Visible — with or without a shell
How ‘Mendel’s Greenhouses’ grew — part #3
Part #1 Head-to-tail and with a blank cheque
Part#2 A nice little project ‘on the side’
They might be two of the most fundamental human needs: the desire to be connected to others and the need to feel safe. Often, these two basic needs appear to be incompatible.
People are not unlike animals in the way we approach the world. So we will curl up like hedgehogs, all quills turned outward, and subsequently fail to understand why others don’t dare to approach us. We hide in deep shells and under sturdy armor, and are genuinely surprised we go unseen.
I could write an entire book about how the dynamics of (in)visibility have manifested in my life — and I know another person to whom this applies just as well (but he is very likely crawling into hiding in his shell right now).
Let it be enough to say that I have had my hands full with the attempts to reach some sort of balance with it, and whereas I started to get the hang of it after a while on a personal level, until very recently where my work was concerned, I had the impression that I somehow kept failing.
As a writer, I felt both myself and my work to be pretty invisible.
To be fair: apart from disappointment, invisibility can offer both security and beauty. Not too long ago a wonderful book by the hand of Akiko Busch was published about the subtle assets and nuances of being invisible. But much as I appreciate and — up to a point — need invisibility and camouflage, no matter how much inner security it might offer, it is not a fruitful strategy when it comes to getting your work out into the world.
As my collaboration with Jurgen grew and solidified, in the course of 2017, I noticed something changing in me. Both as a person and an artist, I was nourished, deeply and fundamentally, by this creative dialogue. And it had an interesting side effect. I started making our collaborative work rather visible: I would talk about it enthusiasticaly with friends and relatives, I would bring it up in conversations with aquaintances or even chance encounters with strangers, I shared it on social media. And I found out I was good at it, much better than I had ever been in making my solo projects visible.
When, late 2017, Jurgen almost casually forwarded me the link to the application form of collective rights society deAuteurs, offering a double residency for a writer and an illustrator in Björköby (Sweden) in the fall of 2018, I mostly considered it a compliment that he could apparently appreciate the idea to spend two whole weeks with me in the middle of nowhere, working.
Neither of us expected anything much, but we put together a portfolio and applied anyway. As Jurgen put it: “That way, they know we exist.” Visibility, indeed. We were getting a little better at it. We would ease our heads over the rim of our shells now and then, if only by a fraction.
Our portfolio and the accompanying application letter left for deAuteurs on my birthday. It would be months before we heard anything, and I put the matter aside entirely. Only, when the date of announcement drew near, it grew exciting, nonetheless. Come D-day, it had been a long time since I had opened any e-mail with my heart hammering in my chest, but there I was.
I reached for my cell phone to give Jurgen a heads-up about checking his mailbox, but the incoming text told me I didn’t need to: “We are going to Sweden!!”
It sure seemed we were about to become a lot more visible.
With the residency now a certainty, a new dynamic evolved. What would we be working on there? Perhaps this was the perfect moment to bring our ideas for a ‘full-fledged’ version of De serres van Mendel back to the table. In Sweden, we would also attend the first SmåBUS Children’s Book Festival , so that seemed very suitable for several reasons.
My years of waiting for publishing houses to reply had made me a little wiser than to work on this project until it was completed, and only then reach out to a publisher I hoped would be interested. This was an idea we would ‘pitch’ first, using the short story text and a number of Jurgen’s illustrations. We wanted to be sure this book was headed for publication before we would put months of our lives into it, not the other way around. And if no one turned out to be interested, too bad. We would be making two full weeks worth of Saplings then, or something.
I wrote to four different publishing houses, three of which quickly showed their interest, and one reached for the phone to call a meeting. In all honesty, something like this had never happened to me before. We’ve got something here, I thought, just like when we first got started on the Saplings. We’ve got something very powerful here, about to bud.
The publisher who ended up at my dinner table for an hour also turned out to be the one most on our creative wavelength, both in approach to the story as in willingness to have the images and the lay-out play a major role in the book, allowing for a dialogue between text and image like we wanted it.
The decision was an easy one. We had another conversation in the offices of Van Halewyck in Antwerpen, with Jurgen present, too, and in September 2018 we boarded the plane to Zweden with a guarantee for publication in the fall of 2019.
The Björköby residency turned out to be extremy important, both for De serres van Mendel and ourselves. Not necessarily because of the amount of work we got done (less than I had anticipated or hoped for, frankly), but because something was sowed in the fertile soil of our collaboration that will grow and bear fruit for years to come. Or perhaps I should say: the soil itself subtly changed.
During the residency itself I wrote a blog about this project, and about the improbable role friendship was playing in it (Not the next best thing). Everything it says, still rings true and is a nice extension to this story. But there is one thing I would like to add here, something I didn’t know at the time. You can only grasp the scope of some things when you can look back on them with a little more distance.
The Sweden residency not only made Jurgen and me a lot more visible in the eyes of the world, she also laid us bare to each other. We are both shell creatures, so to speak, and in the course of two years of collaborating we had already granted the other pretty deep access under our protective carapaces. Now, for two weeks, we shared the same shell.
Visibility and vulnerability go hand in hand. Flemish scholar and psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe calls it ‘intimacy’. This was the gift Sweden brought us, and the true soil from which De serres van Mendel has reached maturity. It is a deep, rich soil, layered and complex, gentle and inviting, at once old and timeless. Not at all unlike the ones you come across in Swedish forests. Visible, present. And yet safe.
No more need to go into hiding.
In September 2019, ‘De serres van Mendel’, a children’s novel (10+) in words and images, a joint project of writer Kirstin Vanlierde and illustrator Jurgen Walschot, will appear with Van Halewyck publishing house (Belgium). For the time running up to the publication, a blog will appear every month on how this book came to be.
