Words are weapons of mass construction, building worlds, expanding horizons, simmering ideas until they boil over.
“When words are considered taboo, then the experiences they communicate are also hidden away, but they are not eradicated. They are still there, only language is not allowed to acknowledge them,” says Alex Vella Gera the award-winning author of Antipodi, Is-Sriep Reġgħu Saru Velenużi and Trojan.
It’s hard to time the exact moment when an author is born. Vella Gera’s journey towards literary expression may have started well before he noticed the spark – but good writing might have been the catalyst to his writing development.
“I was a good writer at school, but that is not literature. I suppose it was when I discovered certain writers like Kafka, Joyce and Borges that I understood that writing was about being. I was 17 and at that tender age ‘being’ was not something I could really comprehend. I had very little experience of life. So first came the action of writing. But that is not literature.”
This is where Vella Gera believes his passion took flight. But his relationship with producing literature itself began with his discovery of the Maltese language in the mid-1990s, while living in Prague.
“I know, it's strange to discover your own language abroad, but that's a whole other story.
“With my new connection to Maltese, I slowly began to unlearn all my writing chops, and attempted to start from scratch. That's when I suppose I was truly born as a writer, author, call it what you will. But birth takes a long time.
“Between that epiphany and my first book being published – self-published I might add – another 13 years passed by, in which I lived, and lived, and wrote a little. But the main business of writing is living. So all that happened, and slowly my ideas grew and took shape.”
The personal journey of a writer is unique, and every piece of writing is relevant to a certain time in a writer’s life. But an author’s connection to their previous works may not be as relevant to their creators as we might think. Is-Sriep Reġgħu Saru Velenużi (Merlin Publishers) and Trojan (Klabb Kotba Maltin) won Vella Gera the National Book Prize, and although their relevance at the time of writing must have been valuable to the writer, his attachment to the stories now, eight and five years later respectively, is not as intense.
“Is-Sriep Reġgħu Saru Velenużi and Trojan form part of my past, and I have very little attachment to them now. Neither of them is my favourite, and when I am asked about them, in an interview for instance that attempts to get into the nitty gritty of plot and character, or currently with Sriep since it is being made into a film, I struggle to connect and engage with them. They are written, they are gone. Perhaps because writing is also a form of catharsis.”
Until recently I had been on a long hiatus from writing. I’m now getting the feeling that I’m back on track…
Clearing out past writing from our active memory may be a pure way of keeping content fresh – a notion where living in the now overrides the need for comparison, over critical judgement and fear of expression. It also locks writers in to their current writing.
“The work I'm most connected to right now is the one I'm writing, and it is the only one that exists for me.”
The writing process requires discipline for some and flexibility for others; there’s no perfect recipe, but Vella Gera focuses on a practice that gets him to actually produce.
“Then comes the discipline of sitting down, physically sitting yourself down, and writing. Otherwise, it remains in your head, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we wouldn't be having this interview then if I had not sat down and disciplined myself.
“I don't have routines or processes as such, except that generally, if I wake up before dawn, around 5am, I'm at my most alert and disciplined. So I get more writing done at that time. But there are no rules. I could come up with the best paragraph I have ever come up with at 6pm while eating dinner, or at 3am after waking up in a cold sweat from a weird dream.”
Like most, Vella Gera has been working from home for the past weeks. His self-isolation has allowed him more time to focus on his craft; using the otherwise lost moments in the day to feed his literary soul with Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail. He’s also been able to break his writing hiatus.
“Until recently I had been on a long hiatus from writing. By long I mean years. Distractions, personal crises, life, had set me back, and writing and reading were not very important to me for quite a long period.” But this period of reflection and self-isolation has allowed Vella Gera to reconnect, granting his readers hope for new additions to their home collection in years to come.
“I’m now getting the feeling that I’m back on track, and the current confinement has had a lot to do with this ‘reawakening’.
Whether this will last I have to wait and see. Hopefully it will. I have, at least, two novels I want to get done before I shut my eyes forever, and no better time like the present to get the ball rolling.”
Vella Gera’s creativity is not limited to penmanship; while he does believe that writing is his strongest creative outlet, his oeuvre does spill into the art realms of poetry, photography and film.
“I would be seriously deluded if I placed all those expressions on an equal footing in my life. I am far more adept at writing than any other discipline. But they are all part of the same river flowing out of me.”
This interview is the first of a series of interviews with local authors, supported by the National Book Council.