I talked about my book “Suspended in Vast Plain” with four superb and very friendly hosts from Massachusetts, North Carolina, Florida and Connecticut. Anybody can find the interviews and watch and get a feel of the premise and theme. I love to talk about it, and I am always ready for questioning. When I shop for groceries, I expect the cashier to ask me not about how many bags I need to pack produce in but about details of the plot, why I did this, or how I cope with that in Africa. Interestingly, the hosts were two women and two men. Men preferred why-questions: why I wrote a memoir; why I wanted to leave socialist Poland, the workers’ paradise. The female hosts wanted to know how: how I cope with difficulties; how this experience changed me and my life. I am generalizing a bit here, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?
Talk is cheap, we know that, but writing is great fun. Most of the authors, well, all of the famous and best-selling authors, write in the morning for five or six hours. So they say. I am far from that level of consistency. Often, I like to scribble at the day’s end when all activities stop, all the noises dissipate, and lights are turned off. Then I sit at my desk, or better, lay down in bed with my laptop supported by my legs bent up, collect my thoughts, and thread them with my fingers punching the keyboard. I justify that; I think I write out of disappointment that I have not written a word that day and fear the day could be lost. Lost in not-essential like eating, exercising to burn calories, watching sports and trying to be on top of the news, checking through the mail, because essential is writing. Obviously, I need to discipline myself.
Anyway, I think, in the next few posts, I will cut out pieces of my African story and wrap each of them in a few introductory sentences to bring some context to the scene or my stream of thought. This will present my dearest blog readers with the story’s themes and show my voice. Some say that the author’s voice is more important than the story’s plot.
I found two such pieces from the first part of “Suspended in Vast Plain”, in which I breathed in the African environment in the first days and weeks. And after many years, I finally exhaled my first impressions and wrote them down, not only of “Vast Plain”, the geographical place, approximately 9°N and 12°E, of its nature and people, but also of FUTY, the newly open the Federal University of Technology. This is why part of the story is a campus story, where the main characters are professors and lecturers, an interesting bunch of characters. How I found them? The first piece answers this question. In the following post, I want to show, at least partially, how come I was enthusiastic about living in Africa for two years. Somehow, these themes are missing in the interviews. Why? How come?