Letter from January

Dear friend,

The first month of this new year has passed on a pretty cool wave. I felt recharged after four month pause from social media and returned to Instagram and X accounts. I even recorded a few video reels to invite you inside the Sea Library and meet Nemo, my beautiful dog.

On the last day of January I signed an agreement and can reveal now that my agent is Allison Remcheck Pernetti from Stimola Literary Studio in USA. It’s a dream-come-true agency, representing many New York Times-bestselling and award-winning authors and illustrators, including Suzanne Collins, author of the famous dystopian book series “The Hunger Games” and my partner-in-crim..writing – Lewis Buzbee from San Francisco. But most importantly it does feel like home for fragile and gentle flower-like creations called manuscripts. There are adventures in life that resemble sea voyages. This is one of them.

Our little fictional book (that I’ve written together with Lewis) featuring the real Sea Library has started it’s journey to find a publisher. But meanwhile my agent has inspired me to return to my unfinished memoir of how the sea changed my life, the first draft of which has been sitting in my drawer for three years. Yesterday I took it out, blew the cobwebs away and started reading with a pencil ready. I will freshen it up and show it to Allison. Somehow I think these years were necessary. Some things have changed, but many haven’t. The Sea Library is still here and is a part of who I am. And I want to tell my story now more than ever.

Another wondrous creative moment happened last week when a blue community of editors and writers from different parts of the world, united by their love for the sea and water, met on a Zoom call to introduce themselves and share ideas. I was already very happy when I was invited to take part in this upcoming book about the blue humanities, but that evening was miraculous. It felt like sitting in the middle of the Sea Library, like I often love to do, and looking around at the books and their titles, only now the books had faces and they talked to each other, told stories about the many aspects of the sea… its depths, its currents, its dance and stillness. I can’t reveal much more for now, but I wanted to tell you how magical it was. Dreams do come true and in the most peculiar ways.

In January the weather was weird, it snowed, and rained, everything froze and melted. Nature was breathing in and out. Someone was playing with the on and off switch. For a few days our backyard was flooded as the snow had melted but the ground was still too cold to suck it all up. And when the giant puddles froze again, we all had to walk on our four. This morning was warm again and the riverside meadow is an underwater world. Fun to explore, more and more. The river, the sea, the forest. With my boys and with Nemo.

PS For a few months now we’ve been on a path of dog training. Being a wild and untamed soul, something of an animal myself, I have so many thoughts about it all, that I’m holding on to Nemo and trying to listen to him more than to others. Maybe we will change the path. If I would have done the things the right way from the start, there wouldn’t be such a magical faraway place as the Sea Library. I’m thinking and listening with a heart-shaped compass in my hands. I trust my gut. You’ll just have to wait for my next letter, my very dear friend.