‘We hadn’t been in Brighton long before I was called Sean.’ That’s from Arrival!, which kicked-off Eivind’s Brighton Argus blog, Walk A Pavement Once Again. It’s about his – and partner, Suzi’s – year in the city. Lots of nostalgia, but with a poignant edge: through choice they can’t go back.
The blog was a by-product of Walk A Pavement Once, his Guardian/Bebo competition-winning nanotale. Also set in Brighton, WAPO, which introduced readers to Jack Trysil, was published in Nano2ales by Franc Roddam.
Jack also walked a pavement once, but in Paris, and much earlier. In 1999 Eivind began The Man Who Would Do Nothing Twice, about a UK school teacher who escapes from the world of repetition, and by doing so not only revolutionises his own life but that of millions of others. Originally a novella, the literary establishment declared that The Man… needed to be longer. Completed recently, ‘extended’ Man… was short-listed for the Unbound Press Best Novel Award (2011) – which augurs well for the book’s future.
Jack Trysil’s adventures made Eivind laugh – which he’d wanted them to do. They also led to a discovery: writing comedy was, in all ways bar one, a tougher task than writing tragedy.
‘She is emerging from the house carrying an atlas’ is the opening sentence of To the Precipice, the first chapter of his earlier, beautiful, but at times harrowing novel. In the mid-1990s, part of To the Precipice appeared in Glasgow’s West Coast Magazine below a ‘work in progress’ banner. The completed novel has been described as ‘a true journey into the imagination’ but ‘too difficult for British publishers.’ Then, in 2011, Eivind began transforming it into a novella – into something that, while retaining the novel’s originality and poetry, is ‘tighter’ and less difficult. This process was briefly but fortuitously halted in the summer, when he edited and re-crafted unpublished material from later in the book. The resulting 3,000 words were entered in the Spilling Ink Fiction competition under the title of the novel from which they came, Cries from the Marianas Trench.
Cries… won third prize – and with it something amazing and hopeful has come to pass. It has taken years, but now elements from the novel’s opening, middle and end have been recognised and are in the public domain. Maybe this will entice a courageous publisher to go that extra mile and put a slimmed-down Cries into the nation’s book stores.
Back in 1989, when typing the sentence about Evelyn emerging from the house, Eivind was teaching in a Scottish secondary school. He departed the classroom for good in 1994. Since then, when not visiting the likes of Perth, Cheltenham, and Goodwood racecourses – and Paris, which he loves and Seville where The Man Who Would Do Nothing Twice ends – he devotes a great deal of time to writing.
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He wants to produce more comedy, but for now is focussing on the tragic. It’s easier, after all. But emotionally? – well, that’s an entirely different ball game. Novella Cries will involve him plumbing the Marianas Trench again, descending in his literary bathyscaphe, his very own ‘Trieste’. But Eivind’s the kind of guy who likes lots of fresh air. So thank goodness he can temporarily re-surface. Thank goodness he has something else, another work-in-progress: writing more posts for Walk A Pavement Once Again and re-living a glorious year he and Suzi spent in that dazzling jewel on the Sussex coast – and thinking about the Big Issue guy at the railway station who always called him ‘Sean’.
