Barbara Sjoholm's Blog, page 6

Fossil Island wins Historical Novel Society award for best indie novel

Over the past weekend, at the Historical Novel Society conference, held this year in Oxford, England, my novel Fossil Island was chosen as a best indie novel of 2015. I was sorry I couldn't attend to win in person (and also just to participate in what seems to have been, from the Twitter feed, a pretty jolly event, with a lot of dressing up and fascinating panels). Never mind, I will definitely be at the next conference in Portland, OR, so very much closer to home. Thanks, HNS! It's a great organization and I appreciate the honor.

A couple of months ago, last year's winner, Anna Belfrage, posted this interview with me about Fossil Island. Anna is Swedish but writes her fine historical novels in English.

The end of summer turned out to be a lucky time for me. A couple of weeks ago it was also announced that I'd been awarded an NEA fellowship in translation. The project is Helene Uri's novel, Clearing Out, which I wrote about here in November, 2014. I'm still looking for a publisher for this fantastic novel from Norway with a Sami theme.

Joiking of Identity and Sisterhood: Sara Ajnnak

In February I had the good fortune to be invited to the winter market in Jokkmokk, Sweden to give a slideshow and talk on Emilie Demant Hatt. I stayed for the whole three days of the festival, which has taken place for over 400 years. The winter market is a place where the Sami people have congregated to trade goods and gossip, to meet friends and sweethearts, to joik and attend church services. Now that the winter market is connected with the museum Ájtte and events and exhibits have spread out through the town to the schools, churches, and community centers, there are more opportunities to see films, hear lectures, admire Sami handicraft, and listen to music.
I’ve long been deeply drawn to joik music, whether in its pure form of vocalization or accompanied by drums, guitars, and electronic keyboards. This February I went to a couple of evening concerts by well-known Sami singers, but I have to say that the most riveting joiking I heard was on a CD by a young Sami woman, Sara Ajnnak, which was playing in the shop of the Viltok Sisters as background music.
Sara Ajnnak is from Västerbotten, based in Gargnäs, near Sorselse in the middle of Southern Sápmi. She comes from a herding family and knows her way around a snowmobile. After high school she studied the theater arts, but realized she didn’t want to be an actor, and turned to singing and eventually writing her own songs.The language her people would have spoken up to a couple of generations ago was Ume Sami, now one of the languages that’s halfway to extinction. Yet it lives on in the words of joiks once recorded and saved in archives. It’s to these archives that Sara turned when she was looking to connect with her past and find a way to joik from her heart. 
On her website she writes (in Swedish, this is my translation):
For a long time I only knew half of myself. I felt I was missing a part of myself and couldn’t really be me. My Sami identity was tattered, the language I should know wasn’t there, but I was searching inside for myself. Out of frustration, I found my way to the joik and there I discovered a piece of the puzzle to my identity. It wasn’t easy, the joik had long since disappeared from my geographical area. I spent hours in archives, while the evenings were devoted to imitating the sound recordings from the early 1900s.               It really was both anger and frustration that led me to the joik and eventually the stage's spotlight. My joik career took off and I traveled around Sápmi to various venues as a traditional joiker. But I still felt tattered inside, and searched for more puzzle pieces to become whole.
I grew up in a reindeer herding family in Västerbotten [a northern province in Sweden]. From childhood I’ve taught myself to relate to the grandeur of nature's changing reality.  Life in reindeer husbandry has affected and affects me constantly. My life has been about trying to survive, and the joik has been a release where I was able to let out my feelings. In the candlelight, my pen has run quickly; reflections on life turned into lyrics.
When I started my journey to regain my language, I grew as a person. Now I could for the first time stand up and say the words that have long been forgotten in my family. Step by step, I grew as a person and took my language with me up onto the stage. 
My history and path into the music hasn’t been straightforward, but has been characterized by low self-confidence, hard work and language barriers. It took more than 34 years before I dared to believe in myself and my ability as an artist. In September of 2014 my first album Suojggat came out and I finally felt at home. I felt pretty soon after I released my debut album that music was my valve, allowing me to freely create from an emotional place and making room for me to tell my own story. I felt that the stories and perspectives from my geographic area in Sápmi were missing and through writing and creating music, my soul also became whole. 
Sara Ajnnak has two CDs, Suojggat and Ráhtjat, with songs that are both soulful and danceable, to a bouncy electronic beat. In a music video of her letting her voice ring out in a wintery world (a video with some beautiful slow-motion filming of a reindeer separation, as well), Ajnnak joiks in Sami of women’s empowerment and equal rights. The lyrics show up at the end of the video, in English: 
I raise my voice/ To free up my mind/ Stand up for myself/ Sisterhood

Fossil Island a finalist for the Historical Novel Society Indie Award

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The winner will be announced at the annual conference of the Historical Novel Society (Sept 2-4, 2016) in Oxford, England.
If you don't know this wonderful organization, based in England but with a sizeable North American membership, see their website at:


https://historicalnovelsociety.org/co...

IA winter's day in Oslo's Vigeland Park. Happy...

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A winter's day in Oslo's Vigeland Park. Happy to be in this city again after a long absence.

Emilie Demant Hatt Lecture with Slides at Jokkmokk in February

The Jokkmokk Market above the Arctic Circle is a three plus day event February 4-6 that takes place every year--and has for 400 years. In the past Sami gathered in Jokkmokk, Sweden to barter and sell, to pay taxes, and to attend church. Now the Market is a cultural feast of music, arts, lectures, films, and lots of outdoor activities as well. See more at http://www.jokkmokksmarknad.se/

This year on Friday, February 5, at 11:30 a.m. I'll be talking (indoors, in the museum) about the Danish ethnographer and artist Emilie Demant Hatt. I'm excited to share my research and show slides of her beautiful paintings. Please join me in Jokkmokk if you like cold, frost, and hot drinks, as well as a chance to experience some of the best of Sami culture today.

Repatriating the Sami Cultural Heritage in Norway

Folk Dance Troupe from Setesdal at Folkemuseum
 Just outside Oslo, on the island of Bygdøy, stands the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, the Norsk Folkemuseum. Founded in 1894 to collect, preserve, and display all manner of Norwegian domestic items, from clothing to butter churns, the grounds also contain dozens of buildings from every part of Norway: original houses, barns, and churches, from the humble to the grand, disassembled and reconstructed and now scrupulously maintained. It’s the largest open-air museum in Norway and one of the earliest in the world. Here (especially on a warm summer’s day) it’s lovely to stroll among the mountain farm seters and stave churches, set among meadows and birch trees. The Folkemuseum also houses its collections, some of which go back to the 1500s, indoors in climate-controlled rooms. 
Norsk Folkemuseum Artifacts collected from the Sami people in Norway weren’t part of the original scheme for the museum. Their clothing and objects of daily use were instead the nucleus of the University of Oslo’s Ethnographic Museum, displayed with artifacts from people around the world. Not until 1951 was the Sami collection transferred to the Folkemuseum “with the aim of placing the Sami on a more equal footing with other Norwegian citizens.” The assemblage of 2600 objects was augmented by further collecting, not only of objects but of photographs and audio recordings of the Sami language and joiks. Today the collection consists of some 4500 catalog numbers.
That collection is about to be halved. Since the 1970s, when the Sami began to organize politically in a more confrontative manner than before, relations between the Norwegian state and its Sami citizens have shifted considerably. The aims of the Sami, to be regarded as an indigenous people with legal and moral rights to land, language, and cultural heritage, have been widely debated in Norway, but have resulted in a number of reforms and new initiatives. Along with the establishment of Sami museums and cultural centers around the country came discussions of repatriating Sami artifacts. These discussions weren’t limited to Norway—it’s been a subject of great interest in other Nordic countries with a Sami minority as well as internationally—but Norway has moved ahead now with a concrete plan to divide its collection, with 50% to remain at the Folkemuseum and 50% to be returned, with full ownership rights, to the six Sami museums, depending on the geographic origin of the objects. 

Árran Lule Sami Center  The process of selecting the objects began in late 2015 and will continue throughout 2016. In some cases, the transfer depends on upgrading facilities at the Sami museums and dealing with problems associated with earlier preservation techniques, which included the use of toxic substances and pesticides. The Norwegian state will be funding most of the project, “in accordance with the country’s obligations towards the Sami as in indigenous people.” The project is meant to be completed in 2017.
The project is called Bååstede, which means “return” in the South Sami language. 
The six Sami Museums in Norway:   Árran Lule Sami Center
Deanu andVarjjat Museumsiida (including Deanu, Varjjat and the East Sami Museums and themuseum of the Sami artist John Savio).
The Center for Northern Peoples
RiddoDuottarMuseat(including SVD museum in Karasjok, Guovdageainnu Gilisillju in Kautokeino,Porsanger Museum and Kokelv Sea Sami Museum)
Saemien Sijte(the South Sami Museum)

Vardobaiki Center

Skumbilar = Chewy Candy Cars

 
When I first started translating Norwegian, decades ago, I frequently found myself stumped by certain words in fiction, and spent hours either writing to people in Norway or talking to native speakers in Seattle. Sometimes the difficult words belonged to past history, sometimes they were slang words, sometimes they referred to kinds of food or clothing I hadn't encountered before. 
The Internet didn't exist then; I couldn't just type in  a word or a person's name.
Recently I've been translating a Norwegian novel with a character who loves candy. There are frequent mentions of what she eats and how it makes her feel (remorseful). I'm not a candy eater myself except for the occasional dark chocolate truffle, so when I'm in Scandinavia I never visit the many candy shops or pay much attention to the bags of candy for sale in convenience stores.  
This morning I stumbled when I came to a description of the character half-choking on the "shock absorber" of a skumbil. Since I knew she was eating that weird, marshmallow-stiff candy called skumgoderi, literally "foam goodies," I figured it must be in the shape of cars. I decided to see if I could find an image of a skumbil on the Internet. 
Who knew that there are forums dedicated to discussing this kind and shape of candy, apparently a Swedish specialty? Also Twitter feeds, Flickr and Instagram and Pinterest pictures. At least now I know what to call them in my translation: Chewy candy cars.

Sweden's 16-year-olds to receive We Should All Be Feminists by Adichie

Every 16-year-old in Sweden is being given a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s call to arms, We Should All Be Feminists.

The essay, adapted from Adichie’s award-winning TED talk of the same name, is being distributed in Swedish to high-school students by the Swedish Women’s Lobby and publisher Albert Bonniers. Launching the project at Norra Real high school in Stockholm this week, they said they hoped the book would “work as a stepping stone for a discussion about gender equality and feminism”.

 For the full article see The Guardian.

Ruth Smith and Júlíana Sveinsdóttir, two painters from the Faroes and Iceland, now in Copenhagen Exhibit

 
  Ruth Smith and Júlíana Sveinsdóttir

100 years ago, women were given the right to vote in Iceland, on the Faroe Islands and in Denmark. To mark the occasion, Reykjavík Art Museum, the National Art Gallery of the Faroe Islands and Nordatlantens Brygge have collaborated to present an exhibition of the works of two female artists: Júlíana Sveinsdóttir from Iceland (1889-1966) and Ruth Smith from the Faroe Islands (1913-1958).
Both artists grew up in bleak, windswept island environments: in Heimaey in the Vestmannaeyjar Islands and Suderø in the Faroe Islands. They were two of the first professional female artists in their respective home countries, where painting in the early 20th century was in its infancy. Both studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen.

Both of them portrayed the nature of their home countries with a profound sense of colour and of the enormous power of nature in the eternal struggle between land and sea. Even though they lived from time to time in Denmark, they still preferred to paint island landscapes.

The exhibition provides an insight into the capacity of these two artists, not only to interpret landscape, but also to paint portraits both of themselves and of their contemporaries. What both artists had in common was their devotion to the self-portrait, where they hid nothing: neither melancholy nor old age.
The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Reykjavík Art Museum, the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands and supported by the Nordic Culture Fund.

Curator: Hrafnhildur Schram.

14 November 2015 - 10 January 2016North Atlantic House (Nordatlantans Brygge)Copenhagen 

Fall readings and workshops: Fossil Island and The Former World

 If you're in the Puget Sound area, please join me for one of several events in the next two months to celebrate the publication of my novels inspired by the relationship between Emilie Demant Hatt and Carl Nielsen   October 2, Friday, at 7:30 p.m. at the Swedish Club, 1920 Dexter Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109. In honor of the Danish connection, the Club’s chefs will be preparing a tasting menu of Danish treats, available from 6 p.m. on. If you’ve never been to the Swedish Club, it’s a fabulous World’s Fair-era building with a view of Lake Union and a cocktail bar out of  “The Jetsons.”
November 1, Sunday, 3 p.m. at the Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 NW 67th Street Seattle, WA 98117. I’ll be talking for the novels and signing books before  a 4 p.m. concert with the Novus Project featuring Carl Nielsen’s work (tickets for the concert are available at www.nordicmuseum.org $15 for Museum members, $20 general admission). 
November 14, Saturday, 7 p.m. at the Writers' Workshoppe in Port Townsend, 820 Water Street, PT, 360 379 2617. Earlier that day (10-3), I'll be giving a workshop on Writing Historical Fiction.


                     Sjoholm gives readers vibrant characters whose personal travails are all the more engrossing for the cultural upheavals that energize them. An entertaining, thoughtful story of old-fashioned romance, complicated by dawning modern mores.   –Kirkus Reviews
These are thoughtful, glitteringly intelligent novels, as shrewd about shifting social conditions as they are about the workings of the human heart. – Editor’s Choice, Historical Novel Review
In Fossil Island, Nik is a fourteen-year-old tomboy who spends her time dreaming and fossilizing on the nearby island of Fur, a geologic marvel.  Her older sister Maj is studying to be a teacher but is starting to entertain ideas of women’s rights introduced by her new friend Eva Sandström. Both girls know they must marry eventually—just not yet. The summer of 1887 begins with a visit from the girls’ aunt, who brings with her from Copenhagen a young man of twenty-two, who plans to become a composer. Flirtation turns to a secret romance between Nik and Carl, as Maj weighs an engagement over her intense friendship with Eva. The following summer brings the sisters’ intertwining stories to a head as they spend a month in Copenhagen and juggle passion, jealousy, and violent events with how they can find independent lives of their own.
The story of Nik and Maj continues in the sequel, The Former World. Now sixteen, Nik resumes her relationship with the passionate Carl Nielsen, who comes once more for a summer visit in 1889 to her provincial village. But their bonds are strained by convention and Nik’s own stirrings of ambition to study art. Now twenty-one, Maj finds a teaching job, but her mother hasn’t given up the idea her eldest daughter will marry. Taking place over the course of two dramatic years, the sisters’ lives will be utterly changed by love, heartbreak, illness, and death. A vivid portrait of two stubborn daughters who love their family, but yearn for freedom on their own terms, The Former World recreates a time when women’s lives and Danish society were in transition. Whether it’s Nik learning to cycle or Maj dreaming of working in Brooklyn as a teacher, Nik and Maj are memorable characters in a setting both distant in time yet familiar.
~"Fossil Island reads as well as any Jane Austen novel, but its political themes and social commentary really matter to the 21st-century reader. As in an Austen book, the characters are engaged with house parties, daily activities, relationships and, always and especially, conversations. However, this novel not only offers an insightful, engaging view of personal manners, social mores and romantic love, but also it deals with the politics of manners, mores, and love. In particular it illuminates the social history of women of the time, including lesbians and other women who wanted to live independent lives. Fossil Island brought to mind the wonderful and internationally acclaimed historical novels of Sarah Waters. Fossil Island, like Waters’s books, made me gasp out loud at its plot turns. The characters are so richly drawn, so compellingly human and difficult and funny and likable, and their interactions so humanly complicated, so impossible and so tender, that I think any fiction reader or history lover will read this, as I did, with avid enthusiasm.”                                                             ––Gillian Kendall, author of How I Became a Human Being~
“Barbara Sjoholm transports us to Denmark in the 1880s, a time when traditional customs and ideas were giving way to new technology and modern thinking, and enchants us with the story of a girl’s first love.Fossil Island captures beautifully the conflicting worlds the young lovers Carl and Nik move between: the harmony and lazy rhythms of village life on Jutland’s Limfjord, the dissonance and hectic tempos of Copenhagen. Nik experiences these disparate worlds with the apprehension and excitement of adolescence. In the city and the countryside she listens to young men and women debate the new ideas, but it is in the city Nik meets women who, by living life on their own terms, will make history and guide her on her own path: artists, writers, musicians, even her older sister’s feminist classmate who sails to America in search of work and adventure. Fossil Island is a book to savor—you won’t want to put it down, you won’t want it to end. ––Katherine Hanson, editor of An Everyday Story: Norwegian Women’s Fiction

Ordering information: www.cedarstreeteditions.com