An Inner Switzerland

Abstract

It was chance that took me to a writer's residence in Switzerland—one of those chances that turn out to be fate. I didn't yet know that when, on the cobblestones of a courtyard on Rue de Verneuil in Paris, I bumped into the friend who told me about a retreat that was "extraordinary". I asked her where it was situated. In Switzerland, she told me, near Lausanne. My interest flagged: that wasn't far from the little house in country where I used to take my children five times a year to visit their paternal grandparents. I appreciated my good fortune, being able to get them out of Paris during their school vacations, but once there I always felt like I was in exile: I had to leave behind my study and the writerly solitude where I delved into imaginary worlds and experienced life so densely, so intensely. But my friend wouldn't give up, she told me that there would be writers from all over the world. With that, the ground began to open up and shift around me: I would have to speak English, to test the uncertainty of language. I would have the euphoric sensation of losing my equilibrium, of doing everything differently, of getting rid of my baggage, the personal matters that stuck to me like glue—all by speaking another language…