Pen, Book and Garden (Notes from Linnesby)
A few months ago I was at a dinner party with mostly philosophers. The conversation was general, and there wasn’t a lot of talk about where anyone worked or what their positions might be. At the end, as I walked out with a young couple, one of them asked what I did.
I said that I used to be an academic, and that now I was a woman who lived in the countryside and wrote things.
I expected to fall in his estimation, but instead he looked, for a moment, wistful. And somehow, that provided the impetus to put more of the writing out into the world.
This newsletter is a home for essays that are more personal, more bookish, more messy than academic writing. They’re not trying to be perfect, but they’re hoping to say things that matter, or at least to add something to a discussion that one would be glad to be part of.
They draw on books, on conversations in the little village I moved to, on things that I’ve worked with over the years, and more. They’re meant to be enjoyable to read, and I’ll do my best to make them so.
The essays fall into two kinds. Those listed under the heading “About a book” use specific books as starting points for broader topics. There is a bit of an attempt in these essays to choose English-language books that I know friends here in Sweden are not likely to have come across yet, and Nordic-language books that friends outside of Scandinavia might not yet have come across, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Mostly they’re just books that I want to write about.
The pieces under the heading “Occasional essays” still tend to be bookish, but they usually draw on books while writing about a particular topic, rather than using a specific book as the starting point or frame. They tend to be a little more personal, but the difference, in truth, is fairly slight.
The ethos of the whole is that people (all people) and community matter.
I expect that the book-based essays will come out once a week or so, and the occasional ones more randomly. But the newsletter is still new; any of that might change.
Comments are welcome, and I would be grateful if you were to share the newsletter with others, and the same with any particular essay that you find worth passing along.
if you would like to receive the essays by email as they come out, you can subscribe using the button below.
Warmly welcome to this word-garden.
