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Once upon a time, in sixth grade I think, I got great praise for a short story I wrote about me and my mom at the public bath house down in Malmö - the biggest southern city in Sweden, where I grew up.
The story takes place when I'm about four years old and back then, for a year and a half me and my mom went to the bath house a couple of times a week, to shower or take baths, since we lived in a very old (and beautiful) apartment in the very heart of the city - but with no working bathroom. That apartment was later renovated by the way, and became worth a fortune.
Anyway, we were bathless at home. Dad showered at work (he worked temporarily as a chef's assistant while studying to become an engineer at the university of Lund (Sweden's Cambridge perhaps...Uppsala would then be Sweden's Oxford, and almost as old...), and when me and mom didn't go semi public with our washing, there was always the sink.
The short story was about my impressions of all the women's different naked bodies and ages, in the steam among the many showers and saunas.
The praise I got for this story, compared to milder praise for other types of stories made me start an empiric experiment that made me land on one conclusion:
Go bloody ethnic, it always works.
Don't ever try being universal, it rarely works.
The public bathhouses and not having a bathroom in my childhood was a hit. The same kind of hit that ragged Irish kids with dirty legs on cobble stone roads, listening to american rock and secretly smoking fags are. (why, oh why is it always such a bloody hit when kids smoke behind sheds and shit in literature or poems? it's like...the smoking thing is evidence that you're out there, tasting reality from the very tit of life...compared to us dull non-smokers.)
So I tried it out, and the Polish stories worked just as nicely, like grandpa's catholic wake back in the small communist village, eel fishing and Eastern German road blocks with Ruhr infested blueberries.
A hit. But I was honest at least, in my writing, it was just the motivation that was dishonest, my goal was empiric understanding of what people wanted to read, and thought was "good".
Today, when I'm older I don't give as much of a shit. Of course I care...but in the end I'm too tired.
Sometimes when I read a certain kind of poem I think: yeah, I could do that as well...ooh, how ethnic - a real WOODSHED! and you smoked/had sex/listened to some badass music/were apathetic/spat/shared a can/some other ethnic shit.
If the stories are genuine I like them anyway...but there is just something that bothers me with a great many of them, even if some are well written.
And when it comes down to it...I think I just want to write poetry about relationship shit, gardening, and inner processing, and that is as far as I understand it, mostly for myself.
I don't think I write for the reader primarily, not at all. And certain poems that others go aaah over makes me go bonkers. I like poetry, and sometimes I'm decent at it...but I am just not a poet.
Perhaps I'll feel different tomorrow, when this horrible paper isn't messing with me, but I have a suspicion that there is some small truth in this anyway.
For those that think this is some kind of proclamation filled with angst - it really isn't. I feel good, and I'm on to something here (and the bloody paper will soon be done!).
I'm gonna go and write myself some good old prose, and set my goal on becoming a semi known fantasy writer instead. Kind of like Tanith Lee on one of her better mornings perhaps...
The story takes place when I'm about four years old and back then, for a year and a half me and my mom went to the bath house a couple of times a week, to shower or take baths, since we lived in a very old (and beautiful) apartment in the very heart of the city - but with no working bathroom. That apartment was later renovated by the way, and became worth a fortune.
Anyway, we were bathless at home. Dad showered at work (he worked temporarily as a chef's assistant while studying to become an engineer at the university of Lund (Sweden's Cambridge perhaps...Uppsala would then be Sweden's Oxford, and almost as old...), and when me and mom didn't go semi public with our washing, there was always the sink.
The short story was about my impressions of all the women's different naked bodies and ages, in the steam among the many showers and saunas.
The praise I got for this story, compared to milder praise for other types of stories made me start an empiric experiment that made me land on one conclusion:
Go bloody ethnic, it always works.
Don't ever try being universal, it rarely works.
The public bathhouses and not having a bathroom in my childhood was a hit. The same kind of hit that ragged Irish kids with dirty legs on cobble stone roads, listening to american rock and secretly smoking fags are. (why, oh why is it always such a bloody hit when kids smoke behind sheds and shit in literature or poems? it's like...the smoking thing is evidence that you're out there, tasting reality from the very tit of life...compared to us dull non-smokers.)
So I tried it out, and the Polish stories worked just as nicely, like grandpa's catholic wake back in the small communist village, eel fishing and Eastern German road blocks with Ruhr infested blueberries.
A hit. But I was honest at least, in my writing, it was just the motivation that was dishonest, my goal was empiric understanding of what people wanted to read, and thought was "good".
Today, when I'm older I don't give as much of a shit. Of course I care...but in the end I'm too tired.
Sometimes when I read a certain kind of poem I think: yeah, I could do that as well...ooh, how ethnic - a real WOODSHED! and you smoked/had sex/listened to some badass music/were apathetic/spat/shared a can/some other ethnic shit.
If the stories are genuine I like them anyway...but there is just something that bothers me with a great many of them, even if some are well written.
And when it comes down to it...I think I just want to write poetry about relationship shit, gardening, and inner processing, and that is as far as I understand it, mostly for myself.
I don't think I write for the reader primarily, not at all. And certain poems that others go aaah over makes me go bonkers. I like poetry, and sometimes I'm decent at it...but I am just not a poet.
Perhaps I'll feel different tomorrow, when this horrible paper isn't messing with me, but I have a suspicion that there is some small truth in this anyway.
For those that think this is some kind of proclamation filled with angst - it really isn't. I feel good, and I'm on to something here (and the bloody paper will soon be done!).
I'm gonna go and write myself some good old prose, and set my goal on becoming a semi known fantasy writer instead. Kind of like Tanith Lee on one of her better mornings perhaps...
