Episode Description:
For more information about our Between the Lines summer camp, go to bit.ly/btl24. Today’s guest is Senka Marić. We discussed how choices a writer makes in the narration of a text can affect the experience of the reader, negotiating with the desires of readers and publishers without compromising one's writing, and Marić's work on the literary publication strane.ba, as well as her beginnings as a reader and writer, among other topics.
Bio: Senka Marić (poet, novelist, essayist, editor; Bosnia-Herzegovina) is the author of three books of poetry, most recently UNTIL THE NEXT DEATH (2016) and the novels BODY KINTSUGI (2018) and GRAVITIES (2021), translated into English and several other languages. The former received the 2018 Meša Selimović Award for best novel in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro, the English PEN Translates Award 2022, and was shortlisted for the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize; GRAVITIES won the 2022 Štefica Cvek Award for feminist writing. Marić often participates in European literary events, teaches writing workshops, and is the editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Strane.ba. Her participation was made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State.
Read Senka Marić’s English writing sample: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/Maric_sample_formatted_2.pdf
Read Senka Marić’s writing sample in the original language: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/Maric_sample_original.pdf
Say the World: An International Writing Podcast is made by the International Writing Program. The hosts are IWP Director Christopher Merrill, most recently the author of ON THE ROAD TO LVIV (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and IWP Communications Coordinator Mike Meginnis, most recently the author of DROWNING PRACTICE (Ecco, 2022). Additional research, transcription, and other support provided by Research Assistant Derick Edgren Otero.
IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the U.S. Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you’d like to donate to IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support.
Learn more about IWP at iwp.uiowa.edu.
Episode Transcript:
[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1" by T. Bless & the Professionals]
Mike Meginnis:
Welcome to Say the World: An International Writing Podcast. My name is Mike Meginnis, and I'm the Communications Coordinator at the International Writing Program and most recently, the author of the novel Drowning Practice.
Christopher Merrill:
And I'm Christopher Merrill, the Director of the International Writing Program and author most recently of a book length poem titled On the Road to Lviv.
MM:
We want to start by reminding you that the Between the Lines application is currently open for students from inside and outside the US. Between the Lines is a creative writing summer camp for young writers who will be between the ages of fifteen and eighteen years old this summer, and the program brings together US-based students and students from around the world to the University of Iowa campus, where they learn together from our renowned staff of internationally acclaimed writers, you can learn more, including how to apply at bit.ly/btl24. That's all lowercase, bit.ly/btl24.
CM:
Today's episode is an interview with Senka Marić, who is a brilliant poet, novelist, and editor from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was a great conversation, so we want to get right to it. But we did want to give you a little helpful context.
MM:
First, in this episode, I made reference to Senka's writing sample. This is actually a specific document that you can go see yourself and we wanted to make sure that you knew how to do that. So, when writers are nominated by various institutions by US embassies and consulates, by our friends in a variety of organizations, they provide writing samples that give us a sense of what their work is, what their body of work is about, what it's concerned with, what it is great at, and they provide it in the original language, and then they also provide it in English translation. You can see both of those things on our website, but they're also conveniently linked to in the show notes for each episode of this podcast. Each episode, we put a link to the original language and to the English translation for that week's interviewee. That said, let's talk to Senka.
[music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]
Senka Marić:
[Senka Marić reads from Body Kintsugi in Bosnian.]
CM:
You ought to sleep, but you can't. Now you finally opened your eyes you refuse to close them again. You feel nauseous, but you don't vomit. After your first operation, you vomited for hours. The pain is dull. You want to lift your hand and touch your boobs, prostheses pretending to be your boobs. You can't move your hand. You ask whether it's stopped raining. You ask whether it's windy. You don't remember what the nurse says. She'll spend nearly the whole night at your bedside.
SM:
[Senka Marić reads from Body Kintsugi in Bosnian.]
CM:
You'll talk, say things you don't say to anyone. You'll tell her how you felt the pebble in your boob, and that your marriage has fallen apart. You'll also tell her that you knew he was cheating on you. And that the pain was too great for you to say anything. So you said nothing. You persuaded yourself not to see, you had already begun looking for cancer in the body, then it took you nearly five years to find it. The nurse sighed audibly. You felt that she wanted to say something. But she was silent. You didn't know whether she'd fallen asleep or was crying. You almost didn't care which. You just needed to hear your voice to know you were alive. You, in your body, where pain resounded.
SM:
I am Senka Marić. I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina. I'm a writer, poet, editor. I've been writing ever since I was a young girl, mostly poetry. But lately, in the last ten years, I started writing novels as well. One of the things I'm really proud of is my work as an editor of the literature online magazine called Strane.ba, where we publish the literature of the whole region of ex-Yugoslavia and trying to overcome the borders and all divisions that we have in the area, especially in cultural sense—I think that's the area we can really reconnect. And my work has been translated in a few languages, I have won some awards. And I love what I do. Because it's, I think, it's a great privilege in life to be able to have such a playground as a grown-up person to write fiction.
CM:
Senka, if we might begin with what you just read. For us, it's such a powerful and intimate kind of books that you've written in Body Kintsugi. And I wonder if you could say something about your decision to write in second person so that you're speaking almost to yourself, but to the larger world? And again, it feels very close. What was your rationale for that?
SM:
The thing is, the novel speaks about the illness, the breast cancer of the main character, and it was, it's auto fiction, it's based on my personal experience. But of course, it's fictional as in order to make it, at least try to make it work as a real piece of literature. So it was really difficult because the subject field itself, it's really big, and there is some, like, almost asks you to be pathetic when talking about, it's too emotional. So you get response, even—response from readers even if you don't manage to do it on a level of the language, because the subject itself, it's so heavy. So for me, it was really important to write about this subject without going into insisting on the pain and stating the obvious. And obviously, I first started because I would think it would be, in an auto-fiction, it would be the first impulse to write in first person, and I wrote some, I would say, fifteen pages or so. And it did not work at all, it was just like, really pathetic. It was constantly asking for the emotion, it was sounding like, "Oh, poor me." And also there is this objective problem that is really difficult to believe the person who's constantly complaining and saying [she's] in pain. So it's like a real problem of literature. How do you objectify something? How do you make it believable? So I've tried, which was the next logical step to make it in a third person, and then it got too distant from the point. It was just like, it had missed that intimacy, that like interior inner world that I wanted to portray in a book. And then I thought of the second person as the next possible solution. And I changed the text I had to the second person and it instantly starts to work and to make perfect sense. So from then on, it was going like really smoothly. And I realized because the decision was based on a technical level, but when I continued to work, I realized how much it has given the novel. It felt, did feel in a way like the character is speaking to herself, but also at the same time, it felt like it's addressing the reader as it's happening to him.
MM:
it was interesting to me as I was reviewing the excerpt today that there's a way in which the second person feels more like an "I" than the first person does. I think maybe partly for me, I don't know if this is your experience of it, but for me, the first person is such an established tool of writing fiction, that it's, it's kind of transparent, and I, and I still experience it as a character, right? Whereas the "you" is not used in the things that I read so much, and it defamiliarizes it a little bit, and I feel like it gets that intimacy back, that is sometimes lost in what seems like should be the most direct method of communication, which is that first person. But I wonder, I think people feel really differently about the second person from person to person. How do you feel about that relationship between the "you" of the narration, the "I" of the writer and the "I" or the addressed "you," the reader?
SM:
Well, I think in this case, it does read almost as "I" because this point of, I don't know, what do you say, focalization, in English, is the focalization of "I." So it's really intimate. It's almost like, it just says "you." And I was actually worried how the readers are going to react, because I didn't, I wasn't really sure if they're ready for that kind of identifying with the character. And I did get some really interesting feedback from readers like today, I just saw an Instagram, someone tagged me in a post reading from UK. And she said, like, how she loved the book. And she said, "And I hate it when writers write in the second person. And I thought, I'm not going to love it. But then I fell in love with this book. And it's going to be like one of the most important books," and so on. So it's a great compliment.
MM:
Yeah, it's a really strong stylistic choice, which I do feel like when I when I read a long-form work, in the second person, my experience of that book is going to be really strongly determined by how I felt about how they negotiated that particular question, right? Because when it doesn't work, it can feel like the only thing you can see in some ways, and when it does work, it has, again, it has that intimacy, right? It felt especially potentially fraught to me as a reader because it is about sickness. And because it's about this, this uncomfortable experience of a body failing. And so I wondered about your awareness of, in relationship to, while you're writing, the fear that the reader is going to reject that second, like, specifically because of that discomfort, right? Because even when you're not describing a failing body, the fear of being rejected when you describe things in the second person is for me, that's where I start is like immediately, I'm like, "Oh, well, they're not going to like this."
SM:
Yeah, definitely. That's what I thought. And I wasn't really sure how they're going to react. But at the same time, this book was really important to me. And I don't believe that you should write in a way to please the reader. So you have to write in a way you think is the best. And whether someone's going to like it or not, that's a completely different thing. So I did make this choice that felt like a really natural choice to me, even though the truth is, that was great, like really well-known publisher from Serbia, who was interested in this book. But they asked me to change it to the first person, and I didn't want to sell. I mean, obviously, that collaboration never happened. Because I do stand by my choices.
CM:
I think, to reject a Serbian publisher has a little more connotation for a writer from Sarajevo than it would be for, let's say, an American writer arguing with an editor in London, right?
SM:
True, but then I had another one in Serbia as well. (Laughter) So it wasn't stated only on that, then it would be political in way. But luckily, there was another one that was interested in the book the way it is.
CM:
Good books always find their publishers and their readers. Maybe we can use that as a way to talk about that larger project you're engaged with in editing where you bring together voices from all of the former republics of Yugoslavia. And I imagined that on the one hand, that's a can be a very fulfilling kind of work, but also has its challenges, doesn't it?
SM:
It does have challenges, but not so much anymore. I think the main challenges were happening in the beginning, but Strane exists for nine years now. And I think really interesting thing everyone finds about us that we never had any funding. We just do it out of our own enthusiasm. And I think the reason for that actually was in Bosnia it's really hard to find funding for anything. You can find funding, let's say, for a couple of years and And then you have authors who are used to being paid, as they should be. But then, like, you ran out of funding. And what do you do, then? Your whole story, it's over before it even began. So all authors know that we don't get paid for our work, the editorial team. At same time, they really appreciate us promoting their work on our site. So I think it's a really nice arrangement we have, and we don't have any banners or anything on our page. It looks really clean and beautiful and simple, and we published one text each day. So that was one of the challenges. And we kind of decided we're going to do it this way. I know, it's really unusual. But I think also, it's really beautiful, because people appreciate things like this. And I think it's important to make that kind of step to show that you are willing to do something just because you believe in it. That you don't always have to have, like, a financial agenda. And the other thing that we were struggling in the beginning, the first editorial team we had, is the fact that I insisted that we do whole region of ex-Yugoslavia. Obviously it's harder to do it with Slovenia and Macedonia because they have different languages, but we still try to include them as much as possible. And I also insisted on the fact that we don't want to get involved in who's fighting who in the literary scene, who was against who and things like that, that the only thing that we are going to judge is the quality of the text itself, in our own capacity to do it. So it turned out to be a good idea. So nowadays, we don't hardly have any time, like, room to contact the authors. We constantly have texts being sent to us. And we always have like a full schedule at least one month and a half. And that's something, as I said in the beginning, extremely proud of because now thanks to us, and some other people as well, of course, I'm not taking the whole credit for us. But it does bring all the writers of all ex-Yugoslavia together. We know more about each other's work. We know what we do, we meet often, then we are all connected. So I think that's really beautiful.
CM:
You have changed the entire literary culture of the region, haven't you?
SM:
In a way, I guess we added to it. I mean, obviously, there were people doing that before in many different ways. But I think that we chose to do this kind of format and have a text published every day. And some of the continuity gave it more weight.
CM:
Publishing a new text every day. That's a demanding regimen, isn't it?
SM:
It is, but also we don't insist on unpublished texts. We don't really live in illusion. People have read everything that's published everywhere. And I think it's also nice to remind them of things. So let's say someone's been published a few times in Serbia, but some readers from Croatia or Bosnia never read it. So it's always good to put it out there.
MM:
I'm curious whether you have noticed, I mean, and you've alluded to this a little bit already, but, what sort of changes you've noticed in, say, your submission pool in the community that's surrounding the publication across time.
SM:
We tend to publish, like, established authors, but we also always trying to give room for younger or new authors that haven't been published anywhere before, as to present them in a way, "There is this person who's writing as well." And what happened, often happens, is that we get the feedback from these authors later on—they tell us, "Because of that publication, a publisher contacted me from this other place," and there's always something that comes out of it. So I think the site is really well followed by both readers and publishers in the region.
CM:
Do you have a sense of how many visit a day you you average?
SM:
We have about, and I know this only for the year because as I said, we're not funded. So last year for my fiftieth birthday, I bought myself a present, and I bought that like, whatever it's called, thing that counts the visits.
MM:
Data analytics.
SM:
Yeah, so that was my present to myself. We have roughly, about, on average, we have 1500.
MM:
Wow.
SM:
Yeah. So I think that's, for such a small region, still, it's a great number.
CM:
Exactly, exactly. Oh, my gosh.
MM:
One of the quotes that our research assistant found that I was really interested in was, in a 2020 interview in a newsletter called The Off Assignment, you talked about how literature had given you a sense of a place where you always felt like you belonged. And I was curious how that relationship as a reader inflected your writing. When you're writing, is there a feeling of trying to prepare a home for the next person? Or is there more of a feeling like, they'll find it for themselves?
SM:
I'm not sure I understand that. I'm sorry, just the last part.
CM:
So, I know that when the war broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that you were quite young at the time, and ended up leaving the country and not to return until about 1997. And I wonder, we want to hear something about what those years were like and how that shaped you. And I think it leads to the question that Mike was raising about literature being a place that offers you a sort of home.
MM:
Yeah, yeah. The the quote was, "To me, first as a reader, then as an author, literature has always been a sanctuary. I've been reading ever since I learned all the letters. And I've been writing since I was eight. Literature gave me a sense of having a place where I'd always belong."
SM:
Yes. Okay. The thing is, I was an extremely sensitive child. Everything seemed sad to me and made me cry. Like, I would see a bee flying and like, "Why is Bee alone? Where is her mom?" And then cry. So I think, for my family, as much as they tried, they never gave me enough support. So then I found literature and it was the place that could take me away from where I am. That fictional world sounded more stable, and felt more stable and secure that my reality with everything was like so saddening. For whatever reason, I'm not going to go into trying to analyze that. And ever since then, it was the place where I go when I can't process my own life, or not even that way. It's more like, I need literature constantly to, like, live parallel lives in the same time. Living my own and not being too concentrated on it. Because I'm living these other worlds—books other people wrote, and the books I'm writing. So it's kind of giving me more diversity in life, the feeling that I'm living different lives.
MM:
Was there a particular thing that you remember reading as a kid that gave you that sense of like, okay, this is a place where I can go.
SM:
First I was read books as a young child, and I loved them. And I remember having these beautiful children books, and I still know how they look. But unfortunately, as the rest of the books I heard, they were all burned during the war, in my house. But I remembered them all well, and there was a children's library very near my house, and I would go there every day and bring books back home. And then I know I was nine, and my grandma really loved to read. And I was nine when I took her favorite book, which was Jane Eyre. And that was the first adult book I read. So and of course, it was kind of, as comforting as much as troubling, like, discovering this world. And then I pretty much read everything they had in the house. And I think I was about ten when I discovered Agatha Christie, and I still love like detective stories. I mean, I'm one of those people who could read anything really. I mean, not so much these, like, popular new writers. But yeah.
CM:
Maybe say a word about the war and how it shaped your, your writing, your thinking, your life.
SM:
Well, I was nineteen when the war started, then I spent, I think, two months in the beginning of the war in Bosnia, and then I fled and ended up in London, UK. And firstly, I think it has shaped me as a person because I have entered completely different reality in a sense that I did know some English, but I couldn't speak it well, so I couldn't express myself. So I think the first questions I had were about the language and, like, who you are as a person if you can't speak your language. And to me, because I love humor, and I love when people laugh, it was really difficult for a couple of years, I couldn't be funny! In English. I would try and people just looked at me in a really strange way, like what are you saying. So it was the question of identity and how do you find yourself in different language, in a different culture, and how to learn to do different things. And also, before that I never worked a single day in my life. I didn't know how to do anything. So I had to learn all these jobs like waitressing and hairdressing and I was doing that. And I was quite pathetic at that [inaudible] as well because my library was gone and together with the things I've wrote, and like loads of it—not that it was any good—but there was like loads of loads of poetry. And I felt like, "Oh, my life is ruined. I'll never, like a drama, I thing I'll never write again, I'll never read again," which, of course, didn't last at all, maybe a few months or something. So I kind of learned who I am during those years. And I think that was the most important thing. So I think that has changed me as a writer. The truth is, I was nineteen when it started, I never considered myself to be a writer before that, the writing was just something I do, because I enjoy it.
CM:
And so you wrote the whole time you were in London.
SM:
Not really, no. For quite a few years, I didn't write at all. And then at the end of my stay there, I started to write some poetry again. I was trying to write some prose. Some short stories. But I knew right away, it wasn't good. I just couldn't find the voice. It took me really long time to actually realize how do I want to speak in a prose text. And also, I think, how I write, it's something you would classify under the "latitude féminin." it's really feminine type of writing, it's really tactile, it's really about feeling with your whole body. It's different in a way. It's quite fragmented as well. Different in a way [from] how men writers usually write. So with the first short stories I have written, I've shown them to some established authors who happen to be men. And they told me that they are okay but they look more like sketches for short stories, not the short stories itself. So I got discouraged. And I didn't try to write prose for a long time. And then I wrote some short stories and published them, but never put them in a book because I always thought, "Okay, this looks good, but still, it's probably not good enough, and I just can't do it well," and then I decided to write this novel the way I think it should be written without thinking whether anyone will like it or not.
CM:
Did your relationship to Bosnian change when you returned to the country? You were older, of course. The war was over. You're trying to find your way now as a writer in the Bosnian language. Talk about that.
SM:
Well, it was, I don't think I ever really left the language, in a sense. Because, well, the thing is, my family says that I started to talk when I was six months old. Yes. It wasn't easy for them. (Laughter) Sensitive child. Yeah. And the language was always really important to me. And I really loved the language and to play with the language. And I used to speak a lot. Now that I'm older, I kind of have learned that people don't really enjoy that much talking and learned to pace myself. Yeah. But so I mean, even though I lived in English for a while, some six years, my own language never left me. They were just kind of playing together. And I especially like, when I speak to people who speak my language but speak English as well. So the beautiful creations we make, they're like two languages combined, and what you can do with it. But in a literature, when I write I usually don't use English, but I use all different variants of my language. And when I say my language, that means something that's called Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian and [inaudible], which are all the same language, but there's some slight rules and different things like Eastern and Western variant, and I kind of mix them all together. And I find that exciting, and I never let anyone touch my language, in the books or in the interviews.
CM:
And what's the reaction to that mixing of these different dialects? I guess you might call them, right.
SM:
In a way, yes. Yes. I think that'd be the easy way to explain it. The thing is, before people—okay, here's the example. There was this huge magazine who contacted me for an interview before this book, and I said, "Okay," but the end of the, like, joking about, they said, "So you know, we're just going to, like, translate you to the Croatian version of the language." And I said, "Well, I'm really sorry, I don't see any point to be translated from one language into the same language." It's just like, one letter of change somewhere, and we still understand each other completely. And they were like, "Okay, sorry, then we can can't do it." And I was like, "Okay, fair enough. You don't do it." But then after this book, everything changed. Like the same magazine contact me again and said, like, they would love to do an interview, but of course, "We're not going to change your language." I guess you fight for your position.
(Laughter)
MM:
I wonder about your relationship to the translation into English. There was another interesting quote from a 2022 interview that you did with Asymptote. The quote was, "I wasn't getting emotional while writing it, but reading Celia's translation, I did actually start to cry, thinking—that poor woman. It's absolutely amazing how she made something completely the same, yet alien enough that I can read it and I feel just like any other reader." And that sounds that sounds so amazing to me to have that experience. Can you talk a little more about that?
SM:
Sure. Yes. And that is, of course, true. But the thing is, maybe I should say this first: when I was writing this book, and actually, when it was published, the first question I always got in the interviews was, "Oh, how hard it was to write this book!" And I would always reply, "It was, but not in a way you would think." It wasn't fine for me in the emotional way. Because the majority of this was my own experience, I knew it, I went through it. So it would be really weird of me as a person to think of myself, the things that happened to me a few years ago, and cry over them and get emotional all over again. So to me, I treated this experience as one would treat any material and tried to make it work as a text, as literature. So, and I also, in the same time, I was always wondering about translations. This book has been translated, among other languages, let's say, to Hungarian. I don't know one word in Hungarian. So I will always think like, I have no idea what's there. It could be the same book. It could be a completely different book. There's no way of knowing. But English obviously is different and I was really excited to read Celia's translation. And I don't really know what happens there. It's same book. She has managed in such a beautiful way to give the same tone, the same atmosphere, and obviously the same sentences. But something happens in the meantime. And it became to me something that [I] can look at, from the distance, and not think, like, "Is this sentence really good? Should I have said this or that?" I could just read it as any reader, and it did make me cry. I did actually think, "This woman!"
CM:
And it's Celia Hawkesworth we're talking about ,who's translated from all the different languages of the region quite expertly.
SM:
Yes, she is absolutely an amazing translator. I know that she's been translating Semezdin Mehmedinović as well, who was one of your guests in Iowa City, once upon a time, I think. And Daša Drndić, as well, I think, and Dubravka Ugrešić.
CM:
Could you say a word about the title of your novel?
SM:
Sure. Kintsugi, I actually had to, I struggled a lot with the title. I had different ideas, but none of it felt right. And the book was already finished. So one night I went to bed, and I was thinking, and then I realized that there is this Japanese technique of repairing broken china with liquid golden platinum, in order to emphasize the brokenness of the object, and to make it more beautiful with this, which is connected to Japanese philosophy called wabi-sabi that says, "The real beauty is in the things that have suffered through history, pain, and practice." So I remember the technique, and I didn't know the name, so I googled it in the middle of the night. And there were actually two terms. One is kintsugi, and the other one was much longer and much harder for me to remember.
MM:
Your decision was made.
CM:
It seems to me to be the perfect title for this book, which is about repairing, about healing, but acknowledging at every turn the various kinds of fracturing that have taken place.
SM:
Yeah. And also we have, like, different kinds of fractures in life constantly. And I don't think it's only my culture. I think it's everywhere pretty much like that. We are, for whatever reason, convinced that we have to hide it, and that we have to show that we never went through the hard times. And wouldn't life be so much easier if we share it with others. But I guess it means agreeing to be really vulnerable, and people don't like that.
MM:
What is one really interesting thing that you've learned during your time at IWP?
SM:
Oh, one! That's that so hard.
MM:
You can say four, but we can start with one.
SM:
Before I came here, I didn't really want to imagine any of it. I didn't want to read too much of it. I didn't wanna make any expectations. I spent the summer at the seaside. And I was, everyone was saying, "Are you excited about Iowa?" And I would always say, "Well, I am not really thinking about it," because I don't want to have this anticipation, and then have this idea how it's going to go. But since I arrived here, so many amazing things have happened. Obviously, the city itself and the university and all different programs we've witnessed, but still, I would say the most important thing to me, is meeting all these other residents from all over the world, people I would never really have opportunity to meet in my regular life, and learning about their life and their cultures, and our similarities, and our differences. I feel so much richer every day when I go to bed. I can't even calm down enough because—and I keep getting messages from my children like, "Mum, are you still alive? Mum!" And I guess in a way, I hope they're not going to listen to this. But it feels so—imagine this whole world with everything that's happening with all these beautiful people and the, all of you, who are here as our hosts. So, it's such a powerful experience in many ways. And I need to be perfectly honest, I need to find a way to, like, calm down a bit, and start seriously writing. Because for now, I'm just— but the thing is, I didn't do as much of actual writing, but what I did do, which is maybe even most important, in the easiest of ways, by doing all this other stuff, I've completed my next novel in my head, in idea, I have a full structure. And also I was asked by Semezdin Mehmedinović, who I mentioned before, to write a diary of my stay here for the publishing house Buybook in Sarajevo, so it's going to be a book. And I'm thinking really much about that and writing notes. So I just kind of feel that I need, I mean—of course, this is not true—but this moment, I feel so full of energy and ideas that I feel that that just need ten days to sit down to write both books.
MM:
Is it usually your experience that you are sort of pre—like, you have the structure of a book, you kind of have a plan before you begin working?
SM:
Never. And this time, well, "Never," I haven't written life fifteen books. I have three books of poetry and two novels, so there's not really much room for comparison. But before, I never really had a plan when writing novels, and I had almost like, an approach as one would have to poetry. I really had to like, to feel things, and it was all about feeling and getting the atmosphere and the emotion. And it's really hard to write that way. It takes really long time. And you have to be in a special mood and special circumstances. So it's always like, you're constantly on some kind of quest. And this time I decided the next while I'm alone writing, I decided—I'm going to think about it, to have the full structure in my head before I started writing. And I did some writing already and works well, and what I can imagine to happen for the rest of the novel makes sense. So let's hope that's how it's going to play out.
CM:
And so are you taking notes daily for the diary?
SM:
Almost. Yeah. I mean, if I don't do it one day, then I do it next day. And I also tried to take lots of photographs or download photographs that people put in our group on WhatsApp. Because there's so many things happening, and they're all much better photographers than I am. I'm usually just, "take phone and click really quickly," so like, lots of things missing there. So yeah, I think, but writing that diary, I don't really want to make it too personal. Especially because after this book Body Kintsugi was published, there was a lot of confusion about me, private person, and character of my novel, and many very strange questions. So this time, I want to really write about people that I'm meeting here in Iowa City and everything that is going on in this program and how it reflects on me, and what I think and what kind of thoughts it brings me, without getting into anything that's too personal.
CM:
You are entering a long and distinguished tradition at the IWP. I'm thinking of the Georgian writer David Turasvili who kept a similar kind of diary while he was here. And I have a vivid memory of watching him write the last words. It was in a big black notebook on the last night together, and then the book came out and it was the bestselling book in Georgia for about ten years.
SM:
Wow. That's amazing.
CM:
Yeah. So let's hope the same works for your book with Semezdin.
[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1 - DoGBeaT Remix" by DoGBeaT]
MM:
Say the World: An International Writing Podcast is a production of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you'd like to donate to the IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support. Links to further information and additional credits for this episode are in the show notes.
