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

My Writing Year 2013 and Plans for 2014

It' been an overwhelming year in many ways. Not least because I'm mainly writing in Swedish again. And I happen to live in Sweden. I haven't quite accepted it yet. I keep telling myself that nothing is forever and that I'm a citizen of the world and all that ...

I still have three main projects going on:

SWENGLISH 

The project is finished and I've written the book. It's just the whole publishing business left to deal with.

REPLACING ANGEL/UNDER THE LIP

Same, same but different. This novel has been finished forever and I haven't given up on the UK market, but at the moment I'm finishing the translation into Swedish and will start to approach Swedish publishers again.

POETRY

And then there's poetry. Performance poetry. If it wasn't for the poetry I would tear my hair and slit my wrists. Poetry keeps me on track. Poetry gets me out of the house. Poetry makes me friends. This year I took part in the National Slam Championship in Malmö and since then I've been performing regularly at festivals, slams, open mics and other random events. I also tried my luck as a "metaphor wrestler". (Pictured).

The reason I love performance poetry so much is that it's immediate and democratic. Anyone can do anything; you can write a poem today and throw it on the world tomorrow. The novel writing can be soul destroying in comparison as it involves a lot of waiting.

So. The future. In 2014 I will do everything I can to get SWENGLISH published and I will try equally hard to get REPLACING ANGEL out there. And I will step up on every stage and fill every page. Am working on some promising collaborations. Watch out!

I also got a an author page on Facebook now. Please like if you haven't already!

Happy new year all readers!

PÅ SVENSKA

Nowhere To Go

Before I started my Swenglish project and hit the road, I had a massive clear out, getting rid of clothes, books and CDs, but I just couldn't give away books that were signed by the author. One of those books were Ben Graham's Nowhere To Go.

When I unpacked my few belongings in my new home in Gothenburg, the title Nowhere To Go leapt out at me, making me a bit sad. For the first time in my life I live on my own, but am far from settled. Instead of dealing with stuff like a blocked drain and a dead basil plant, I'm escaping into the world of fiction. Nowhere To Go is fiction but I suspect it is close to the author's own experience of being a bit of a drop-out from society.

Reading Nowhere to Go made me think of Kerouac's On the Road with the romantic notion of travelling and taking drugs and just hanging around, trying to get by. But this book feels closer to home. The road trip takes place in Eastern Europe and all the characters are English working class with fantastic Yorkshire accents. Vic, the narrator, is more of an observer than a participant and I especially love his walk through Prague one hung-over morning.

It's a short book, more of a novella but I think that's a strength. Instead of focusing on life back in "boring Britain" the story is basically the trip to Prague and back. Vic's reflections are thoughtful and poetic, showing the gap between the beatniks and "the neatniks". The book is worth reading alone for the brilliant description of a night out playing with national stereotypes  "France glowers over, sipping a cognac at the bar, an elegant femme on his arm, while Britain sulks on the sidelines."

I can't get enough of road trip romanticising, but perhaps it isn't the kind of book I should be reading right now. I should appreciate that I'm in a clean, comfortable and warm flat instead of "being transported in a metal ice box through a bleak inhospitable landscape on a road trip to nowhere". However I will finish with another quote from the book that kind of describe my life in general: "this temporary resting place on the outskirts of adventure". To read more about what I'm up to check out my Swenglish blog.

Nowhere To Go was originally written in 1998, but published in 2010. To read more about the book and the author visit his blog: http://bleedingcheek.wordpress.com/

Dress Rehearsal before the Swedish National Championships in Poetry Slam

Today I'm travelling to Malmö for the Swedish National Poetry Slam Championships. Last night my team (Jens Börjesson, Ann Dahlström & Erica Engdahl) did a dress rehearsal at Acoustic Stage in Växjö and it was all good fun trying out our team piece!

Photo: Marie Nilsson

PÅ SVENSKA

Towards the National Poetry Slam Championship in Sweden!

Today I took part in a poetry slam in Växjö, Sweden. I came second which means I'll be one of four people representing my county in the National Poetry Slam Championship in Malmö in May!


I'm super happy as I haven't been on stage in Sweden for years. Almost all my material is in English, but I wrote three poems in Swedish especially for this competition. You can watch some of my poems on YouTube.


PÅ SVENSKA

On the Road in Sweden and England

I've been on the road for most of the year because of my Swenglish project. Now I've only got a week and a half left and still don't know where to settle, perhaps I'll keep moving back and forth between Sweden and England for the rest of my life ...

The other day I watched On the Road (based on Jack Kerouac's classic novel) with Swenglish host number 29. Even though the book is better of course, I was positively surprised by the film. And I was reminded of one of the reasons why I started to write ... The main character Sal Paradise says:

“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” 

When I grew up I was a very quiet and shy girl, but in my teens I was drawn to the so-called mad people described in the book, and I loved and still love reading books about mousy people following more colourful people on great adventures. Apart from Sal Paradise following Dean Moriarty in On the Road, I loved reading about Patrick Keane following Will Savage  in Jay McInerney’s The Last of the Savages.

I would appreciate if someone could recommend books where mousy girls follow colourful women on great adventures. In my debut novel ("Punk industrial hard rocker with attitude") the main character Amanda kind of follows her older friend Kim, and I've realised that most of the stuff I write is based on this notion of meeting a person that will bring some danger into your life and changing it.   

TO FOLLOW MY SWENGLISH JOURNEY PLEASE CLICK HERE