FRENCH LETTER: All I Know… Thoughts on travel, book tours and school visits

Three whirlwind weeks of travel bring a feast of books, school visits, South African flavours, spectacular sights and unexpected delights. From inspiring young readers to celebrating new literary and film milestones, it’s a joyful journey through the tastes, sounds and memories of home.

Oh, how I admire and envy those writers who have the discipline to keep writing, no matter where they are or what happens to them. Come rain or sunshine, travel or turbulence, they cling to their daily habit of producing a few paragraphs or a few hundred words.

They used to make me feel terribly guilty and inadequate because I can’t write while I travel. And I travel a lot. Think of all those wasted days of writing! That’s what I used to think. Now I’m old enough, fortunately, not to be bothered by unnecessary feelings of guilt and inadequacy. I know that when I travel I become a sponge, soaking up everything – people, places, conversations, feelings. And when I get back home – or at least to a place where I can spend a month sleeping in the same bed each night – I wring out that sponge. All those experiences on the road, on the move, become the stuff from which I form my stories.

Well, that’s my excuse, anyway, for being all quiet on the Substack front. Although I also started writing on Substack to force some discipline into my sometimes too lazy writing life – which is why I’m creating this post in a guesthouse in the northern suburbs of Cape Town after three weeks of constant travel during a book tour. The tour is not over, but it is time to start wringing out that sponge, even if only to wave to my subscribers – please note I’m waving not drowning – and to thank you for sticking with me.

This book tour is more gruelling than usual, because I’m wearing two hats, balancing on two chairs, sometimes feeling like an acrobat juggling more balls than I can handle. I have to talk to adult readers about my adult book, My jaar van vrees en vryheid (available in English as My Year of Fear and Freedom), shortlisted for two Afrikaans literary awards in the non-fiction category – but I also have to talk to teenagers in schools about not one but two YA novels. Al wat ek weet (available in English as All I Know and in French as Tout ce que je sais) was published 10 years ago but has now been reprinted because a movie based on the book will hit the big screens at the end of October. And Twee halwes maak ’n hele, not yet translated or turned into a movie (please note the hopeful yet I can’t resist adding), is published this month as the winner of Tafelberg’s Youth Book Prize.

And let me tell you, talking to adult readers is a leisurely picnic compared to talking to huge groups of school kids. Talking to adults is basically preaching to the converted. They come to listen to me eagerly, they’re even willing to pay to listen to me, because they already know my books. Whereas talking to school kids is a missionary task. Some of them know and love my books, but many of them never read any book, never mind my books.