Schrijfster Pia Prezelj uit Slovenië woonde en werkte op uitnodiging van Leeuwarden City of Literature een kleine maand in de stad. Hier lees je haar ervaring als writer in residence.
I first set foot in Leeuwarden in November 2023 – My debut Heavy Water had only just been released, and I was heading to Schiermonnikoog to present it at the Meet me at the Lighthouse festival. It was my first time taking the novel abroad, and it turned out to be one of the most precious ones too – the island, with its dunes and birds and a language slowly vanishing, cut quite deeply into me, and in the years that followed, from that cut grew the idea for a novel set on Schiermonnikoog.
When the Leeuwarden City of Literature office later offered me a residency, I accepted without hesitation. I would be able to return to the places of my novel, able to get to know them – or know them better, at least. But I also knew I was returning to the people I had already, after that first encounter on the island, begun to think of as my own – the colleagues in the Leeuwarden City of Literature office, without whom some girl in some Slovenian town would have been writing much less.
So now I’m walking around Leeuwarden for the second time, but this time better, this time deeper. I cycle, I visit the old cemetery, I eat mustard soup and croquettes (what an brilliant invention Febo is!) and, above all, I write. I spent a few days on the island again, but this time we walked to it, across shells and mud and jellyfish, and above them, a sky stretching wider than on the mainland. When I pulled an empty whelk shell out of my backpack in the hotel room, a tiny crab crawled out of it – I had to catch dinner, and I left it in the bathtub, then returned it to the sea; I imagine I’ve equipped it with quite a story for the grandkids.
On the island I met Nathan, who told me of the four lost sailors and the ever rattling kettle, Rutger, who recommended a book by Matthijs Deen, and Lisa, who spoke to me about farming on the island and the quiet winters and the cows she sleeps above. I lay on the sand and listened to the geese and gulls and terns all flying overhead and thought about how curious the writing life can be – how all the doubt and dread before the next blank page can be outweighed by the song of a single willow warbler.
