June 2022

 

Dominik Bárt (CZ)

Katarzyna Szweda (PL)

Márgit Garajski (HU)

František Malík (SK)

Petr Minařík (CZ), convenor and editor

 

Petr Minařík: Authors’ reading: what does it mean for you as an author, not necessarily as a festival but as a format?
Katarzyna Szweda: Fear and elation. Not necessarily in that order…

Petr Minařík: Kathy, Could you say more? Why fear and why elation? Is it because of the open confrontation of your work with people in real time and place?

Katarzyna Szweda: As a poet, I really write with the hope (rather than expectation!) that I will hear my words spoken aloud. There’s a joy in speaking them in the voice with which I heard them, but also a fear that the judgement(s) are more immediate. There’s a vulnerability. The elation comes, as it always does, from feeling the work take flight which is only possible with an audience.

Dominik Bárt: Well, let me give a slightly longer answer: I used to believed that writing is, and ought to be, a very lonely job, the very opposite of, say, show biz. Then I found out that writing is a lonely job, and it is show biz as well. First I did not like the idea at all, then I got used to it. I still resent the necessity of showing my face in front of an audience sometimes, but while it can be hard and time-consuming, it also brings a lot of interesting situations, people and stories into my life.

Petr Minařík: Dominik, we’ll come to the stories later but for now: You have done many readings. Is it part of the show biz, as you say? In what way?

Dominik Bárt: Well, you just have to show your face in public, whether you like it or not. You have to be entertaining, or at least try to. You should crack some jokes, tell some good stories to keep the readers’ (or, perhaps, just listeners’ and viewers’) interest high. Just as Kathy says, you have to develop your public persona… and this requirement is a double-edged sword. I have learned a lot from readings and from meeting my readers. And it has changed the way I write. I am just not sure whether it’s for the better or worse. For instance, in the distant past I never thought to include a few passages in each book suitable for reading aloud. Now I always try to do that. Public readings haven’t taught me much, though, about the way people might read my books in private.

Katarzyna Szweda: Dominik, the resentment is interesting. It does feel now that there is an expectation for authors in every form to have a public persona – from readings to social media. I know many who opt out of the latter, but it feels as though that is an active and constant choice to make.

Petr Minařík: Dominik, that’s very interesting! Would you say then that your writing (a novel, for instance) is become somehow “intermedial” in that it’s not just for reading but also partly to be performed?

Dominik Bárt: What you know about the readers (or, in this case, perhaps not readers, just the people who come to your readings) changes you views on writing whether you like it or not. I don’t think I cater to my readers’ wishes and tastes in every way but I often do realize that, sooner or later, I will have to choose a passage or more for reading aloud. It’s not just reading, though: just knowing that people will most likely ask me for excerpts from each book (for publication, translation etc.) sometimes makes me wonder whether the actual book I am working on is “excerptable”, whether some chapters, for instance, can easily stand alone. I am not sure whether this is good for your writing or not. In any case, I have learned to think about the readers a bit more during the process of writing.

František Malík: When I started with the public readings in Slovakia in 2000, it was very new. I did my first tour around the Country with a DJ, many people had no idea what a DJ was at that time… in one place they even brought us Soviet wooden turntables… I see reading as an art form, between literature and theatre.

Márgit Garajski: In Ukraine reading prose is still very uncommon; until lately my only experiences were abroad. In Ukraine it feels rather horny and pretentious. Only lately has author’s reading become more normal, after people had brought experience from international festivals etc. Abroad, it’s OK because one conforms to new ways. I also agree with Dominik.

Petr Minařík: The cultural specifics are very interesting! Why do people see it as pretentious? What is the cultural perception of the author as a public figure?

Márgit Garajski: Marijana Kijanowska, a Ukrainian writer, once wrote an essay titled “Author as an entertainment” (or “a thing for sightseeing”, that might be a better translation). Sometimes you feel like an entertainer rather than a writer, and that’s “a different business”. You might be forced to struggle for “popularity” (“public recognition”) through your performance, your personality or charisma. Rather than by way of writing better texts - as it ought to be, in my opinion.

Márgit Garajski: I agree with Dominik again: perhaps readings favour extroverted writers over introverted ones.

Petr Minařík: These are fascinating points. From what you seem to be saying, a writer is also fashioning her/his public image. On the contrast between extroverted vs. introverted authors, is there a way of adjusting authors’ reading to allow for the introverted, the timid and the shy?

František Malík: I rehearse for every reading, especially in German.

Márgit Garajski: The thought of rehearsing a reading never occurred to me!

Katarzyna Szweda: And by ‘rehearse’ do you mean that you are performing a role? Do you always read, or does it become a recital?

Petr Minařík: How do you rehearse? Alone? With friends? With your editor?

František Malík: I rehearse mostly alone now, because I have a lot of practice. But with every new text I think a lot about what and how to read out loud.
I test my new writing in the live perfomance. I think the audio experience of a text is very important in the editing process.

Márgit Garajski: The acoustic side is really important but not all writers read well. Chekhov hated reading his stories in public even though the sound was great.

Petr Minařík: Michal, so would you say that it is a special new genre? Just like, for instance, DJ-ing is a special genre of musical performance?

František Malík: Definitely it is a special art form. The modern form started in the German Romantism with the figure of the author Genius such as Goethe or Schiller. Since then the tours there – die Lesereisen – have had a strong and amazing tradition.

Márgit Garajski: Personally, I still do public readings reluctantly. It’s more a “must” than a “want to”. And it’s a different art. There’s a great writer in Ukraine, Les Poderviansky. His plays are most popular in audio, read by the author. Not many people read them, and fewer attend when they are staged.

František Malík: I recommend to every young author: read your new text aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are ok. Prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear.

Dominik Bárt: Michal, yes, I would sign this.

Márgit Garajski: That’s true for me as well.

Petr Minařík: Michal, Dominik and Artem, you are using oral, embodied tools to work on your written texts. Does it mean that you are anticipating a reader’s voice? I would understand that with drama – in the case of Kathy as a playwright – or perhaps with poetry. But with prose?

František Malík: I am not sure anticipating is the right word. The text should sound good, be fluent, flow… My experience is: I write the first draft the way you usually would, then afterward look at each sentence and ask: Is this the way I’d say this if I were talking to a friend?

Petr Minařík: So a piece of writing exists in a kind of social space. (Sorry, I know this sound stupid, reading it aloud to my friends, but anyway.)

František Malík: I write, but I also edit it many times. Among other things, I remove and replace useless words and phrases that are usually from my speech patterns and aren’t necessary to what you’re reading. Social space – yes! Literature is communication.

Dominik Bárt: To my mind, good prose has to have a rhythm to it. It shouldn’t really matter to the author how the reader chooses to read it… or, at least, the author cannot do much about that. But a good sound to it, to my mind, is essential. Social space – that seems like a good expression for it.

František Malík: As for rhythms, Kerouac based On The Road on Neil Cassidy’s way of talking…

Márgit Garajski: Michal reminded me of the patterns. It’s true. I once made a list of my oral speech “parasyte” words in order to eliminate them from a novel draft, such as just or simply and others.

Petr Minařík: Am I understanding it correctly that, as writers/authors, you are cultivating not only your text but also your public persona? (And I don’t mean this in any pejorative way.) You are refining a metaphorical voice through which your stories, plays, poems, ideas are conveyed. Is that a fair summary?

Dominik Bárt: I am afraid so.

Katarzyna Szweda: Yes, and also to the ways in which one wishes to be identified/identifiable.

Márgit Garajski: Reluctantly, though.

Petr Minařík: Maybe this is, again, connected to the introverted/extroverted spectrum?

Márgit Garajski: Where are the reclusive sages?

Petr Minařík: Artem, is that another Romantic myth that we have been landed with for the last 200+ years?

Márgit Garajski: Unfortunately yes, more of a myth. Being a reclusive sage is a type of public persona too, ironically.

Dominik Bárt: True, reclusive sage is one of the possible public personas! Yes.

Dominik Bárt: I am afraid the reclusive sages are mostly in secondhand bookshops…

Márgit Garajski: What about Thomas Pynchon?

Katarzyna Szweda: Patricia Highsmith preferred snails.

Petr Minařík: Was she reading out to her snails?

Katarzyna Szweda: If only I knew the answer to that!

Dominik Bárt: Which doesn’t mean that their writing is not entertaining! They are just unable or unwilling to “bring their skin to the public market”, as we say in Czech.

František Malík: I was a horrible public reader when I started… I have got a bit better. I was practising for years.

 

Petr Minařík: What is the purpose of literary festivals?

Katarzyna Szweda: The cynic in me thinks it is primarily commercial…

Márgit Garajski: True.

Dominik Bárt: It might well be so but, on the other hand, literary festivals tend to bring more potential readers into the fold. People who don’t really read might at least hear some written word.

Katarzyna Szweda: Although there’s been an interesting phenomenon at recent Edinburgh Book Festivals in which the First Minister has interviewed popular writers.

Petr Minařík: Can literary festivals actually be commercial? My question is aimed rather towards the opportunities of authors meeting with readers and listeners. Or is this just an illusion?

Márgit Garajski: Festivals have a right to commercial, of course. Not all should, though.

Dominik Bárt: No, in my opinion every undertaking in the literary world is a positive thing.

František Malík: Many big festivals are events, cost a lot of money, pay a lot of money to the star authors. They have line-ups like music festivals.

Katarzyna Szweda: I think there are many who would prefer to let the work stand alone. As with music, traditional sources of revenue are depleting so there is a pressure as well as an expectation on authors. According to Howard Jacobson, competition for audiences also!

Dominik Bárt: Kathy, well, yes. But that is just part of the cultural fusion. Not everyone likes it and it’s not entirely positive but it’s a serious attempt to make literature more popular among people who are not readers.

Katarzyna Szweda: Dominik, But how many people are attending the festivals who are not readers? I understand that there are different outreach events but I thought we were focussing on paying audiences?

 

Petr Minařík: How does literature travel places and between cultures? Can it? How?

Katarzyna Szweda: My first response when I saw this question was an emotional one, altering it to how authors travel between cultures – how aspects of identity that may or may not be present in the work may become a focus when the author is present in both senses.

Dominik Bárt: Perhaps you’re right. I just based my thoughts on a few personal experiences. I seem to meet the most devoted of my readers as well as people who’ve never heard of me before but seem to be taken in by my writing at literary festivals.

Petr Minařík: Kathy, that’s a very interesting notion. In what way is an author’s identity open to travelling and intercultural encounters?

 

Petr Minařík: At some point you were approached and invited to come to MAČ. Where is that? Why should I go? What’s the point?
Why DID you go in the end? Has it opened up new territories for you as writers, artists, intellectuals?

Márgit Garajski: Flabbergasted was a good word someone used.

Katarzyna Szweda: I think it’s a collective act of faith. But funnily: Many of those invited in the Scotland year were emailed on April 1st so didn’t respond initially as they thought it was an April Fool’s Day joke!

 

Petr Minařík: What is your experience from the Authors’ Reading Festival(s) in Brno-Ostrava-Wroclaw-Košice-Lviv? Any chance encounters, good luck, serendipity, inspirations worth sharing?

Márgit Garajski: I met Leszek [Leszek Budrewicz, Polish writer and public figure]. That was worth all of it, ten times over.

Petr Minařík: Could you say more about your meeting with Leszek and what it means to you?

Márgit Garajski: He came to my reading, as a journalist rather than a reader I believe. And, sometimes there’s a click between people. Like falling in love, but in an intellectual sort of a way. And later I was told amazingly inspiring things about him. I admire the man.

Petr Minařík: In one way this reads like a diary entry from the literati of the 18th or 19th centuries!

Márgit Garajski: You’re mentioning the romanticism again? Maybe it’s the pathos of writing in a foreign language…

Dominik Bárt: Well, for me the best moment came when my partner who travelled with me, a Czech of Nigerian origins, arrived at the Slovak-Ukrainian border. The way the people around us behaved (certainly not in any racist manner, they were just totally flabbergasted and curious at the same time) taught me a great deal about the part of Europe I was born in.

Petr Minařík: Are these the dangers/challenges/adventures of being a travelling artist?

Dominik Bárt: Haha, yeah. My punishment and reward for having a non-European partner… all at the same time.

Petr Minařík: But your reaction to the experience is an artistic one. You use it understand the neck of the wood you are coming from.

Dominik Bárt: Yes, I do. I think.

František Malík: I have taken part in the Authors’ Reading Festival three times, I think. This year I am doing Košice again and I am very much looking forward to it. What the festival has achieved in Brno is unbelievable. This is not happening in Berlin what you have there – this audience! These masses! Incredible!
Even Košice, you know. There was basically no public reading tradition. It is not easy to start something new in a new city. It is a challenge but you can make change happen. Since then literary events in Košice have been booming.

Dominik Bárt: Yes, I agree with Michal that the organization of the whole event was breathtakingly good, inspired even.

Katarzyna Szweda: Agreed!

František Malík: Especially when you know there is no German infrastructure in Brno: no Literaturhaus or something. It started from the bottom up.

Márgit Garajski: I’d like to add on about the admiration for the Author’s Reading. Me and my wife were traveling from Prague to Brno and saw the festival being advertised on a bus. Well, there are good things about promotion. And, too, I was amazed how many people come to hear writers they never actually heard of!

Petr Minařík: The weird thing about MAČ is that you are becoming not only writers in your own language cultures but international literati. How does that change you?

Katarzyna Szweda: Yes, and the inevitability of that given the international reach of the participants! I wonder the extent to which it would happen in reverse.

Katarzyna Szweda: Yes, good point. In terms of exposing audiences to new work and motivating those audiences to attend.

Petr Minařík: I also wonder how important is the fact that the cities are not the metropolis: it’s not Prague, nor Bratislava, nor Warszawa, nor Kiev. In a way it’s a bit of a counterculture.

Márgit Garajski: That’s maybe the best part of it. Especially Ostrava! I was lucky to have Mirek Tomek as a guide there. Another “literati” thing not related to writing directly (20th century this time) was going to some Absinthe place with no sign over it, that you have to know in order to come across.
And, too, I was amazed by the full room of people in Ostrava. HOW? WHY do they come?

František Malík: I love Ostrava since I went there with the Reading. I made friends there. This hardly ever happens. This troubled City has a strong writing and reading community.

Márgit Garajski: I wish someone made literary events in places like Krivy Rih in Ukraine (similar to Ostrava in a way).

Petr Minařík: Well, most Czechs know that Ostrava is the real city of culture in the country. Ostrava’s theatre is by far the best.

Dominik Bárt: I was very happy when the organizers invited me. It was a combined blessing: travel to places not all of which I’d visited before, a little holiday for me and my partner, a great opportunity to meet like-minded people and a chance to test my texts in foreign countries.

František Malík: I would love to see MAČ in Bratislava. Good for the logistics, too.

 

Katarzyna Szweda: There’s an unfortunate comparison to be made with the demise of touring theatre companies in Scotland.

Petr Minařík: Kathy: Could you say more about the demise?

Katarzyna Szweda: It’s mainly anecdotal, but at a conference I ran a few years ago, an Artistic Director (Johnny McKnight of Random Accomplice) was talking about the ways in which companies used to leave wee notes for each other as they were using the same venues with such regularity and how that just doesn’t exist anymore. Money, of course. Money.

Dominik Bárt: Coming to places like the Ukraine where readers certainly never heard of me is very interesting as well as humbling. I was quite surprised when my Ukrainian interpreter praised my books and assured me that their publication in the Ukraine would greatly benefit local readers (mostly in terms of self-awareness etc.) Now, almost a year later, though, nothing is happening regarding translation, although I was willing to basically donate the book rights.

Márgit Garajski: I’m not in the business, however, my impression as a reader is this: 95% of books being translated in Ukraine are being translated from English. That’s another big topic.

I attended a discussion on this subject at Vilenica festival in Slovenia, seems like it’s an inevitable “cultural domination” if that’s not too strong a phrase. Anyway, what’s the language we’re all speaking at the moment among ourselves?

Dominik Bárt: Yes, most books get translated from the English… the situation is the same in CZ, too. Seems like the infrastractures for this are firmly in place.

František Malík: Now we will have Georgia and there are like zero books translated into Slovak recently…

Petr Minařík: I know from my own experience that English is the language to mediate between Georgian and Czech. There are virtually no translators direct.

František Malík: Yes, fine with my. I allow to translate my books from German, because hardly anyone around the globe speaks Slovak…

Petr Minařík: Do you work with the translators who translate your books from German? Are they in touch with you?

František Malík: Just a little bit. That is the version they understand, some of them ask me some questions, but I cannot help them with the version for India. :)

Dominik Bárt: These two-step translations might seem iffy… but their quality depends on the situation and the people who do them. This seems to be a fairly common practice lately, for not-so-widely-spoken languages.

Katarzyna Szweda: Just look at the Bible...

 

Petr Minařík: On translating from “our languages”: Do you think MAČ could or should be publishing the guest literati in the wake of the festival?

Petr Minařík: Michal, when MAČ started, that’s what I thought about it too.

Márgit Garajski: Pavel, actually MAČ did publish collections for the Reading.

Dominik Bárt: I think it’s great to publish excerpts from everyone’s work. This way, many more readers and even potential publishers can gain access to their books.

Petr Minařík: Artem, yes, you are right about excerpts. But would a series of whole works succeed, do you think?

Márgit Garajski: If “succeed” means commercially, I don’t have a clue. Culturally, it could make a great impact in terms of unprecedented interchange of contemporary literature among several countries.

Katarzyna Szweda: “Our languages” means something different again in Scotland of course. Books are translated from English to Scots or Gaelic, for example. But there are of course dialects – the Doric etc. And writers can’t necessarily translate from English to Scots themselves (Alexander McCall Smith, for example). Ian Brown, one of the participants in 2014, is the expert on this.
Of course in Wales Welsh was forbidden for some time and the legacy of that prevails.

 

Petr Minařík: Why do you think audiences come to MAČ? Any guesses? Ideas?

Dominik Bárt: I think it’s great that many people did show up. In my view, it has something to do with the phenomenon of literary festivals: People know that, for a month, each day there will be a reading or more. And they trust the organizers not to bring boring writers. Two women in Košice assured me that MAČ is the cultural highlight of the year for them.

Petr Minařík: Did they say what they liked about it? Why highlights?

Dominik Bárt: Well, they are great readers and one of them is a journalist. They both love getting to know other countries etc. and are, as far as I can tell, cultural relativists. They just love meeting other cultures in Košice each year. They said it’s the only literary festival in the city.

Katarzyna Szweda: Many of the key events from literary festivals in this country are accessible virtually – is this true elsewhere? Of course this goes back to the audience/persona question also. And of course it raises the commercialisation aspect – copyright etc.

Petr Minařík: MAČ is available virtually too: http://www.mac365.cz/. In Czech for now and in English starting in the autumn.

František Malík: A cool website. I look there so much younger than now!

Petr Minařík: This brings us back to the question of how literature travels. Does it? Are we as readers encountering news worlds and novelty in general through reading? How do you, as writers, make that possible?

Márgit Garajski: New worlds, of course. Complete new worlds in writings of William Faulkner or Ismail Kadare or Arundhati Roy. Actually the best ways to enter into a new world is by reading great books. Not sure though how close to “real” worlds of the US South or Albania or Kerala these worlds are. And, should they be?

Dominik Bárt: This is a question that I don’t find possible to answer with a few sentences. Some literature travels very well. Some doesn’t. On the one that does, take Paulo Coelho, for instance, who seems big in Europe, praised for his wisdom etc. but rather resented in Brazil.

Petr Minařík: Dominik: Yes, you are right. My question may be asking for a singular, reductive answer. I am more interested in trends.

Dominik Bárt: As for myself, I love learning about new worlds by reading great books. It seems that many readers, however, enjoy reading mostly of characters that remind them of themselves and situations they find themselves in often.

Petr Minařík: There seems to be a constant dialogue when reading (watching etc.) between confirming who we are (self-reflection) and opening up to new realities.

 

Petr Minařík: What is happening with literature? There is a trend with Kindles and e-books falling in popularity but people read books more and more. How do you understand that? How is literature developing? What is literature today?

Katarzyna Szweda: What is literature today? Wow. Live. I suppose. Vital.

Dominik Bárt: Well, I haven’t bought a Kindle. Am I trendy, all of a sudden?

Petr Minařík: Yes, you are now on the cusp of fashion.

Márgit Garajski: Are they? Kindles?

Petr Minařík: Yes, it seems so, according to a recent article in The Guardian, Alex Preston’s “How real books have trumped ebooks” (14 May 2017, http://bit.ly/2qITcgb).

František Malík: I love Kindle and I love books. I collect both. I publish e-books and books. People still read. I work in a library and have another smaller library at home. I live my dream.

Katarzyna Szweda: Michal, tell me your secret. I dream my life.

Márgit Garajski: Actually I don’t see if it matters whether it’s a paper book or an e-book, that’s just the medium. What seems more disturbing is that people seem to turn to TV series (yes, especially the series) rather than books. In Ukraine at least.

Petr Minařík: Isn’t a literary festival also a development in a certain way, just like TV series are to the serial novel of the 18th and 19th centuries?

Márgit Garajski: I have thought about that, too.

Petr Minařík: That was a provocation on my part but I think there is a certain parallel to be found.

Márgit Garajski: The difference is that the serial novel is created by one person (mostly) and it requires work and talent rather than money. The TV series requires a huge team and a lot of money. Which brings us back to: a) commercialism; b) most of the TV series are in English, again. We don’t have a single solid one in Ukraine (like Bing Bang Theory, Black Mirror etc.). Do you have any worldwide series in Czech Republic?
Whereas a single person like Ismael Kadare can create things in Albania about the not-so-rich Albania that could potentially be read worldwide.

Petr Minařík: Artem: Yes, that’s the production side of it, true. At the same time, as writers writing with your audiences in mind (during literary festivals, authors’ readings, or simply with the reading voice) are also metaphorically collaborating.

Dominik Bárt: We have a few very interesting TV series in the Czech Republic now! Very exciting. One of them is Kosmo, one Pustina (The Wasteland). Really well made, I dare say.

Márgit Garajski: I envy you! We mostly have nationalist propaganda here in the one or two full-length movies per year. The good ones are the underground shorts etc.

 

Petr Minařík: Could you say more about the social aspects of writing? That’s something you’ve all mentioned previously. It also ties in with authors’ readings and literary festivals.

Katarzyna Szweda: Pavel, do you mean the act of writing or social situations one encounters through writing?

Petr Minařík: Perhaps more the act of writing. I am thinking along the lines of authors’ reading (literary festivals) as sharing the enjoyment of reading; meeting celebrities; fascination by creativity; testing the new and the possible. Any comments there?

Katarzyna Szweda: This is interesting because I am just starting to work collaboratively with another playwright, having of course collaborated with other practitioners previously.

Petr Minařík: Authors’ collaboration is also a counter-Romantic idea: multiple authorship vs. the Romantic “myth of the solitary genius”.

Katarzyna Szweda: You’re right. I’ll dinghy her. There can only be one. (Laughter)

František Malík: Writing is much more social than before. I can now respond to Margaret Atwood, for instance! As a writer I get a lot of comments and feedback, good and bad. Writing can change, or rather influence the world a bit. It is very important especially in our part of the world where an intellectual is the enemy of the state and the nation again.

Katarzyna Szweda: Michal, by ‘our part of the world’ do you mean there are places where that isn’t true?!

Petr Minařík: Michal, thank you for this! Very important: the author’s public responsibility.

František Malík: Sure. But in V4 [4 Visegrad countries: PL, CZ, SK, HU] countries far-right populists seek out confrontation openly. They create an atmosphere that the nation is threatened by enemies, traitors inside and outside. Writers play an important role opposing this. Unfortunately, too many of them are corrupted by the power…

Márgit Garajski: I’d like to hear more about the intellectual being the enemy of the Nation in Slovakia. I thought it was only Ukraine, ha!

Dominik Bárt: No, the artist is the enemy of the nation (and, mostly) its politicians in the Czech Republic, in Slovakia, in Poland, in Hungary… you name them.
I must agree with Michal that in places like CZ and SK writing has gained new importance… especially now that the media are, for the most part, not as free as they should be. Book publishing doesn’t seem that much affected. At the moment, I am writing a novel with some political implications, and the publisher seems happy. It would be very hard to write about these things for the daily papers or try to bring them on TV.

Petr Minařík: If you were to read from this book at a literary festival or MAČ, would that be a political arena for you and space of freedom of expression?

Dominik Bárt: Pavel: In a way… the book is not about politics as such, though, it’s about personal freedom... namely the personal freedom of the main character (a real-life woman) whose basic rights are being denied by the Czech foreign ministry… By the time the book is out and I at a literary festival, I hope, this problem should be solved for her. Fingers crossed.

Katarzyna Szweda: Again, I have been fascinated recently by the interviews Nicola Sturgeon has conducted with authors, only to have questions directed to her rather than the author at the end!

Petr Minařík: Kathy: That’s the danger of the interviewer being perhaps more interesting than the interviewee?

Katarzyna Szweda: I know, but a politician! It’s extraordinary! Although when asked how she found time to read books, Val McDermid responded for her that she wouldn’t be interested in a politician who didn’t read novels.

Dominik Bárt: Pavel, I hope I am answering your question: Obviously, if you want to write, you have to balance the conditions conducive to actual writing (for most writers, this means solitude) with the conditions that help you get to know the world, new people, new characters, new ideas. This balance can be very precarious sometimes… and it can mean completely different things for different people. In the same vein, you have to find a balance between writing “what people want to read”, that is, simpler and/or easier to understand stories etc., and writing what you want to write or feel obligated to write, that is, hopefully, something deeper and probably more personal. These requirements or problems (whatever you want to call them) have always been here, it just seems that recently they tend to lean more towards socializing, going out, leaving your shell, dropping the idea that you might be a recluse.

 

Petr Minařík: Dear all, as we are gradually coming to a closure, one last question for everyone: Authors’ reading as a genre, as an encounter, as your experience, as your inspiration, as part of your writing. Concluding comments? Anything omitted?

Katarzyna Szweda: “Anything omitted” – yes!! And isn’t that always going to be true?! (I mean that in a positive way!)

Petr Minařík: Kathy, I don’t take that for an answer! I am asking for a Message “to the world out there”.

Katarzyna Szweda: When we arrived in Brno for the festival, the generous person meeting us held up our names on a piece of paper. At his car, he placed the piece of paper in the boot along with multiple others. The writer I had flown over with retrieved the pieces of paper from the car, laid them on the pavement, and photographed her name alongside all of the other names. I’m sharing someone else’s story because I know that they were all different. I know that everyone encountered huge generosity and perhaps that is the flip side of my earlier cynicism about literary festivals and, you know, quite a few things just now…
Also the fact that one of the first billboards I encountered was for plastic surgery. An (inevitably) normal body was marked up with the improvements that could be made. In the UK, I’m certain you’d only ever see the airbrushed ‘after’ image. I don’t know what that means but it means something, I think.

Márgit Garajski: I was thinking of the readings being good as contrasted with the old “Soviet style” boring official writers who were sometimes published and promoted regardless of popularity. Like, when writers wrote monumental stuff and were published by the Machine and didn’t know if that’s interesting for anyone anymore. So, a reading is sometimes a good reality check.

Petr Minařík: I think you are right. The festival is in many ways a new form of public sphere that didn’t use to be there!

Dominik Bárt: Yes, reality check! I quite agree!

 

 

 

 

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