Karina Book, Interview

LitNet: An interview with Karina M Szczurek from Karavan Press

Stefaans Coetzee sent Karina M Szczurek a number of questions.

Karina M Szczurek, could you please introduce yourself in a few sentences for our readers?

Polish by birth, Austrian by citizenship and South African by heart, I am a reader, writer, editor and publisher based in Cape Town. I count myself extremely lucky, because I write and work with stories for a living. After my turbulent, migratory early life, South African stories brought me to this country. The old Victorian house I share now with Salieri, my beloved literary catssistant, has been my home for the past 20 years. I am gradually approaching my fiftieth birthday, but I am still learning how to be in this strange world, and loving the adventure.

What made you decide to start a short story workshop, which would result in anthologies?

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Karina Festival

Franschhoek Literary Festival 2024: A personal reflection by Karina M. Szczurek

“She doesn’t want to be. She is,” Thobeka Yose said in response to a woman who attended “Signs of a struggle”, one of the Saturday sessions of this year’s edition of the Franschhoek Literary Festival, which spanned the weekend of 17 to 19 May. That was the moment when our tears spilled over after an already emotionally charged discussion between Yose and Sara-Jayne Makwala-King, whose remarkable insights and empathy held us throughout the session. The woman in the audience spoke about a grandchild who is transgender. She was asking Yose how to deal with the reality of this fact that she was struggling to understand. “Love your grandchild,” Yose said …

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Until next year!

Karina Author, Book

‘Still beating, reflecting on heart attacks and writing in the City of Gold’ by Mike Boyd

I listen to Johannesburg move around me, and I wonder how she is still able to act like nothing is wrong. When that is all I can see. Why she is not angry. I’m tired of being angry.
…

I have started to walk everywhere. I tell myself it is because I want to research my next novel. I’ve had an idea, and it involves walking the streets of the city. It’s got a big concept, but I want it to be written with a low-key, tangible realism. There are angels and monsters. I want the reader to experience Johannesburg from the ground. So, I walk to the shops whenever we need anything. I find myself making excuses to go, despite the winter darkness approaching earlier and earlier. Even better. But it’s not just the unwritten novel that pulls me onto the road. It’s not that I need to be healthier now. It’s not that I want to get my 10 000 steps each day. The real reason is more complicated. I want to hold onto the present. Be present. Slow down time. Slow it down so much that I might somehow return to a time before now, when I used to walk more.

I listen to the city move around me. The ever-present highway hums in the distance, in time to my step and the passing cars and the other walkers. To feel a part of this great madness, I realise, makes me feel smaller. And that’s what I need right now. As I pass under the shadows of the bare trees in the pale winter sun, I am reminded of what one of the main characters from my novel says: “I don’t know what to believe anymore … it all feels so heavy on my mind. The weight.” Although I was able to explain this away with convoluted literary ideas when asked about it at book launches, for the first time I understand it for myself. The weight of thoughts can have a bearing on one’s spirit …

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Karina Author, Book, Interview

Joanne Hichens interviews Cathy Park Kelly about her memoir, Boiling a Frog Slowly

Boiling a frog slowly is a courageous exposé of a romantic relationship that slides into increasingly disdainful and abusive territory, when love indeed goes wrong. In this interview, Joanne Hichens chats with Cathy Park Kelly about her experiences and the writing of her memoir.

Boiling a frog slowly, a memoir of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of an early lover and partner, is searing in its honesty. Your story shows how terribly difficult it can be for a woman to extricate herself from a relationship in which she is treated with violence and contempt. What prompted you to write your account of abuse at the hands of your male partner?

It’s what I do – I use my writing to explore my life and pick out threads that shine with truth for me. What I have learned, and what I am coming to trust, as I write more and share my writing more, is that these threads are universal. They are present in many human stories. When it comes to the story of the abusive relationship, I wanted to do two things: make sense of this experience for my own sake, and also make something out of this chapter in my life that I could share with others.

On the first, personal level, I used my writing to make sense of this chapter and to crack through the disbelief I was left with, to dig beneath the feeling of “What the f*ck?” to get at the truth of what it meant. I was weirdly fascinated, as well as confounded, by what I had gone through, so I used my writing to create some sense of order and understanding.

But, on the more universal level, I was driven to write this for the unknown reader out there. I felt that I had learned much and gained many insights, and this hard-earned knowledge burned inside me. It felt alive, like it wanted to be given a voice …

LitNet

Interview with Cathy Park Kelly, author of Boiling a frog slowly

Karina Author, Book, Review

David Attwell reviews An Island by Karen Jennings for LitNet

Samuel’s final act is a culmination of this violence and, paradoxically, a desperate and self-destructive protest against the triumph of cruelty in the world.

An island is an ethically driven and formally accomplished novel. Those making decisions about texts to prescribe in the undergraduate curriculum might consider it. If Mark Behr’s The smell of apples was a university text of the 1990s, with its emphasis on the uncovering of apartheid-era secrets – a novel that was eminently teachable because it was ethically centred, with clear lines of development – the novel that might play a similar role for the 2020s could well be An island.

LitNet
Karina Author, Book, Interview, Review

Death and the After Parties by Joanne Hichens: an inter-review by Janet van Eeden

Joanne Hichens has been extraordinarily brave in excoriating her soul in a searing and honest memoir about her attempts to survive the unendurable. In Death and the after parties – one of the best titles I’ve heard in a while, by the way – Joanne doesn’t spare herself as she examines the brutal rites of passage which death inflicts on her life.

The first death she endures is the expected decline of her own mother, who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. While this is a difficult and heart-rending experience, she is able to process it fairly well, as the months leading up to her mother’s death are preparation for the inevitable. By the end of this process, Joanne believes she “can do death”.

Fate has other plans for her, however. The mind-numbing shock of her husband’s heart attack and almost instantaneous death destroys the very fabric of her known world. She finds herself reeling with denial, guilt, despair and total devastation as her reality is ripped asunder. Her husband, Robert, a powerful personality and energy who filled up the space in her life as well as his children’s, is gone in a matter of hours. The loss is so enormous that Joanne cannot regain her equilibrium. Unflinchingly, she describes her descent into the deep depression experienced only by the truly heartbroken …

Continue reading: An inter-review for LitNet by Janet van Eeden
Karina Author, Book, Interview

LitNet: Joanne Hichens interviews Karen Jennings about AN ISLAND

“I didn’t set out to write a fable – or, rather, I did not think about it explicitly in those terms – yet I believe that the description is an apt one, to a certain extent. I wanted to explore certain complexities relating to the history of the African continent and how that history continues to influence the lives of individuals to this day. Because that history is such a multifaceted one that is shared, to varying degrees, by numerous African countries, I wanted to reduce the narrative to a small location, with few characters, and by those means amplify the key concerns.

One of those concerns is examining the life of an ordinary individual. There is nothing special about Samuel. He is not heroic, intelligent, skilled or wealthy. He is very much an everyman – an everyman who has experienced aspects of colonisation, of being made to flee his home, of poverty, of the fight for independence, of torture and imprisonment under a dictatorship, and of trying to find his place in all of that chaos and horror. What does a man like Samuel have? How does he feel? What will he do in order to protect his home?“

AN ISLAND by KAREN JENNINGS: AN INTERVIEW
Karina Author, Book, Review

LitNet’s Yolanda Wessels reviews Shadow Flicker by Melissa A. Volker

Shadow Flicker on Muizenberg BeachShadow flicker vertel die storie van Kate Petersen wat leef vir haar werk, veral omdat haar persoonlike lewe ’n gemors is ná ’n lewensveranderende gebeurtenis. Sy vertrek na St Francisbaai in die Oos-Kaap, waar sy die boere moet oorreed om hul grond beskikbaar te stel vir die ontwikkeling van hernubare kragopwekking. Dit is haar keuse om nie haar baas in te lig dat sy terugkeer na die plek waar haar probleme ontstaan het nie – ’n tragedie wat steeds by haar spook en die oorsaak van haar paniekaanvalle is.

Hier ontmoet sy vir Dr Matthew Sykes, die dorp se veearts, wat steeds in rou is oor die ontydige dood van sy omgewingsgoedgesinde vrou. Alhoewel sy geensins beplan het om emosioneel betrokke te raak nie, ontwikkel dié twee spoedig ’n sagte plek vir mekaar. Ongelukkig is die pad nie net met rose besaai nie en behalwe vir die vyandigheid wat in die kusdorp uitbroei, word Kate die slagoffer van inwoners met verskuilde agendas…

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Karina Interview, Uncategorized

Karavan Press: A LitNet interview with founder and publisher, Karina M. Szczurek

What kind of books would you be interested in printing? And why?

Books I can be passionate about, of any genre, any length, but mainly literary fiction and non-fiction. I read extremely widely, and don’t want to box myself or Karavan Press writers and readers in. I want to nurture authors and their creativity, establish strong bonds between Karavan Press writers and readers, and offer a literary home for those who treasure words and stories. Excellence, integrity, and love for the book as an object are the cornerstones of what Karavan Press is about.

Click here to read the entire interview: LitNet