags lyxig bilderbok… för vuxna. En ”coffee-table book” som vi amerikaner brukar säga. Som handlar om barn och deras pappor.

Ja vi har det ganska bra här i Sverige, vi pappor, och snart bevisas det i fina stämningsfyllda bilder och kortkorta intervjutexter. Boken kommer 2012 på engelska, japanska och tyska. Propaganda eller eller en kärleksförklaring till föräldraskap och den svenska föräldrarförsäkringen? Kanske lite av varje, men fin, mycket fin blir den.

Jag har skrivit ett förord till den engelska utgåvan, och ska dessutom bidra genom att översätta texterna. Men varför kommer inte boken på svenska? undrar åtminstone en svensk-amerikansk pappa.

Länken till hemsidan: The Swedish Dad.

 

Skrivarkurser på engelska/Writing classes in English in Stockholm

It happens all the time: people ask me to read their manuscripts, sometimes in Swedish but usually in English.  So I read and give comments, discuss where they think the manuscript is headed, where they think they as a writer are headed… and then almost without fail they ask whether I know of any local writing groups or classes in English.

I used to shrug my shoulders.  For years the English Department at Stockholm University has offered a class at the master’s level, but that’s not realistic for most people.  Other than that, an American I know named William Males (one of the founders of Frostwriting.com) used to teach a popular writing workshop in Gävle.  But he’s retired.

Now I’m pleased to say that starting spring 2012, I’ll be teaching an evening course in Creative Writing and Narrative Theory at Folkuniversitetet’s Författarskola in Stockholm. The course will be split between practice and theory: we’ll be practicing narrative techniques and stylistic elements, as well as studying narrative structure and theory.  We’ll be doing a lot of exercises, some inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, others designed by me during the years, and reading half-a-dozen theoretical essays (all available in the public domain) by authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Virginia Woolf.  Being a native speaker isn’t a requirement, though the class will require proficiency in English (this is an opportunity for people who work in Swedish, as well, to try their hand at writing fiction in English, and to learn about another theoretical tradition).

It should be a lot of fun, a lot of work, and a lot of learning.  I’m looking forward to it.  I’ll post a link when the sign-up for next spring goes public (details should be available around the 15th of November), and maybe I’ll see you there.

Noveller på räls

Under Bokmässan 2009 deltog jag i X Publishings workshop/intervjumonter Bokburen. Att jobba med en massa andra författare var så trevligt att jag föreslog att vi skulle fortsätta jobba ihop. Kanske skriva en bok. Till exempel en ”story cycle” eller ihoplänkad novellkedja/kollektivroman, som utspelar sig under en dag på pendeln. Jag ville ge läsaren en enhetlig upplevelse som ändå lämnade utrymme för diverse stiler och författarskap.

Nu blir det verklighet! Boken kommer till våren, lagom till vårdagsjämningen. Det är författare från Sverige, Norge och USA some deltar. Mitt mål är att bjuda svenska läsare på en alldeles ny slags läsupplevelse. Det har inte varit lätt, och det finns en massa jobb kvar att göra (men förlaget X Publishing är arbetsmyror som brinner för det de gör).

Vi ses till våren, på pendel-linjen Nynäshamn-Bålsta!

(klicka på pressmeddelandet för att läsa helskärmsversionen)

Who Wants their Books to Become a Theme Park?

So we took the boat from Stockholm to Finland, where I once spent a summer in the 90s working with a friend on a book about composer Jean Sibelius that never got published.  This time the pilgrimage wasn’t about Sibelius, though; it was Finnish author-illustrator Tove Jansson.

We drove from Helsinki up to Tampere to look at her original illustrations, located in a windowless museum under the city library.  I’d been twice before, back when I was drawing as much as writing.  And once again I was struck by how meticulously she worked, in such a tiny format, with pen and ink (absolutely her strength –– her watercolors and cut-outs are evocative and add color to her world, but it’s he drawings that show her at her most masterfully efficiently.  She seems to have worked at 1:1 scale, and wasn’t shy about correcting her work by masking over parts).

We listened to her books on CD all the way through Finland –– from Helsinki to the museum in Tampere, then out to the coast and down to Turku to the theme park Moomin World/Muumimaailma/Muminvärlden.  Once about two decades ago I made the mistake of driving to a Dylan concert in Cleveland, Ohio, listening to his music in the car with a group of friends.  Listening to Dylan before the concert was a poor choice because when he went onstage, he’d changed everything –– melodies, lyrics, hair, band… so that the whole concert turned into a frustrated rescue mission, trying to find the remains of a songwriting career amidst the auditory rubble he was croaking from the speakers.  But listening to Tove Jansson’s novels (read in Swedish by Marc Levengood and Birgitta Ulfsson) provided the missing link that the park itself wasn’t able to.

Because how do you take an author and turn her work into a theme park?

In this case, must have been a complex process. Dylan gets to re-write his songs himself, but Tove Jansson is no longer alive.  And there isn’t just her books to be taken into consideration, there’s also the work of her brother and wife, as well as Japanimation Moomins, the table service produced by Arabia, Finland, all the character licenses, etc…  And so the narratives on display were re-written, compressed, water-down, simplified, scrubbed of context and linguistic feeling, clumsily illustrated , written in Finnish and poorly-spelled Swedish (the language Tove Jansson wrote in, despite living in Finland).  The English translations seemed to flow better than the Swedish ones.  Her gorgeous, iconic illustrations were nowhere to be found except in the gift shop and the tower-house, where poorly-scanned print-outs hung inside a display case without any background information.  But on the other hand… at least it wasn’t hysterically overproduced Disney.  Or Lego.  It was clumsy and amateurish… and actually a relief.  The kids complained that the characters walking around in costume shaking hands with kids weren’t in character, they were all just walking around shaking hands.  And our nine-year-old remarked that the word ”melancholy” (melankoli), so frequent in the books, was absent.  The park was quite simply more fun and joyful than the original books.  But we did enjoy it.

So how do you turn literature into a theme park?  And who wants their books to become gift shops and ice cream stands and rides and story-walks through the forest?

In a collection of Tove Jansson’s original Moomin comic strips, she writes in the preface that the comic artist, despite working in such an abbreviated format, has a great ability to get readers to think about certain topics.  Without her books, the Moomin World itself wouldn’t have made us think much at all.  But it was somewhat literary, and I’m still pondering the artistic dilemna of how to turn melancholy into theme-park profits.

Liten releasefest på torsdag den 5:e maj

…på Gula Villan, Stockholms Universitet, kl. 19.00. Alla är välkomna.

Då släpps en skriftsamling som heter Stockholm Syndromes. Folk kommer att läsa från sina texter – jag kommer at läsa i några minuter från en novell som finns med i samlingen.

Novellen är på engelska och börjar såhär:

Killing Time

Kevin Frato

     … and Giuliana yanked my hand and pulled me in, and the stench of stale beer and piss shoved its fist in my face, and I dug into my pocket and it was still there, still after all this time, and she was the only one who’d understand, she always had been, and she stomped her clogs and yelled, Yo bring out the beer you queer, and Fast Frank licked his lips and blew me a kiss and grinned like Babcock-Hovey with a Haji-Mama in his sights, and he leaned down behind the counter and pulled out two plastic pitchers and flipped the taps and the draught splashed into the plastic guts, and he leaned forward and his Hello Shitty t-shirt stretched so tight over his chest I could see the safety pins popping his nipples, and Let there be beer! he hollered, and someone slapped me on the back – The City of Brotherly Love still fucking loves you, brother! – and someone else smacked my head – Been too fucking long, Timo, we thought you got your ass wiped over there! – and Giuliana ran her fingers through my hair, it was still sandy even though I’d washed it with men’s-room soap under a faucet in Frankfurt, ’cause the snafu-desk made me fly civilian in my fatigues, and the Pashto next to me, can you believe it?, he farted for eight hours while Greenland rolled past underneath like a crumpled field report, the one I never wrote, and the bar tilted and slid, my chair did somersaults in the turbulence, the jet motors whined and Fast Frank jabbed the stereo: ”Dancing Queen” squealed across the room and they hooted and cat-called and then Frank was up on the bar-top in his heels shaking his booty and flopping his hairy beer-belly and hollering, Yo Timo, welcome home to the Land of the Free and the home of the Gays!

Finding Yourself in Rome

My Uncle once went to Italy to find himself, he said.  My brothers and sister and I figured he was probably going to try to find a girlfriend.

I was thinking a lot about my uncle the other week when I was in Rome with my writing students, working on historical fiction and studying what others have written about the city.  One of the highlights was writing stories set during the Roman Empire while sitting amongst the ruins of Ostia Antica at the mouth of the Tiber.  We also visited the writing department at John Cabot University where we attended workshops and a poetry reading by David Starkey; and we went to the Keats/Shelly Memorial House at Piazza di Spagna, where it’s still the 1820s and Byron is still composing Don Juan.

After a couple days I no longer needed a map of Rome – I walked so much that I learned to leave the map in my back pocket and instead find my way by instinct, often arriving back to my hotel room (or walk-in closet, rather, with shutters chained shut) hours after sundown.  I found my way by getting lost, and as I walked the city, I thought about my uncle.

When he finally returned to Ohio after months in Italy, I asked him if he’d found himself over there.  I recall the look on his face – as though I’d caught him telling a fable.  He said yeah, he’d found himself there.  Then why did you come home? I asked.  He just laughed.

All roads lead to Rome, but once you get there, even if you’re looking for yourself, it really is pretty easy to get lost.  But finding inspiration in Rome is another story.  It’s on every corner.  Rome is a city as layered with stories as it is with ruins.  While walking its streets, I thought about Paola Russo’s fabulous first novel En säck full av Gud when I found myself in the Jewish corner amongst artichoke restaurants and carpentry garages, and I thought about Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 when I wandered into a photography exhibit around the corner from the tourist madhouse that is Fontana di Trevi, and again at the library of ancient history.  Each time I found myself lost in stories, sometimes other people’s and sometimes my own.  I started a short story at a pizzeria in Trastevere where nobody but me spoke English;  I finished it on the steps of a church that I will never know the name of.

Did I find myself in Rome?  I found stories, and myself in them.

I still wonder what my uncle found.