anne enright

	Walberberg 2007: You cannot be serious!

I just go where I am invited, really, especially if the invitation comes from Glenn Patterson. I’d go to Portadown for Glenn Patterson, and that is saying something. But the days before I go are spent organising childcare and finishing something overdue, so I never really know where I am going until I am on the plane. This time, the ticket said ‘Berlin’. There were a few things I needed to buy, toothpaste and the like, and I thought, ‘That’s all right, I’ll get them in Berlin’.

The taxi driver drove me twenty, thirty kilometers through trees. These were very European trees and they frightened me a little. There were so many of them. The taxi man couldn’t find the conference centre. He wanted to leave me on the side of the road near a likely-looking deserted house. But I said no.

After we arrived I went looking for a toothpaste shop. Then I came back with my dirty teeth, and I started to speak. Because I may not quite know where I am but I always know what my job is, which is to say whatever I can muster - whatever seems most true at the time - to whoever is there looking at me, at the time. Sometimes it occurs to me that my job might be to listen as well, but these seems more advanced, somehow: I haven’t reached that level, yet.

So I speak, and speak, through sessions and through food and through drink (lots of drink), and the only thing I have to say, really is that I am between books. I have no book in my head. And for a writer, to be without a book, is to be bereft.

I walk in the bright snow and see fox tracks to bring back to my children, also stories of wolves, and the fact that the road beyond here leads all the way to Poland. I think about Russian woods, and Swedish woods, these endless, slender northern trees that conjure tanks or wild strawberries, depending on the light.

Then back in to Glenn, Patricia Dunker, Patrick Neate. As always, prose writers for fellowship and the poets for sustenance: Jamie McKendrick and Wendy Cope. And just in case anyone thinks I am falling down on the job, I eat some more amazingly fattening German stuff, and drink some more Riesling, and speak.