Thursday 2 October 2014

The Perils of Balcony Sleeping


Last week I made an appearance in Brighton. Not in person, but my short story-video was shown at the event Flash Lit Fiction where several stories were screened to the public. James Burt has written about the event here.

The story is inspired by a real life event. Christer Petterson, the guy who was accused of killing Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, lived on a balcony for a while. The drummer, and I lived on a balcony in Uddebo for two nights.

The title is inspired by Pretty Tied Up (subtitled "The Perils of Rock n Roll Decadence") by Guns N' Roses. And my brother thought the video was similar to Garden of Eden by the same band.

PÅ SVENSKA

Thursday 24 July 2014

The Art of Summer


I'm gathering energy for the autumn.
By evening swimming.
By celebrating July's Eve 
(In Swedish the month of July (juli) is almost the same word as for Christmas (jul).
Life is art.

Saturday 19 April 2014

Writing process tag

Maria Jaztrzebska, a poet I admire very much, asked me to join a blog tour thing, answering a few questions about my writing, so here you go!


1) What am I working on?

At the moment I'm mostly concentrating on writing group pieces for SmutsKultur, the performance poetry group I'm part of. Our latest commission is to perform at the opening of a new library in Gothenburg - in connection to a lunch beat disco. So I'm trying to polish my lines about disco anxiety ... not being able to dance well, not having anyone to dance with etc.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Well, I started to grow tired of the Poetry Slam format and asked a few other poets if they wanted to start a group and they all said yes. It's not that common to write poems together and I find it both challenging and rewarding. When a poem is finished we've kind of forgotten who wrote what: if you get stuck it's great to have the support from the others. We allow ourselves to be as crazy as we want to be and have a lot of fun.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I love hearing poetry out loud! I love playing with the spoken word, how you can transform a line from the page to the stage and make sense of it through your voice and gestures. Sometimes I enjoy moving commas around and thinking about line breaks, but it gives me a real buzz to communicate in real time and then the pauses might be entirely different to what I wrote.

4) How does your writing process work?

When SmutsKultur write together we often decide on a theme, brainstorm a bit around it and then we go home and write individually in a shared document. After that we meet up and try to build bridges between the different parts we've written. Sometimes we have to add a lot, other times it's just a matter of moving things around. 

The next writer of the blog tour will hopefully be writer, poet and novelist Morgan C Nichols



Tuesday 28 January 2014

Double Bubble: Publication of Two New but Old Short Stories

IMG_45292010 was the year of short fiction. The year when I only wrote short stories. No, now I lied. I happened to write the odd poem and worked a bit on a novel as well, but my main occupation was to write short stories.
The funny thing is that sometimes it can take just as long to get a short story published as getting a novel published. Now I've got two at the same time. Short stories that is.
One of the stories, A Day in Her Honour, is about mourning a family member and is published by Stand Magazine. I can't find a reseller on the net, so if you want to read the story you could email me and I'll send you a copy. This is how it starts:
IMG_4530
The other short story, To be seen or to be felt, is about growing pains and discovering certain feelings. You can read it for free here. Published by Fox Chase Review.

Monday 13 January 2014

Brand New Interview with me in Fox Chase Review



Fox Chase Review is a great literary online magazine from the States. I've had some short fiction published by them and they've also interviewed me. I'm sure you'll find out things about me you didn't know... About my writing and my attitude towards toilets. Click here to read.