Workshop

Dispatch from a Happy Harbor

I have retreated with the page proofs of my new novel to a monastery a short walk from Castro, the stronghold on which Aeneas and his crew set eyes some 3,200 years ago
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In the Yellow

To slow down and prepare to stop
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The World’s Shifting Navel

They are not communities – backwaters, provincial boltholes, global metropolises – so much as psychogeographical places
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The Only Way Out

I dream that I am sitting in a large string orchestra, whose seats are arranged in rows on a gradient, so that the rearmost one is a few meters higher than the front one, where I have just taken a seat next to a writer friend
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Untimely Reflection

For more than a year, a bag of old clothes has been sitting in a corner
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The Present as Legacy

Almost through the first draft of a new novel, I become unsure
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Sudden Urge to Get Off

I must have performed at least seven bypass surgeries on the novel I have been working on for a few years
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Bloodletting

Part of what makes literature indispensable, I suppose, is that its sensations are as difficult to pinpoint as they are impossible to deny
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Shifting between Melon and Kerosene

I sank into the Odessa of yesteryear like a body into water
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Charged

What good is literary prose if it does not get under the skin of its readers?
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Sand and Unknowing

Only when the carousel has made a full rotation and I am once again sitting in the chair where I discovered the Sphinx at Giza do I leave the hall. My knees tremble slightly, as if I have been thrown off balance
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Ground Zero

Was this all?
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Coming Home

Over the years, I have discovered that I want to step out of my own skin when I write
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On the Banks of the Alpheios

For each year, the water passing underneath the bridge which I tend to cross with a jolt of reverence in my spine seems a little less buoyant, a little more sluggish
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Day by Day, Bone by Bone

For the past few years, I have been drinking two glasses of water as soon as I am on my feet, barely awake
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Wandering Energies

… no melancholy, no precipitous emptiness …
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Over and Over Again, and Always As If for the First Time

It is over a decade since the man who called himself »a sort of biologist« died. Strangers like us aren’t able to judge whether his ghost haunts the studio. Still, everything exudes calm, clarity, concentration. In a word: presence of mind
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Alaska

The only thing needed was this will to detach oneself from everything and everyone, no matter at what cost. I associated it with the thirty-first point of the compass, which is to say north by west, and with a name: Alaska
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Rather Be Deaf

Recently I was asked if I could name an appealing utopia in literature. The question made me awkward. In truth, »the Isle of Bliss«, of which the Romantic poet Atterbom spoke, makes me claustrophobic; every fibre of my body wants to flee
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Fuck, Marry, Kill

Is it not high time we killed off fictional characters whose principal purpose is to give the narrating protagonist self-insight and cause to celebrate himself as the best thing since pomade?
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