All about: writing

Writing on Substack
A month ago, as part of my new year's resolution, I prepared a Substack account. I wanted to write something on it as soon as I would be pain-free for 24 hours. Today, I started a short note with the intention to announce the delay of my first essay. It turned into a short piece ...
The distance to writing poetry
You are on your own, you think yourself unreachable. Somewhere on the side of the light. All talk about giving yourself up into the world, as if you can be glorious that way, and you sit there, cold light in your face, half way to darkness You make the senses light, more of the world ...
This is interesting
My exuberant, eccentric and extraordinary train journey, zigzagging through western and central Europe at a maniacal pace, walking a beautiful stretch of the Camino de Santiago near Donostia/San Sebastián, dipping my feet in the Atlantic Ocean in Sintra, staying in lovely boutique hotels as well as a bench on the boulevard of Nice, sipping red ...
The writer’s hunt
According to the much celebrated author du jour George Saunders, there are three big pleasures in the life of a writer. He shared them in a recent interview I listened to during my daily walk (that's a white lie: I don't walk daily, something is holding me back) and now I share them here. The ...
On writers
Be brief. There is no use for meandering sentences here. No rose garden esthetics. I have seen the writers for what they, all to many of them, are. Amateurs at narcissism. Where did it start? The desire to crack everything wide open. To put it all out there. The silly hope that there still is ...
You have to thicken your words to hold them in place
The Luck of Interest
If you write a book, you have to be that book. Your time must become the time of the book. If you engage in public discussion on social media, the world (the others) will always be a step ahead of you. Only the latest analysis and verdict are worth mentioning - everything else is irrelevant, a mere object ...
Is literary writing the art of making cultivated loneliness feel like engaging conversation?
How I avoided Depression
The original title of this article was “How I Overcame Depression” because it sounds more spectacular and is more likely to propel me into the realm of fickle yet immensely enjoyable Internet fame. But I didn’t want to lie. I don’t believe my symptoms, burdensome and debilitating as they were, warranted the diagnosis of clinical ...