A country like a dream
Björköby residency — Blog #6
Sweden is a country that sounds like a dream.
Not in the least because it is the native soil of children’s book author Astrid Lindgren, but just as well because it breathes an air of fjords, dark woods and slabs of rock from behind which goblins and trolls are waiting to emerge.
Thanks to collective rights society deAuteurs, illustrator Jurgen Walschot and I were welcomed in Källäng, the Björköby residency, for the better part of two weeks, under the wings of book centipede and SmåBUS organizer Joke Guns.
In the aftermath of the international children’s book festival we regained some peace and quiet there, and we got to work in earnest. For we have a book to complete, and not just any book: a novel for readers of ten/eleven years old, with extraordinary illustrations, a book that takes the reader off the beaten path. And isn’t that what we love to do, wander off any and every beaten path…?
A residency of this kind is, inevitably, deeply influenced by the atmosphere of the house you live in and its immediate surroundings. We biked up to the nearby lake, we roamed the woods. We loitered on little docks, happy to catch the sun, the wind and even the storms when they presented themselves. We stood in awe for the unexpected majesty of the hooded crows, and the multitude of colours and shapes in the landscape. In Sweden, nature has more space to be present than in the perpetual suburbia Flanders is turning into — a relief. The proportionality between man and ecosystem feels more balanced there than it does at home.
Sweden is a land with deep roots, digging into the soil. It is also a country with a homely culinary tradition, fika (the social ten o’clock snack, a recommendable hobbit habit, regardless of where you live) and a lot of cosiness that has a lot to do with one of the main native resources: timber. Whole villages are built out of nothing else, and mixed with the scent of cinnamon and traditional meat stew like we ate at our residency hosts’ on our last evening, it makes for a success recipy of well-being.
Sweden is a country that sounds like a dream, and for half a year we were living towards that dream.
And like every dream, reality was somewhat different from what we expected, but that is in fact exactly like it is supposed to be. Reality is more concrete, more physical, more sensuous than any dream could ever be…
Food tastes better if you have first thought the menu of the following days through together. Writing and drawing become more intense when you fully realise that this is what you have in fact come here to do. Collaboration and friendship grow deeper when you have to rely upon each other for a full fortnight, and you experience how every challenge brings you closer to both each other and a profound creative partnership.
For us, Sweden was both blessing and fertile soil from which we will harvest the fruits into the far future. I suspect they will taste a little like the blond apples in Källäng’s garden: gentle, creamy and easy to use, seemingly inconspicuous but surprisingly tasty, grown from an old tree, drawing from the power of an entire country and from a history that reaches back even further than we are capable of fathoming. Every mouthful is a gift.
At the end of this residency, there is only one thing we can possibly say, from the bottom of our hearts, to both Joke, her family and collective rights society deAteurs, who helped this residency come about.
Thank you.
What you have helped to find soil, root and sprout, like the best of saplings, will flower and bear fruit.
