Katherine Arden

Nu på fredag kommer författaren Katherine Arden till vår butik i Stockholm. Hon kommer att signera sin fantastiska bok The Bear and the Nightingale. Inför besöket delar hon med sig av en text om att skriva och att resa.

I wrote my first book in a tent. No, really. An actual tent. It was quite large, for a tent. It had a lamp, an air mattress, a bar for my clothes. A permanent heap of sand on the floor, no matter how many times I tried to sweep it out. The outside was white and green. It was pitched on a beach. In Hawaii.

I am not from Hawaii, or anything. I moved there after I graduated college.

I was a bright sort of girl, serious, and I could have tried any number of careers. Why move to Hawaii to live in a tent?

People often ask me that question. I often ask it of myself.

There are several answers, but best answer is, why not?  When you’re looking for yourself, as they say, and you really don’t know where to start, you can try anywhere.

I finished university, went off to try and find myself, and the first place I tried was a coffee farm in Hawaii.

When I arrived, I found an outdoor kitchen surrounded on three sides by water, and a coffee farm on the mountain, the mauka side of the road. I found a flat space for my tent. The first night the sun set over the water, and I watched dolphins jumping, silver in the last of the light.

I knew I’d made a good choice.

But I didn’t mean to stay long. I meant to meditate for a couple months on the meaning of life, and then race off back into the big world. I eventually wanted to become a diplomat. An interpreter. Or a secret agent. Something cool.

But when I finally left, I had become none of those things. Instead, I became a novelist.

Some people find themselves in work, or in family. I found myself sitting being bored on a beach.

That is literally what happened. I started working on the coffee farm. I spent my days tanning, surfing, and of course picking coffee. At first it was wonderful. Then it got boring.

But have always had an overactive imagination. When I was little, I would look into the mirror and convince myself that I was the mirror image, and that on the other side there was someone else, the real me, going about her business, while I just watched behind silvered glass.

So I put my imagination to work.

I decided to write a book. I started. I pushed word against word and tried to see what stuck. Eventually my words became sentences, became paragraphs, became chapters, became story.  I found that I loved writing books.

That was five years ago, and I haven’t looked back since.

Books and traveling are two of my favorite things. I have had wandering feet since I was a teenager. When I was sixteen I left home to live in France for a year. When I was nineteen, I left home again and went to live in Russia. I am twenty-nine now and haven’t changed. I still love traveling and have a vivid imagination.

Only now I am paid to imagine things.

I can’t complain, except on the not infrequent occasions when I give myself nightmares. One day I was talking with my editor, earnestly explaining my ideas about a talking bear that appears in my first novel. She was listening with equal seriousness.

    And I stopped and thought to myself, good lord. We are adults. I could be an accountant. I could be discussing the fiscal health of a medium-sized bank. Instead I am getting paid to discuss talking bears.

    Then I thought, well, I am ok with that.

    I wrote my first book in Hawaii. I wrote my second in France, in Sweden, in the Swiss Alps. Who knows where I will write my third? In Canada so far, Vermont, Cornwall.

    I am ok with that too.