Another month over and guess what! I have some actual news! This month I went to Stockholm to attend the Stockholm Writers Festival. If you’re a writer, and you don’t do writer events, then I strongly recommend giving them a try (and if you do, you can do a lot worse than going to Stockholm).
Seriously, the SWF was founded because Stockholm-based writers were sick of having to travel abroad to attend literary festivals, yet writers flew in from as far away as Texas, and I was not the only Brit.
Guest speakers included literary change agent and author advocate April Eberhardt, Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, author of What We Owe, American authors Johnny Shaw (whose ‘Write what you Don’t Know’ seminar I attended) and Jeff Bens, Liv Maidment from the Madeleine Milburn Literary, TV & Film Agency and Stephen King aficionado Hans-Åke Lilja. So that’s a pretty varied roster of people, not to mention other industry experts who popped up throughout the weekend.
If you do attend events like this, then I won’t need to tell you about what I’m calling the Writer Critical Mass Effect. For everyone else, what happens is that you get a large number of writers together who are suddenly aware that, hey, we don’t have to pretend to be normal! Everyone here is just as strange as I am! Everyone else’s search history is just as worrying as mine!
A hundred or so people who are usually somewhat isolated all start vibing together about the thing that typically isolates them, and a strange energy starts to build. I do attend a local writer’s group, so I was definitely aware that hanging with other writers and getting to relax a little is fun. But this was a much larger, more diverse group of people than I was used to, and I learned that enough writers vibing together with a high enough level of excitement form a sort of hive mind. Strange but true. Seriously, fellow writer-folks, find yourself an event and try it for yourself.
Harriet Phoenix 