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LIFE HACKS F

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The 2010 Sozopol Fiction Seminar

Editor’s Note:

Each spring the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five English speaking writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. In 2009 I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the fellows, along with then soon-to-be FWR contributor Steven Wingate. That journey was chronicled in an essay entitled “Literary Life on the Black Sea,” which FWR published later that summer.

Keeping with what we hope will become a tradition, we asked several of this year’s English speaking fellows if they would be willing to compile a similar essay reflecting on their trip to Bulgaria to participate in the 2010 seminar. Those individuals are Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich. The results of their collaborative work is below. We hope you enjoy!

PART I: The Road to Much Excess

by Kelly Luce

Work schedule cleared, bags packed. Workshop pieces read, re-read, and noted upon. It was the end of May and time to head to Bulgaria for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, organized by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. I was one of five writers working in English who’d been chosen as a fellow

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I used to approach my reading in terms of content. I’d be looking for particular genres, or at the very least I would choose books based on whether the subject matter appealed to me. But something has changed (or maybe something has been brought out) in the years since I’ve been blogging. I now approach books much more in terms of language.

What do I mean by this? Well, I don’t mean that I’m drawn to ‘fine writing’. Indeed, I think that literary style, in and of itself, is a red herring. What counts for me is not the style of writing per se, but what the writing opens up. In the work I value most, the language embodies what it seeks to portray; the way a piece of fiction is written becomes part of what it means.

 

 

A good example is Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, which is set in the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest of England and written in a ‘shadow tongue’, a modified version of Old English. The effect of this shadow tongue is to estrange the reader just enough from what might otherwise seem an overly familiar historical period. The crucial thing is that the same story couldn’t be told in a more contemporary style (or even a more conventional ‘historical’ one), because the style of The Wake adds its own layer – a particular relationship be