A Place Where I Liked to Stay

The first text I wrote, when I was twelve or thirteen, was the lyrics to a song. I wrote some poems and small stories. And I felt that when I wrote for myself and by myself, not for school, it was very private. I had found a place where I liked to stay.

Tell me about that place.

It’s a secure place. And it’s still the place I found at the age of twelve by myself. I’m sixty-two now, and that place—it isn’t me, but it’s in me somehow. It’s different from me as a person. I normally say that I’m Jon the person. And then there’s an official image of me. That’s Jon Fosse. But the writer, he has no name.

That place is for listening and for movement, and it’s a very safe place to stay. But it can also be scary, because it’s the route for me to enter the unknown. I have to go to the borders of my mind, and I have to cross these borders. And to cross these borders is frightening if you’re feeling very fragile. I was like that for some years. I simply didn’t dare to write my own things because I was afraid of crossing these borders in myself. When I’m writing well, I have this very clear and distinct feeling that what I’m writing on is already written. It’s somewhere out there. I just have to write it down before it disappears. *