2026

I had a new year of writing (almost full-time) ahead of me. By now I’d had a few discussions with publishers and other virtuosos within Swedish publishing, about my books. One thing had changed, I wasn’t so anxious about sending my work out anymore. So I sent the third novel (the one about Veronica and Ruben) into the void. Even though I was making progress creatively — trying new ways of writing and increasingly gaining trust in my craft — I was not in an excellent mood with regard to my prospects in literary fiction.

I was beginning to feel trapped by the smallness of my country as a “market” for esoteric novels. What does that mean exactly? Well, it means that as long as I’m not writing the kind of books that sell the most in Scandinavia (crime fiction and psychological thrillers, aka “Nordic Noir”), the odds of finding a publisher that will risk something to publish my first book are beyond poor. In cruel collusion with a windy and dark winter, this hurt me a bit.

I am far from a perfect writer. I have a lot to learn. Occasionally, I get some nice feedback on my work from prominent people. I cannot be entirely delusional, partly for sure, but not entirely. Surely, I can change and adapt, but I cannot give up too much of what I set out to do, which is writing the weird and swirling tales of my heart, just to pass through the intake. There must be another way.

I love my first language. Swedish is the language of my parents, my first reads, the awkward love letters and first stories of my childhood. But in January of this year I decided to switch to English for a while, to create more opportunities for myself.

Having worked and lived with English as a constant presence in my life and brain for many years, I figured it was worth a shot. And, because I heard myself say, out loud, “I cannot write short stories; I simply don’t know how it’s done,” I ventured into (yeah, you guessed it) short stories.

During a freezing week in late January I set up a drill for myself. Every day for a week I would write a new story. Starting fresh every day with a blank page. And since I only had the one day, I couldn’t spend half of it dwelling on the right idea. That I “didn’t know how to do it” actually helped, because all I could do was try. A naively ambitious attempt every morning. The first morning a saw a neck disappear behind a corner and figured it was someone’s missing brother. Day two is was thinking about a term had used in a seminar, and instead of looking it up I invented a story around it. The week went on like this, with speed and intensity. I have described this drill in a post from January. I was being my most compulsive self and it was not pretty.

Pretty or not, this endeavour gave me seventy pages of raw material to work with, some of which ended up having actual potential. Do not try this at home, I should say. But, no. If you are in a slump, feel out of touch with your imagination and the subconscious powers of your mind-belly, I do recommend mistreating yourself in this way. Just write what comes to mind every morning. Start somewhere. Anywhere.

Maybe you’re one of those who do morning pages. Ditch that for a week and do this instead. For me it was important to challenge my hesitancy toward writing short stories. I came into closer contact with my creative compass. And it doesn’t have to be short stories, it could be a new novel idea every day, a poem, a letter, or autofiction. The surrealists were all for this kind of unhindered pouring out. And I am all for the surrealists.

Since February I have been editing and developing new stories, building on that first five-day batch. Spring whooshed by. I got myself a wonderful little corner of an atelier where I sit and write and work every day, manifesting new routines for my creative work-week. I now have a story collection-in-progress. It follows twelve characters across time, geography and circumstance, each of them seeking, longing for, or moving away from something that was left behind, taken away or missing from their lives. The stories move across centuries, from a historical island to a speculative near-future.

My latest venture in taking my work seriously — and I do nowadays, no more lying about not being a writer — is that I have submitted all of these stories to around sixty literary magazines and competitions. This of course opens up a vulnerable channel for dozens and dozens of “NO THANK YOU” emails popping in at all hours. With the time difference between my Nordic self and American literary editors it is fairly often that I get a NO first thing in the morning, or even late at night. Like a little whisper before I go to sleep, Goodnight, I don’t want you. Note: Do not check inbox just before bedtime. More on the nightmare that is literary submissions in this poorly camouflaged rant.

Tally: Now, in late June of 2026, I have three novel drafts, one poetry collection, and a story-collection-in-progress. Math is not my strong suit, but I’m summing that up to a total of 4.5 failed, unproved, promising, and/or budding books.

These are my current vows:
I will continue writing for at least one more year.
I will continue to learn and make progress — creatively, spiritually, poetically.
I will share my journey with anyone who wants insight or perspective on trying to live a creative life. Putting thousands of words into the universe every day until I decide it’s time to stop will be my mission.

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In case you missed it, read part one here.

Part two:

2024

After a long period of doubt and anguish, I quit my job to write the next book, an intercontinental avantgarde novel about a sea captain who rams his 400 meters (1,312 feet) long container ship into shore. It is a story about losing control, taking a stand, a secretive love story about an abandoned tourist, as well as a contemporary comment to the virtual abundance of online shopping and its material and logistical consequences. Yes, it has a lot going on, and you should only see what the first draft tried to do.

High on synonyms, I wrote the first draft: a braided narrative of four parallel stories. Massively complicated, esoteric, borderline pompous, and obscure at times. One strand told the story of a reluctant goddess of fate crossing a continent to save the world from humanity’s failings. After finishing the first draft I saw that it was not going to work. It had to be rewritten. Two brave and very qualified friends read this version and both came back with: “It is a book”.

I fell into a slump of dramedyesque despair for a few weeks, not because of the feedback, no, I already knew before anyone read it that there was so much more work still to be done to make it work. This was around Christmas the same year. I had to do something else for a while.

Desperately wanting to follow my own path, I had been writing one hundred percent intuitively, just opening up Scrivener or my heavy, gifted notebook every morning. My projects had started with a poem, a dream, a sentence. That was the kind of freedom I was craving after many years in offices, trying to climb ladders, doing and saying the right things, pleasing rooms, perfecting emails. I could feel myself tensing up every time someone wanted to talk to me about plotting, structure, planning, outlining… Out of fear, I said, That’s not for me, I cannot work like that.

There was slash is this sense in me that work-work is where I do things by the book, strategically, academically, businessmindedly. I didn’t want to bring that part of myself into fiction writing. Understandable. Foolish. I was afraid of attempting something planned and failing to see it through, afraid that my precious work would be tarnished by plotting. I resisted this pigheadedness by giving myself four weeks to plot and plan a new novel, which I then had eleven weeks to write. (This thing about deadlines, I know, it’s perverse. I need the pressure and intensity that come with a tight timeframe. Staring at sentences, this tendency to stop and question everything gets me nowhere, no, just hammering on with a sense of urgency is what works for me.)

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2025

For four weeks I plotted the novel. Starting by combining two of the sentences I had written down in my notebook, on one of the many pages where I had scribbled down things that came to mind, inspired me in some way. The two sentences were:

Veronica finally misses Ruben now that he’s gone missing.
Small town post office late nineties.

Every chapter was configured to get to know Veronica and Ruben. Why didn’t she appreciate her partner until he went missing? What happened to Ruben? What was his side of the story? How had Veronica become who she was — a spoiled and passive queen of a post office about to close up shop forever? Where and when did she last see Ruben? What was their relationship like? Who could know where Ruben is? If he’s alive, where is he?

On one of my daily walks I listened to an interview with Salman Rushdie, where he said something to the effect of, Don’t do anything else before you write, don’t read the news, don’t watch tv, just start writing right away in the morning. I wanted this. No make-up nonsense, no emails firsts thing.

This fuelled my Rushdie-era (sounds ridiculous, whatever), a period of a few months where I stayed in bed writing from eight until noon every day. There was no room for vanity in this practice. It wasn’t sustainable longterm. Anyhow. With the chaptered and plotted map in front of me, feeling like an absolute forest creature, I wrote around 1500 to 3000 words a day for six weeks. After that I edited for three weeks. The result was a light novel of 50000 words about the mysteries of the mundane, about Veronica and Ruben, about the dismantlement of small town services, about who we think we are in our twenties versus who we can become later on. About looking away from our needs.

I still like this book. I has an air of seeking, regret, and longing. I learned that there’s nothing bad about planning. No freedom disappeared forever at the cause of some chaptered document. And as long as you exercise and drink roughly as much water as coffee, you’re going to be fine doing it Rushdie style.

After sending out the Veronica-book for feedback I went back to the previous manuscript. The big ship-story that wanted too much. I re-wrote the whole thing, taking with me what I was just figuring out how to do when it came to structure, re-organising the whole thing, and then writing it again with a new map and a new world order.

I cut two out of the four storylines, I created a frame story to hold and guide the central question of the book: Why did the captain ram his giant containership into land?

The frame story is set in 2025, where a journalist has tracked down the captain, called the Ghost Captain in the media. It is now ten years on and the world has all but forgotten about the intense media frenzy that surrounded the mysterious case of the captain who deviated from his course and for four days held the entire world chained to their news feeds. Where is he going? Is he a terrorist? What does he want? The second half of 2025 I re-wrote and edited the second draft of this book. Come December I was exhausted by the thought of transatlantic crossings and global logistics. Another Christmas. I had to pause.

Tally thus far: At the end of 2025 I had three novel drafts, one poetry collection, and a willingness to open up to new ways of writing.

A note on lifestyle: By now you might be wondering how I sustain a life, since I’m not a member of any royal family, nor charging for my stacks here. I pay the bills by being an inventive Swedish-English copywriter with twenty years of experience. I write manifestos, voice-overs, scripts for commercials, taglines, poetry for startups. Tuesdays and Thursdays I do some work at the design agency that I still co-own with an amazing creative partner. I drink filter coffee and go running in the woods. I produce and host a literary podcast together with my best friend. I stay open to life’s wonders instead of traveling like I used to. Petted a bumblebee yesterday, as far as I could tell the snuggle was consensual. Felt rich for a minute.

In the next article we’ll reach this current year of 2026, when I decide to pack up and move into a different language and claim I do not know how to write short stories.

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Read part 1/3 here:

More on the dark comedy that is sending out work into the void:

From 2017 to 2020 I accidentally metamorphosed into a poet. (As a child I was clearly a comedian, there is strong evidence to support this). During a roadtrip to Gotland with a friend, I had a bunch of notebooks with me. In a sudden realisation that I could easily lose all of the scribblings in those books if I just forgot my bag somewhere, I started taking pictures of every page. Looking through the images I then saw that the “material” was about a hundred poems. I edited them during the winter and put together a collection of about ninety poems. Today, six years later, I opened the pdf and got a glimpse of who I was seven-eight-nine years ago. It is a dark and weird and witty and teared up and nerdy and sparse and over the top account of both memories and contemporary life. It’s a Long Island iced tea, really. Conflicting, confusing, strong in its core, and draped in some sugary spumescent camouflage.

2022 - 2023

The second time around, the novel writing began with a poem, or a few poems actually. I was dealing with the death of my father. A death I had been trying to pre-deal with, for a long time, ever since I first realised he was way older than other dads. Fiction is an excellent escape from the real world. Fiction also offers means of bringing the real world up to a level of realness that is colourful and scary, layered, messy, grammatically correct, and absurd at the same time.

Shocking to no one but myself, the plot of this book was the following: When her father dies, a young woman inherits the keys to the summer house where she grew up, on an island deep in the Swedish archipelago. She discovers a sister she never knew she had, one who died long ago. In some liminal space she brings this sister with her and goes back through the scenes of her early island life, a claustrophobic union of a girl and her alcoholic and self-centred dandy of a father. She has sixty days to face what she’s spent a lifetime avoiding.

I wrote the first half during the loneliest time of my adult life, knee-deep in the covid crisis and its mandatory shit show. No need to worry, it was a long time ago. Then I had to park the book. I wrote the second half when I was feeling stronger, when I had settled in to something that resembled a new life. During the summer of 2022 I wrote and wrote and wrote. I was still working at an amazing yet challenging job and wanted to take the book as far as I could during my vacation. The structure and rules that the book needed emerged, the two parallel strands of narrative, the ending.

During the following fall and winter I edited and finished a draft that I could live with, and nervously gave it to a handful of trusted people for feedback, before I sent it out to seven publishers (in Sweden you don’t need an agent to talk to publishers). The book is fine. It’s poetic. Some publishers even liked it but said it was the wrong debut, that it needed more forward motion, more drafts. All true. My longtime friend and mentor still thinks this book deserves a second chance. If I had unlimited time I would sit down and write it again, better. Not sure how to describe it to people, in some ways it’s a classic coming-of-age tale; In other ways it’s a little out there. I mean, it has a three-page intermezzo about eel grass (keeping that).

At the end of 2023 I had one novel draft and one poetry collection.

In the next article I’ll move on to 2024, when I quit my job to write an overloaded novel draft about a sea captain who rams his 400 meters (1,312 feet) long container ship into shore.

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On learning to trust my writerly instincts:

Some surprisingly upbeat flash fiction:

He met his love at an antique furniture store. Yes, he frequented that kind of place. Not out of interest but out of regret. Because even though it was more than twelve years ago now, he was still looking for his father’s things. The two men had had a huge falling out right before the father had suddenly fallen ill and passed. Hence, there had been too much anger to deal with while packing up the house. So he had sent off the whole lot to goodwill. Everything. The antique razors, the musky Pierre Cardin colognes, the ties and the bow ties. The pots, the pans, the mountaineering gear. The love letters, the bills and maps and globes as well as the empty terrarium. Of course he changed his mind about it afterwards. Every trace of his father’s existence now gone. Because of this erasure, he had turned to constantly foraging every vintage store in the neighbourhood and beyond, waiting for some fragment of the father to resurface.

Anyway. The love. Her name was Ruby and she laughed at the most outrageous things. Out of nowhere she was standing beside him at one of the posher places. He was halfway through inspecting the vintage razor section. It was a polished little boudoir of past dandies’ treasures. A complete rosewood set. Leather travel kits. Bulbous bottles. None of them his father’s. It had hit him then, an overwhelming helplessness that caused him to slump forward. The tiny dog, Bruno, had been struck by the same feeling and looked up. And Ruby, and here is the thing, Ruby had felt it too. She had been looking for a gift to bring to some ridiculous dinner party. She was smelling soaps and lifting vases, until she was hit by this tattooed man’s surrender. Without assessing the alternatives she stepped right up to him, took his hand and said, “I know”. Only that. “I know.”

And she knew, alright. She knew that life is impossible and old things in the present are never the things they once were in the past. She told him this and he had felt the tears coming, shocking his dog by dropping a few big ones right atop his smooth little forehead. Ruby had looked down at Bruno and thought, geez the dog is sad too, what happened to these poor fellas? So she decided to take them both out for coffee immediately. At the nearby coffeeshop, she sat on a wooden chair, letting her long auburn hair fall down over her left shoulder, almost touching her knee as she leaned in. The man had put his dog in his lap now. He was explaining the whole ordeal, from the fight and the things to the obsession with claiming something back. If only just a razor.

They weren’t far from her apartment so she made them lunch. She said, You have to let go now, all this looking through old things will anchor you in the past. He had said, You are right but how does one stop looking? You just do, she answered, you make your legs go somewhere else and the head will follow. Lucky for the both of them she was in a purple dress when she said this, and the dress did something to the temperature in the room. It was right then that he saw her. Not like he was just looking and waiting for her next ingenious resolution, no, he really saw her. There she was. The love. She was all love in some corporeal, mystic form. There was love in her verdicts and there was even love in the dress.

From looking at things, scouring, scanning, plowing through piles, he stopped searching altogether. The searching had led him nowhere. Plus, she had found him. Him and Bruno. Bruno fit in her big dress pocket and seemed to take to the purple love just like his master. The next day he quit his job as a fishmonger and showed Ruby his savings account. She had laughed and said, I’ve always said fish is too expensive for land people. She wanted nothing to do with his money and said, If you sleep quietly as a mouse and do your own laundry you can move in. That he could do.

A heavily tattooed man with a very small dog decided it was meant to be and zigzagged through the park for an hour or two, while figuring out what to do with all of his things. He stopped at a bench under a very large chestnut tree. Of course, he thought, he didn’t need things. He must let go of things entirely. For what he needed was love and love only.

Am I in the way? The book wants to come out, but not under any old circumstances. I need to protect it and create the right space for it to show itself. “Have some faith, and sit in the damn chair and see what happens,” Paula McLain said. So, I sit down.

Sometimes the words that arrive are meaningless muck. But I try and try again to make wonder happen, and by wonder I mean wonder as in wtf, I wonder why, I wonder how, I wonder what this is. I loosen my muscles to help it come forth, I squint to see what it is, to welcome whatever. Am I a mystic, in connection with something divine?

It is mysterious alright but I don’t like to use the word divine, since it removes the source of this energy away from myself and my body, from where I know it came, and places it somewhere unreachably remote. For we are not supposed to know the unknown, the divine as an entity beyond ourselves. No. I’m positive this book came from me. So I search and wait. It can take weeks or months to find the book. Am I a huntress?

Nope. But a mixologist? With an interior cabinet of liquids that bears both possibility and danger and beauty and berries. Potent spirits for me to mixture and shake and swallow and regurgitate until it makes sense or at least reveals their shape and flavour.

The words are only meaningless until they start to make sense. I find a string and I pull it to see where it leads. And so I continue writing. Sometimes in circles. If I’m lucky it leads to more curious matter I didn’t know I had in me. Where in the body does it come from? I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

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And I can’t be craftswoman either. The writing community is so into craft and I am too, of course, because we all want to know how the best books are crafted. Ingenious books that hold together without duct tape are like magic tricks. You look and look, but how? It’s floating. Are there strings? One out of a hundred times when I sit down and write I get that feeling. Like the text is hovering with its own energy for a minute. Then maybe I’m a magician, just not a very reliable one.

I feel my hesitation towards the theoretical, the explanatory, the ways that I can shape a story to come to certain points, to cause a calculated effect. I try and fail to talk to people about this. They are so good at explaining the magic. They’re telling me there’s a recipe but I feel like a child that doesn’t want to be told what to do, and perhaps I am. Maybe I’m a child still. Is that it?

So. I study my idols. Study the works I love and try to dismantle them. Break their books into pieces, hack and saw until all I see are these pieces, a quibbling pile of fragments that are no longer the thing that I loved, no longer a shimmering creation but pieces I vaguely recognise. Colours I have seen. They were more precious together. I broke it.

Fine. I might be a bad engineer. But right now, having written three (possibly OK) novels, hundreds of articles, and a good batch of short stories, I feel something else, that instead of the right strategy or skill, what I do have is a compass. I sense the direction. I see what shines. I feel and hear the moments when a story accelerates, oscillates, takes off. It took a long time to listen to and trust this wobbly and sensitive little arrow in my chest. It’s my duty to finally trust it.

In the context of urban middle-class life, I have made some radical life decisions to accommodate this sensitivity. I have created space and time. If I just sit down, shut up, and place my fingers on the keyboard. If I hold the pen loosely. If I take out my headphones in the woods, if I lie down in warm water, it will speak. In the moments where my breathing slows and my body listens, it will sigh a delicate sigh and say, So anyway, where was I…?

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On non-linear writing.

On writing short stories in a rush.

A poem about a body.

Normal people have so much to tend to. It can be difficult for these well adjusted members of the work force to find time to care about your art. It’s not their fault. Because meetings have to be met, cars parallel parked, calls answered and money laundered. Instead of waiting for your normal friend (assuming you have one) to pick up your manuscript or come to your exhibition, I recommend meeting them halfway, using their methods of communication for a change. But how?

The world deserves to be tricked into caring about what you have suffered to create. Every time the others take time away from the all-hands to share your fantasy the world inches closer to being a liveable planet.

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Here are a few rebellious deeds that do the trick:

Warm up by launching a few dramatic text messages starting with, “So there has been some development…” The use of the dot-dot-dot is an important tension builder here. Wait for the “What?”, the “What now?”, or “Who dis?”, until stalling a bit further. Text messaging can either lead to a telephone call, or, even better: Email — weapon of choice for most serious jobsters.

In emails, make sure to always use the subject line in unconventional and enticing ways. Here it’s wise to take lessons from the spam community, whose output is abundantly rich in this area. Try out, “Can I trust you with this?” And then attach a short story. Or, “Of course I forgive you”, and then send over some of your lonesome links for them to click and like.

Go analogue. Print out your latest novel draft or artwork and have it delivered to your friend’s big corp office, forcing them to go down to some brightly lit reception area and sign for it. If that sounds expensive, just wear something brown or red/yellow and go there yourself. Same outcome. Hostage by delivery.

Or, send out some work you want feedback on as an attachment to a calendar invite called, “Senior strategy meet-up: drinks meny”.

Last resort. OK, this one takes some work:

Use AI to learn about business conferences. Conferences are a great divide: To some they’re hell on earth, forcing successful house cats out of their homes to spend time away from the life they painstakingly built over decades. To others, conferences are Narnia, serving up a good excuse to run away from the painstaking lives they have build and paid for through years of dreadful work-work. Anyways.

Set up a conference agenda with legit sounding topics like, Demystifying the Digital Frontier, Authenticity Masterclass Deep-dive, and Change-maker’s Workshop. Use some free online software to design and distribute one invitation only, to your best friend’s work email. Sender ID should imply some distant HR or business development division of their company. Make sure to include free meals and generous accommodations in the invitation copy. Single rooms only. Multilevel beverage package.

When your friend receives this invite they won’t care if anyone else in the division is going. If they ask around and others seem clueless, they’ll just feel special. And getting special treatment at a normal job could be lucrative, hence important. Instead of an address you just drop a modern venue name, in the likes of HubSpace, and fill in the coordinates of the place you always went together, back when you were still the same species.

The day of, your friend will come weekend-bagged up and ready to ditch their family and you will be waiting with chilled cheap wine and a smorgasbord of gems to show, tell, and read out loud. What are they supposed to do? Run? I don’t think so.

More on dreaming big.

More on being generous.

A friend asked me if I think we have become poorer readers in the age of AI. We have become lazier writers – in the everyday writing that goes on in emails, presentations, and applications – yes, I’m quite sure of this. Many of us are just copying together texts generated by questions we didn’t have the time to properly formulate. But lazier readers as well? Yeah, probably that too. And it’s not just because we’re in a hurry. It’s likely because of the abundance of chance information served by the machines. And please let me just be an artist and call them machines; it feels so right.

I ask Gemini a simple question, and I get a nine-page answer. I skim through a quarter of it and see that the machine has not fully understood the question but answered anyway, just filling the screen with adjacent information about adjacent topics. I ask again, this time a little more pointedly.

Consider the swells of words generated, only to try and landfill the vast gap between my question and a factual, thoughtful answer. Impersonating a teenager at their first job, desperate to seem wise, the machine is just giving me anything, truckloads of anything.

The opposite of this nervous rambling is poetry. What is scraped together and inflated could instead be carefully looked at, spun around, chosen, and replaced, landing gently in a small group of nine words instead of nine pages.

If you have time to double that, please help yourself to these eighteen words by Salma Deera, explaining poetry:

The personality type, and you know this one, that just keeps talking. The one who is just staring at your mouth waiting for it to close, jumping in at any opportunity, and then just grabs hold of the moment, the mic, the air in the room. Is that what we’re building? Is that the intention behind this new intelligence? Don’t we have enough of those?

How about a toast to brevity. But also to relevancy.

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A different, older, and very much seasoned friend once said: “Gahhh, [dramatic bored face] people always ask me what I have been up to lately, isn’t that pointless? Ask me instead what I have been thinking about, I think about really interesting things.” And she does, I can vouch for that. So by asking her what she has been doing, as in actions, we miss out on the good stuff. That she made lunch and took out the trash and almost slipped on a paperclip, that’s just filler. And I don’t want filler.

FILLER FILLER FILLER FILLER FILLER FILLER

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is 42. That’s an intergalactically short answer to a big question. And just because I still, decades after first reading it, do not fully grasp its meaning, that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong answer.

There’s such a boldness in being brief.

Old one about having ambitions

On being social

I am on Instagram scrolling for updates I don’t need. I get jealous of interiors I don’t have and food I’ll never cook. I see, Instagram is for creating demand. I come upon a post of two women standing side by side at a beauty convention. The caption says something about learning so much and getting free stuff. The quest for knowledge about how to get prettier seems to me like a personal and vulnerable matter, but I assume that’s not what they mean.

I am on that PC blue workaholic platform scrolling for contacts. Just reading through the posts as a copywriter, I gather some artificial professional intelligence has helped many of them express their pride over this and that team effort. Sounding communal in words, looking individual in context. I guess LinkedIn is for looking successful enough to not need anyone else.

This might be the dustiest, most arbitrary deduction in modern history but, there’s nothing social about social media. There’s no way for humans to communicate in a feed without all of us just shouting into the same tube. Feeding the feed doesn’t allow for speaking and listening at the same time.

Should I think more about how to share? An overwhelming amount of articles on Substack are about how to grow your subscriber base. I click and read and say thank you if they allow free commenting. I came here to share my writing and read other people’s writing. Should I want something back? If my presence on Substack was about making money I would be disappointed, for I have failed. If my presence is about being a social writer, now that’s more difficult to decipher how to do.

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There’s something I’m not getting about sharing. Yet, on Telegram, the icon for starting a channel, as opposed to a group chat, is a megaphone. That means one-way communication. Just a suggestion, but perhaps every social media logo should be a uniquely beautiful interpretation of the megaphone.

An unmissable part of sharing is receiving. Since backing out of my professional life for a while to concentrate on fiction writing, I am posting completely different things than before, wondering what I could possibly exchange the likes for. And they are precious, my likes on Substack are like dog-years, where three likes equal at least three times nine likes on other platforms.

For introverted writers, I suspect sharing is actually venting. Sitting around thinking about love, ghosts, loneliness, extinct species, or countryside murderers all day, it’s no surprise that one has to share a quote or two, whisper into the feed Hello, I am over here.

I see you.

More about online weirdness

On still having dreams

I feel lucky

This bi-weekly blast promises no research nor academic significance. It is fully propelled by the sheer frustration watts of being a creative person. If at any time you feel bad about not being sufficiently lauded for your creative work, please join me in celebrating the purest madness of all: attempting, in the tepid war crimey spring of 2026, to be a fiction writer. Some newsletters are garbage. Not this one.

In puffs of about a thousand words at a time I will give you everything you need to pose as an undersocialized and overeducated cultural bastard at upcoming events, with ammunition like: “Is the personal essay just a serifed diary entry?” and “It is up to the books to get read by me and not the other way around.”

I will give you as much of myself as legal. I will serve you really overwritten sentences, like “Two boy hands holding the ruffles of a twice worn dress, made for matrimony, meant for quiescence.” As well as hauntingly sparse ones, like “Hi.”

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The Fiordy newsletter has no hidden agenda. It is an overtly fabricated concoction setting out to trick you into tilting your head and going “Huh?”. Travel tips, there will be none of those, since all my travel is intracranial. The publication is humour-free, influencer intolerant, and vegan. Book reviews of weird, messy, poetic, powerful, disastrous works of fiction and non-fiction will be sprinkled throughout the year. Please sit down for incoming craft pieces on non-linearity, new fiction writing, wells of inspiration, word-bending practices, and poetry.

In an average funeral and/or arrest free week I write about 4,000 - 6,000 words of fiction, going into novel drafts and a work-in-progress collection of stories. With full transparency I will share the details of my rigorous schedule already right here: On Mondays and Wednesdays I wholeheartedly doubt my existence and the meaning of creative work as a whole, which leads to excessively commenting on other substackers’ articles as if this was work. Tuesday afternoons I think about what this world would be like if there were no local dialects. I get my exercise from flailing my arms at the news and jumping ship whenever a new website sends me a discount code. Every morning I actively avoid mundane, un-literary deaths by walking eyes closed into traffic. Friday afternoons I cry for eight minutes before trying to convince my sober partner to take up drinking.

I am a great admirer of your work. And by work I mean presence. I admire how much time you spend on here. I want to give back by avoiding talking more about Lena Dunham.

It will be my great honor to mercifully and regularly clog your feed. If you comment on my posts I will write something cynical and dubious back, only to delete it and write something pure and thankful. Your unsolicited opinion means everything to me.

Read about death

Weird book recommendations

My first ever Substack entry

Two years ago I quit my job to write full-time. I had always been writing, but now I had a book in me that refused to gestate in office environments. The books (it turned out to be several) didn’t care for emails nor phones. They only cared about coming into being. And isn’t that fair? We simply cannot ask for a fetus to abide by corporate law. Every embryo of art must be allowed to focus solely on coming to life.

As a child I wanted to be a journalist, then a singer, then nothing. As living became more and more complicated, I forgot to dream. Being young is awful. I don’t care if you disagree. Deciding, making plans, taking the right steps, getting the right grades or accolades, is all exhausting. Add to that having to deal with a body, having to deal with gender and love and money and makeup and class and booze and lies and jeans and top lists. I am truly glad to be way past thirty.

But what now—how does one dream of a future nowadays? I am writing this while preparing for a literary podcast episode dealing with the future. So, I’ve started by writing down associations, to be able to then find interesting books on the subjects (please add suggestions below). When thinking about the word future, or the concept of time not yet lived, these words fell onto the page:

Unwritten — predictions — prophecy
Future selves — fantasy — dreaming
Building — planning — optimism
Time — age — savings — fear
Awakening — visions — hope
Futuristic — modernity — aesthetic
Past futures — sixties — Jetsons
Envisioning — unbelievability — sci-fi

Are we thinking more or less about the future as the world turns to shit? Has the world always seemed to be turning to shit? Wasn’t there supposed to come a time of upswing and bloom after the pandemic? Didn’t we agree the world needs to be kinder, sounder, more connected—with fewer flights and more wisdom? Please. None of that, at least in my view, has materialized.

It can be tricky to dream. I’ve always struggled to see myself in a different situation than the one I’m in. I saw what I would be doing, achieving, making. I didn’t see myself grow old. Do you? I didn’t see myself in a different house, in a different country. I only saw myself getting to the next step of things.

When you’re young and accept (consciously or subconsciously) the terms of Western capitalist pathways for becoming an adult, you don’t think about the person you are going to be in the future. You think about what you need to do to get the next job, the high salary, the bigger sitting room.

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Not many species think about their future. I look around for a scientist to ask how many and which, feeling a bit lonely when it comes to dreaming. As a purebred fear-driven achiever, I came into this dreaming business very late. Has everyone already left the party? I see your backs heading down the alleyway. Wait, come back.

But let me start in the other corner. Dear French, Americans, and Brits: I feel seen and human when you answer my emails as if it is your great honor to take part in my life journey. Even if your reply is only a way of declining my offer, refusing my creative work, or ducking a meeting, I still feel we have something beautiful going together.

The Scandinavian digital communications landscape person-to-person is a brightly lit waiting room furnished with two dead flowers and a do-not-reply infinity loop. I have been on various sides of different power dynamics, and I would like to make a case for courtesy.

Especially in creative industries, there is some profound anxiety influencing the way we talk to each other in the north. We smile and wave but seem scared to celebrate each other’s efforts. As if we cannot take the risk of being nice to the wrong person. As if a bomb would go off if we did.

If a person is looking to collaborate or share a piece of creative work, we roll up instantly like vibrating little business hedgehogs. I don’t want to dwell on this embarrassment. I would much rather present a list of tiny changes anyone in the whole world can make to secure a friendlier creative space:

1. Take a moment to consider your place in the universe. Especially if you’re an editor, curator, or otherwise gatekeeping person on the receiving end of people’s passion projects.

2. Like more stuff. Nothing bad is going to happen to you if you see a cute or smart post and decide to give it a penny of your online liking currency.

3. Honor yourself by having an opinion. Why not invest some love, time, or effort in someone or something that is yet to be certified as “good” or “right” by the entire universe. If everyone did this, maybe we would end up with a diverse and interesting world of ideas. Imagine that for a future.

I started a band once. Emailed a gazillion labels. Kitsuné in Paris replied within forty-eight hours with input. Ended up signing in Lyon. The Nordics are yet to acknowledge the band’s existence.

Pitched an artsy Nordic magazine. Four editors, zero replies. Reached out to an editor at with a question and heard back the same day.

On a whim, I messaged an esoteric poem about the ocean to an American podcaster with thousands of listeners and got three red hearts in reply.

I repeat. Three red hearts.
They made my day those emojis.

On a March morning in 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed in the French Alps. The first officer, who had been diagnosed unfit for work by his doctor, locked the cockpit door and flew the plane and its 150 passengers into a snow-covered mountainside. A tiny lock on a plastic airplane door, I thought at first. But apparently the flight deck doors on an Airbus A320-211, and many other aircraft, were reinforced after 9/11 to withstand ballistic impacts and forced entry. A rule was instituted after this crash, that there had to be at least two people in the cockpit at all times, but by 2017, this rule was dropped. The airline said it had no safety benefits. I don’t know what to make of any of this: the door, the lock, the diagnosis.

Adam Higginbotham’s book Midnight in Chernobyl kept me up at night for weeks. It describes the people, the technology, the politics, the timeframe, the repercussions, and the deadly salvage operations of the Soviet nuclear disaster in 1986. An infinite number of things went wrong. An infinite number of decisions were made, and some of them changed the course of history.

Try to truly wrap your head around the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the 2004 earthquake and following tsunami in East Asia. Try to understand what was driving a Norwegian man to shoot and kill sixty-nine people at a political summer camp. I read about the guns he brought, the Fiat he rented, the police uniform he put on. I read about his mother and her downfall.

Disaster is the devilish twin of the lottery ticket. It lets us get high on the unpredictability of life — moments leading to death or prosperity, casting long, dull shadows on the mundane. It is often a mystery how this thing happened to a number of unassuming persons. Their faces on the news demand our attention for as long as we can hold it. Or until there are new ones.

In his book Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, Mark Buchanan lets us roll around in the enigma of raging fires, earthquakes, and stock-market crashes. I learn there is a natural element of instability built into the structure of our world. This “critical instability”, as he calls it, is vibrating within the mathematics of politics, tectonic layers, piles of flammable debris, and heaps of heavy snow, at all times.

I feel curiously in tune with this critical instability right away. It’s embedded in how I view things.

The crucial takeaway of the book is that even though the triggering cause is the same (one spark, one unexpected drop in stock price, one pre-war gunshot), the result is radically different depending on the state of the whole system at that exact moment. It could result in an unnoticeable blip in the overall motion, or it could cause a once-in-a-century catastrophe. We look and look and look again for the signs, but they just weren’t there.

Looking for these signs and trying to make sense of dramatic events and outrageous behaviours is an excellent way of channeling hyper-vigilance. It devours attention and makes for compulsive fabling about the why and the how on earth. So of course, disasters are catnip for nervous writers. There is no better fuel to soak us in and wait for the drop of a cigarette.

The day my father died I had on rubber boots. Giant silly rubber boots to fit the giant silly toe I’d hurt the week before. I wouldn’t have remembered the toe if it hadn’t been for this deadly timing. None of the hospital staff in charge on his last day of panic could ever have appreciated that in this room my life was both ending and starting anew. Birth—death—rebirth, this is how it goes. Now, this man dying was the man I grew up with. I was his person, his stand-in for a wife. I had loved him furiously because no one else would.

Two days prior I had received the call I always knew was coming. He had been taken to the emergency room and was now in intensive care. My first response is crystal clear to this day; it was these three words: Is it now? The “it” so many years in the making, finally catching up to the “now”. From there time melted. I don’t remember anything about the massive tsunami-turned-nuclear-meltdown that happened in Japan just days after. I don’t remember celebrating my birthday that same month. I have only the three days I spent on a chair, in boots, wondering what to do.

The first year without him was a mixture of emptiness, forbidden normalcy, and eye-scratching sadness. Wasn’t he beautiful? Wasn’t he just trying his best to be someone? Didn’t he dress up as a businessman and shout and walk faster than anyone beside him, just to get somewhere? Wasn’t he completely on to something about the world being unfair and people being stupid and lazy? Wasn’t he just a poor baby boy when both his parents had died?

I was about eight when I first started thinking about his death. He, who always lied about his age. Me, always anticipating disaster. I figured it out pretty soon, that he would die way before the other dads. If I’d known I would get to have him until I turned 27, would I have tolerated every selfish, eyes-closed thing he ever said or did?

When you think someone might be gone tomorrow you treat them differently. You give them tons and tons of slack. All the slack you have you give away, keeping none of it for yourself.

After five years, the whys took over: Why didn’t he ask me any questions? Why did he keep me all to himself, when I seemed such an impossible task to manage? Why didn’t he teach me anything? Not entirely true. He did teach me to wash my hands and not to run indoors. He taught me to look down on people for whatever reason you could find. He taught me that looks matter. He taught me endurance.

The day my father died he said almost nothing. Mostly unconscious, halfway over the bridge. When the nurses adjusted his breathing device he solely let out a NO. He was not going to take this crap. Scaring people off had always been his solution; why wasn’t it working? Then a groan of ocean-deep anger at life once again beating him up.

By noon of his last day, a nurse came into the room and knew exactly what time it was. She had one look at his quivering body and told me without hesitation: I think you should give your dad a hug. That was his last minute on earth.

After ten years the picking at scars had to subside. It was high time to invite the quiet. Let go of the shame of not actually missing him anymore. Let go of the explanations as to why he must indeed be missed. He was often speaking so loudly I would disappear into myself, or, he wasn’t speaking at all. Curtains down. Fences up. That’s at least over.

This week marks fifteen years since the hug. Fifteen years since the capital NO and the no goodbye. I do not sob. I do not question. I do not hate. Would he have liked how my life turned out? Well, “liking” did not fit with his vocabulary. He was a man of inverted emotions, of unquestionable opinions. There were some things he did not hate, people he did not yell at. But no, he wouldn’t have hated how my life turned out. But once and for all, it doesn’t matter.

A few years ago, back when I was still allowed in offices, I was in an actual business meeting. Keynote slides were sliding. I had invested a few coins in an app. I will certainly not bore you with any of the details of this appiness, except that in this meeting, one of the owners looked me straight in the eye and said: “I never knew you were such an oddball.” I am indeed an oddball. Thank you. I will pass on this gift of enchanted honesty someday. For now, I will give you substackers some literary treasures of oddbollery.

When I say weird, I mean different. Unusual. Books that make me shiver with shame, confusion or bewilderment. Books that send urgent messages from spine to finger, through nails and back up and around again. Books that ask me what the fridge is going on. What is a world? What are words for? Is this edible? Wrong is good. Strange is right.

I’ll give you an example of some lusciously weird books to sit in the darkness and marvel at, along with some short excerpts. Are you offended in some way by the word weird? That’s OK. Keep on scrolling.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

Dangeous esoteric talents. Humans as described through the unspecified senses of a wax doll tells me more about freedom, fire, and conviction than any science.

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

A dead dad needs to be handled carefully. Sometimes turning into a leaf is the only rational thing to do to remain in contact with your first love.

Shy by Max Porter

A backpack of rocks. Walking through black nights looking for a self. It’s Max Porter, you will understand why text can simultaneously thrill you and kill you.

How It Works Out by Myriam Lacroix

A novel that is not a novel that doesn’t care if you care about these categorizations. Power struggles. Lost and found babies and lady bosses. Sliding doors in your stomach.

Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch

Building the Statue of Liberty. Drowning the earth. Swimming through time. Meeting and learning from a sex worker’s lost foot. Returning a giant letter missing from a storefront sign. I wish I could do all this, too.

Walking through in a forest last year, I met this incredibly weird tree fungus. Beautiful. A little bit repellent. Look at me, look at all of me, it said. I am pink and yellow and I might smell like scrambled space egg. I said fine, I’ll look, I’ll even snap some pictures. I salute you, mysterious fungus.

Money and war, and even famine, are all products of the human imagination, Vonnegut wrote in the eighties. Didion knew that to be able to report on the state of anything, she had to go and have a look for herself. Writers have produced millions of pages of story, analysis, and guesswork to grapple with what the hell is going on in the world. And here we are, some thousands of years in, and we seem not to have a clue.

Long before my time, there was an earthly consequence to most everyday decisions. If you needed potatoes, you had to grow potatoes. If you slapped thy neighbour, thy neighbour might piss on thy stoop. If you forget to delete hours of useless holiday footage from your phone, a thousand more litres of precious water will be used to cool a server on a patch of obliterated forest. All very concrete chains of consequences, yet only one seems invisible.

Many actions involving abstract matter — like time, money, anger, politics, love or data — have concrete effects somehow draped in a cloak of faraway clouds. Isn’t it hard to grasp? Even thinking about this makes my hemispheres spin. We cannot handle this world we created. The parents are out of town and we are burning the house down.

It’s getting increasingly hard to sleep. And just when I am about to tumble through the layers, my fifteen-year-old (excellent) LED television makes a tiny clicking sound. That’s it, I think; I am being watched through the little camera on its frame. Wonderful, my devices are now controlled by online terrorists. Then I remember the thin strip of white tape I put across the lens eight years ago.

When a silly man with yellow-dyed hair wants to scare the world into subordination, he takes to loud threats on little whiteboards—figures of invisible percentages called tariffs. My abstract little heap of invisible savings plummets, making little red arrow marks on my palm-sized screen.

Looking at a picture taken only yesterday, I am struck by love. Gosh, I love this person so much. I feel the swirling blood not knowing where to go, yet my love is invisible. The person is real. The picture is here. The love cannot be captured nor held.

A big decision, like banning abortion, might be a PDF. Life-altering.

Am I the only one thinking the end of civilisation might have something to do with how we camouflage consequences? Let’s dance until the music stops. Then everybody will launch into full panic.

Imagination as Interpretation and Metaphor

While re-reading Kurt Vonnegut’s cheerful, dystopian sci-fi satire Galápagos, I am puzzled. A Noah’s Ark-type ship of celebrities sets out for the Galápagos to escape famine, World War III, and a virus that renders humanity sterile.

In a very sharp New York Times review by Lorrie Moore (yes, that Lorrie Moore), the narrative is explained as follows: “(…) from a million years hence, from the afterlife, whence he can best pronounce on what was wrong with us 20th-century folk—our brains were too big—and reveal what, through evolution and for purposes of survival, we became: creatures with smaller brains and flippers and beaks.”

Okay, so: a million years on from the 1980s, the human species, after a reset, develops smaller brains. We basically turn into jolly seals. This is a Darwinian development to save us from ourselves, since the big, heavy human brains of yesteryear had too much processing power for our own good. We just used it to make up evil schemes to manipulate and torture each other. Rings a beastly bell.

All this to say: when thinking about imagination, Kurt Vonnegut popped into my head. I thought of his inventiveness, his far-out stories, and his bold predictions. But is satire really that imaginative? He was merely feeding what is wrong with the world back to us, dressed in burlesque attire. I’ll file it, for now, under “imagination as interpretation.”

Imagination as Brain Magic (i.e. drugs)

Now, back in the wintry dread of the present day. I erased the reality of five January days by writing five short story drafts, more about this exercise here. I did not want to look away from the screen. I went where my mind needed to go: Lisbon, Porto, London, Paris, and Antwerp. I boarded a train. I looked up at mesmerizing yellow train station ceilings. I got a rescue Schnauzer and named him Bob. I bought century-old jewellery and followed the engravings back to 1920s Italy. I exhausted myself by writing for twelve hours straight, until my drying contacts resigned and jumped off the cliff of my face. Yet when I stopped, I wanted to go back in. The “normal” world lacked saturation and promise.

Smell the coffee. In the real world democracy is failing, scented candles are poisonous, lying is winning, and there are around-the-clock war crimes. Do I even know what to fear when “markets are plummeting”? My imagination cannot seem to cover the chilling gaps left by fragmented news accounts and loud opinions. Reality is out of it’s jurisdiction.

The score: Fantasy vs. Reality, 1–0. I need to get back on that train through pre-pandemic Central Europe and edit my way out of this. Is escapism imagination’s most self-serving tool? Probably. I look away for a few hours, therefore, I persist.

Writing for ghosts means sitting at your desk for maybe six or ten hours a day, five days a week, decades out of a lifetime. Sometimes someone reads what you write, even non-ghosts. However, countless words will go from notes through a word processor (can we call it something less IBMish, like lyricatron, or poetry juicer) straight to the bin. You might text bits of it to friends in exchange for lazy likes.

Writing for ghosts can entail imagining a reader that does not yet exist, since ghosts are not just ex-humans, they’re also future ones.

Writing for ghosts means maintaining constant vigilance over the subject matter and characters you write about. Stealing and bending memories from your own head to use as tokens or metaphors for something else. Worrying about the leakage of truth and who will suffer from that truth: the family members, the friends you don’t see anymore because they just wouldn’t stop talking about themselves. This worry has to stop. Ghosts do not retaliate.

Writing for ghosts includes being a ghostwriter, transcribing the world of the mind, one scoop at a time, into sentences.

Writing for ghosts is writing for imaginary editors and agents and publishers and magazine executives — those who make a living fishing for thoughts. Maybe you picture them in hats. As long as they do not exist they cannot harm you though. This is good.

Writing for ghosts is swimming in your own bathwater until you go to Paris again, see something weird dumped at the recycling again. Until you change outfit, meet a mad scientist, begin to think of something more, something other than the same old stuff. Do all of that.

Writing for ghosts also means never having to be entirely isolated. We need the ghosts to write for, to write away from, to read into circumstances. Why would you chase them away?

Writing for ghosts is gruelling and wonderful at the same time because it is the practice of ethereal around-the-clock farming.

Writing for ghosts is finding your crowd, because you are a ghost too, living off the living, feeding on novelties and archeological treasures, synthesizing one thing with another. Antique jewellery plus disappointment. Airport floor plus regret. The ghosts are patient and will await your directions. Now lie down and breathe for a moment before you summon them again.

____
[Just read an article on how AI is drinking up all our water. So tis post is not spelly-checked. Relish these precious typos, in a pathetic ode to worldwide water. The future is dark but I’m darker, y’all should thank me for providing some contrast.]

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Here’s the deal: I currently find myself in a limbo between two books. Or between one book and whatever the hell comes next. So on Sunday night of last week I has a bunch if anxiety about how to prioritize my time come Monday. Just write something, the head said. And since I have heard myself saying I don’t know how to write short stories, I decided to try. Just one.

On Monday I set out to try to write a short story, just to get my brain out of its loop of doubt for a few hours. The story could be about anything. While summoning the dark forces, I saw the back of a man’s head crossing the street. I felt like I had lost touch with someone, and that someone manifested themself in that head walking away from me. So I wrote a story about a lost brother. The title, Long Lost, came along with the head. Twelve hours and half a migraine later, I had a twelve-page draft.

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On Tuesday I figured I had to do this all week, which is a venture very typically me, according to nearby sources. So I sat down and thought about a word that had come up quite a few times over the last few weeks: un-learning. Instead of getting into what it means to the online community—which is the only community I have access to from my laptop—I conjured up a story about a woman going to take an un-learning class, learning about un-learning. This piece opened up quite a few mystical saloon doors within myself. I was consumed by the homework and repercussions of this class. Eighteen pages later, I fell asleep.

On Wednesday I thought, this is a heavy-duty imagination drill and I need to pace myself. So I dug up a piece of backstory I really liked but ended up not using in my novel. I rewrote the piece with more of a short-story arc (whatever that is, I’m here to figure that out).

When Thursday came, I had the usual this-is-impossible feeling. How do I snap into a completely new story world and trust it to last me all day? Self-prompt: Since I have done this at least two times already (if one doesn’t count using old backstory material), I can do it again. I fell into a brief daydream alluding to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic The Secret Garden. What if someone were to build that thing for real, in the present day? A pan-European family tale emerged.

On Friday morning, my brain and heart were sore. I thought about loneliness and jewellery, and how old jewellery sometimes feels like little unpolished letters from the past. The story Engravings drifted ashore, a rough draft about a woman deciphering her new self after losing her husband of forty-nine years. When in doubt, seek out dead lovers’ emerald-cut emeralds.

Outcome: The endeavour gave me seventy pages of raw material to work with, some of which might actually have potential. This is not a viable working situation—I get that. But I ended up challenging my hesitancy toward writing short stories. The structuralists are not going to like this but what struck me the most was: I came into closer contact with my creative subconscious by diving lawlessly into each day and I cried only once. OK, twice whatever.

From Siri Hustvedt to Sheila Heti to Ben Okri, to Lidia Yuknavitch and Hisham Matar, and back again. The non-linear cyberspace of fragmentary fiction drew me in years ago, and I didn’t know why. Now I know, and understanding why my brain and sensations flow with the chopped-up, beautiful arrangements these authors bring into this world of biblical chronology is helping my writing. I took a class at the Shipman Agency with the powerful Lidia Yuknavitch, and it got fiercely non-linear.

What is a human going to do next? Where were my friends when this happened? How can there be a scorching sun in my memory of this event when it clearly happened in November? If the telling and re-telling of memory is the processing of life after the “fact,” then I believe fiction is the processing of fantastical possibilities before they happen, leading the way through fragments arranged into a larger, more elaborate composition: the story.

“Just tell it like it happened,” some say. Don’t hide it behind metaphor or poetry. But I choose to listen to Lidia Yuknavitch, who says the distinction between metaphor and truth is a false dichotomy. I need to say it again in the context of telling a story in a fragmented, non-linear way and using metaphor as a vehicle. I need to understand this: whether I am writing fiction or non-fiction, the story is mine, and there is no maths teacher to correct me. There is instead perception and the possibility of resonance. Again, the distinction between metaphor and truth is a false dichotomy.

Even though the Earth is only spinning in one direction, our lives — and the lives of animals and plants and tokens — can change at any minute. This is the true non-linearity of life, isn’t it? It is being alive.

I am considering turning an unfinished novel into a memoir, not because I need, or even want, to write a memoir, but because said in an interview: “(…) I had to find the strength and my voice to write honestly and clearly about something in order to put it away. (…) Because in my own fiction, as I mentioned before, I kept being drawn back to writing the same characters. It was like I was sort of haunted by this unprocessed experience (…)”

Then, past midnight, Swedish time, Yuknavitch said at the end of our class something to the effect of this: recursion is when a pattern repeats itself until it can no longer repeat, interrupting the possibility of an endless loop—and therefore change can happen. So, in order to move forward in both life and fiction, I might need to go back and tell the story again, this time honestly, and with some of Dunn’s summoned strength.

The fragments of a day, of describing a friend, of misremembered conversations, of cell phone pictures, unanswered texts, and neighbours’ shifting faces are the disjointed structures of life. This is how I feel I can write. Like Ben Okri’s short paragraphs in The Age of Magic. With multiple perspectives. In a sequence that adheres to repercussions and imaginings, not the clock. I just finished a second draft of a fragmented novel that could have been even more musical and wildly arranged if I had trusted this dark magic of non-linearity. But I am trusting it now, and before I change my mind, I’ll have another go.

____

+ A loving shoutout to the brilliant writers who participated in the Shipman class led by Lidia. Two years ago, I probably would have muted myself and stayed muted in the presence of fifty-nine obviously brilliant writers. Now, without knowing why or when it happened, I cherish the opportunity to listen, learn, write flash fiction, and discuss freely in the best possible company. Thank you. And thank you and .

I see a heron quietly balancing on an ice floe in the city and think that perhaps it has come to tell me something. Either I am looking for the dreamlike and poetic in the world, or just dissociating. The definition of having a romantic view of something—anything at all—leans toward the unrealistic. Maybe there we have it. A romantic sees a world that isn’t real. This frozen Sunday, I refuse this notion and would like to counter: it is the layers of grammar, hierarchies, and value chains that we have coated on top of what was here first that are unreal.

Wikipedia says: “Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.”

There are moments when the gap between the ethereal and the rational is bridged. I’ll give you an example: last night I heard these exact words come out of ’s mouth: A single tear carries the same elements as the ocean, from which we all came. I sit down for a minute now and absorb this. The thing is, when someone tells me something like this, I get a sense of some crossbreed baby alien that is half science and half sensation.

Could I be more precise? Fine, in a world that demands definition, I’ll suggest the following: Romanticism is the artistic and intellectual ambition to keep choosing emotional connection over competition, rhythm over rules, creation over compliance, in order to uphold the meaningfulness and spiritual integrity of all things and beings.

I watch as the molecules of salty water
made from grief or relief
send a signal back to where we came from,
telling the ocean we are still here.
I breathe tepid air into the atmosphere. We’re still here.
I drop a droplet of pain, sweat, or aching beauty moisture
down onto the hardened earth between my boots. We’re still here.
I leave an oily paw print on the wooden door
as I go back inside, and we are now together.
I touch the curling silver hair of a beloved and see
it all came from in there and it will all come out.
All of it.

Wait. The thing about romanticism might just be the choice or inherent ability to make meaning. What if the romantics are more essential than ever? Try putting these two words together: Successful. Meaningful. A world of whirling digits in between.