1. Is it even a poetry evening if it doesn’t take place in a grungy bar that wears its warm heart on its sleeve? | 2. here are dozens and dozens of bookshops in Berlin, but She Said – a bookshop for women and queer writers – is a highlight in terms of its selection, its ceramic shelving (!), its coffees and pastries, and the quality of its service. There are also free tampons in the loo.
It is that time of the year. Young people are thinking about the future. Should they study next year, start working, or take a gap year?
These conversations needn’t be limited to matriculants. LitNet recently published a series of articles, written by Marita van der Vyver, on her and her husband’s gap year, titled “Swerfjaar vir seniors”.
In the interview published below, Karin Schimke talks to Naomi Meyer about her own adult gap year and travelling abroad, while writing about and pondering life.
Karin, I believe you’re on an adult gap year. What’s that all about?
Last year, I was unexpectedly in Greece. On one of those days, floating in the warm water, I wondered why I didn’t live like this more. Travel has always felt beyond my means, but I’m a freelance writer, editor and translator, so in theory I could live and work anywhere I want. The notion took hold, in spite of all the reasons why it should be impossible, and I pursued ways of living a less structured, planned and predictable life for a few months.
A poet friend called it my vagabonding year. Vagabond used as an adjective means to lead an unsettled and carefree life.
The plan coincided with my children both being out of school. I now have freedom to choose what I want to do. I hope it’s the start of a new era of living light and experiencing different ways of being the person I am.
There are many years, if you’re lucky, between when your children are grown and death, and I wanted to travel while I could still walk with ease. No matter how we look after ourselves, our bodies start getting a bit crock at a certain age, and I wanted to expend all my restlessness while my knees and hips are still feeling well oiled.
You’ve spent most of your time in Berlin, right? Why?
My father was German. I’ve been writing a book about him for several years now, and I wanted to spend some time in the places he lived as a child, and with his family members who are still around, so Berlin made sense.
3. I finally had an opportunity to visit my grandmother’s grave. Burial in Germany is an expensive and highly regulated area of life. My family chose to have no headstone. I didn’t expect to be pleased by such a decision. I’d never thought about headstones much until I started wandering around cemeteries in Europe. | 4. In my year of not buying books, I’ve been reasonably, though not very satisfyingly, fed by the offerings I find in little free libraries, many of which in Berlin are installed in old public telephone booths.
What have the highs been?
So many! Berlin feels fantastically foreign from the life I know, and yet familiar from my four previous family trips here. I revel in the smell that hits you when you descend into the U-Bahn, in the cadences of friendliness in the language, and in the quality of the beer and the Brötchen. And in the absolute joy of walking as a means of travel, not just leisure. I finally understand now what it means to “live in the moment” and that, although it’s sometimes uncomfortable, I can live without my beloved books and only two pairs of shoes. I’ve experienced a deeper level of “living lightly”. Minimalism has been liberating.
I’ve been to countless talks, museums and exhibitions. Just in the past two weeks, I’ve attended a reading and talk by Lina Atfah, a Syrian poet and refugee who recently won a major German literature prize, and a live interview with the Nobel Literature Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, whose comments on war and culture I wrote here.
I have been to book shops of all descriptions. I’ve made new friends. I’ve met South African writers like Deon Maas, Peter Machen and Anelia Heese and have had the kind of intense, deep, sprawling, fascinating conversations that often only seem possible with writers. One of those conversations was with the writer Niq Mhlongo, and it was all about walls (I wrote about it here), a fitting conversation for two writers in a city whose wall was truly epic, and who also come from a country of walls.
And, very excitingly, I’ve been approached by publishers to turn the travelogue part of my weekly “Love letter” into a book.
5. Sitting between the columns at the Altes Museum in Berlin. In this area of Berlin, much of the stone is pockmarked with bullet divots. The traces of war are everywhere. | 6. Hiking in Wales, on a ridge from where you look down towards England on one side, and over at Wales’s rolling hills in the Brecon Beacons on the other, I came across this clean sheep skull. This was the only moment in the year when a poem came to me in a single, quick download.
And the lows?
Really just one: between the effects of artificial intelligence, the global recession, wars, the energy crisis and a publishing industry under pressure everywhere, freelance work has pretty much dried up for many of us. But even that has, in some ways, been a good thing – it has meant that I can focus on work I love, like writing my weekly “Love letter”. I have discovered a new way to make a living as a writer, where I engage directly with the loyal readers who like my work. Some of these readers are prepared to support “Love letter” financially by subscribing. This new model is based on reciprocity, exchange and relationship.
I’ve also begun to take on writing mentees in a professional capacity. And then, of course, I’ve been able to spend more time than usual on writing the book about my father and plan two others that have been waiting for a gap.
Amazingly, despite the lack of financial security, I decided that I was not going to waste this opportunity to explore another way of being in an otherwise ordinary life, and that choice has given me freedom to genuinely enjoy being here. I do not lie awake at night stressing about the obvious. Everything about this unusual year has been intensely enriching and joyful. I have had days and days of what can be described only, blandly, as “happiness”. It’s a low hum, rather than a clash of cymbals, but it’s been a wondrous experience.
Like most middle-class South Africans teetering frantically between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor, I spend a goodly part of my mental energy just trying to hold on to what I have without taking too much elsewhere. But I had to go all in for this adult gap year. It was a gamble, but it has paid off in ways I didn’t expect.
Also read:
Flame in the Snow – the love letters of André Brink and Ingrid Jonker