Author Keenan Walsh gets a fresh perspective while writing novel

When a project stalls, sometimes the best thing to do look at it from a different perspective.

Author Keenan Walsh, a graduate of the Iowa MFA fiction program, did just that when he found himself “struggling with” his novel manuscript. He left the United States to participate in the Sozopol Seminars, an annual gathering of English and Bulgarian writers from around the world.

“I’m very interested in translation and cross-cultural dialogue,” Walsh said in a recent interview. “That aspect of it — to not just collaborate and think through things with Bulgarian writers but also with English-speaking writers from all over the world, really appealed to me. I’m very interested in those types of conversations.”

The Sozopol Seminars, which are sponsored by the Еlizabeth Kostova Foundation, select just five English-speaking writers and five Bulgarian-speaking writers to attend the program each summer. Walsh was among them.

“I just feel really grateful,” he said.

Fellows participate in workshops, attend literature panels, and take part in a series of conversations about the nature of creativity, translation, and the writing process. They also give a reading — but not of their own work.

“We sent (conference organizers) a 1,000-word excerpt of our own work and then they translated it so the English-speaking writers were in Bulgarian and vice versa.”

At the reading, one of the Bulgarian writers read Walsh’s work in Bulgarian while simultaneously a translator read the original English version over an ear piece. Walsh then read the Bulgarian writer’s work in English while the Bulgarian translation was broadcast.

“It’s a strange type of joy to hear your own work and not be able to understand it. And also to watch people react without knowing exactly what they’re reacting to,” he said.

“It’s things like that over and over and over again at this conference. Because it’s really a multilingual conference. You’re just kind of constantly, in a really tactile ways, dealing with translation and difference and all these types of things,” Walsh said.

“It’s just really cool,” he said.

Walsh took a few classes on translation while studying in the MFA program at Iowa, and he also did some work with the international writing program, including collaborating with author Hajar Bali to translate a piece of her writing from French.

“(Translation) has opened up my reading life and has been one of the best things for my writing life. Thinking about language at that level of detail is endlessly fascinating to me,” Walsh said.

In Sozopol, Walsh had an opportunity to learn from some of the world’s top writers and translators, including Bulgarian author Georgi Gozpodinov, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, and his translator, Angela Rodel.

“These questions of interpretation and translation and fidelity and loss and all these things came up over and over again,” Walsh said. Some authors discussed feeling a sense of loss when their work is translated, while others found the process to be exciting.

“Just talking through those things: What is the experience of being translated? Is translation a loss? Is it a gain? What is translation?” he said.

“The (conference) theme was loss and grief, so these questions of translation fit kind of neatly.”

The core of the Sozopol Seminars is the workshop experience, where writers have a chance to read and comment on each other’s manuscripts while also receiving guidance from a workshop teacher.

When he was a student at Iowa, Walsh participated in a number of workshops run by fiction writers. But in Sozopol, things were different: his workshop teacher, Debra Gwartney, was a non-fiction writer.

Working with Gwartney was “exactly what I needed right now,” Walsh said.

“Because the novel I’m working on is first-person, past tense, a lot of the things I’m dealing with are things that non-fiction writers deal with. Sometimes when I get nervous or when I’m struggling with my writing, I backslide into thinking about plot. It was really helpful to have an essayist be my workshop leader and reinforce for me that, ultimately, what’s important in a first-person retrospective story is the consciousness telling the story and not so much exactly what happens.”

“It was just very, very helpful in this moment to have someone give me permission to — I don’t want to say disregard plot, but to lean into the narrating consciousness in conflict with itself and have that be the drama of the novel.”

After three packed days of Sozopol, fellows traveled to Sofia for a literary festival which featured panels on fantasy fiction, loss and memory.

The transition from the intimate atmosphere of Sozopol to the Bulgarian capital was “kind of nice,” Walsh said.

In Sozopol, “everybody was in this very small place together and we’re all doing everything together. And then Sofia we basically had days to see the city and then in the evenings we’d come back together with the people I’d been working with in Sozopol but also other people I don’t know and don’t recognize,” he said.

“It was a cool experience of kind of opening out into the world. It was a nice buffer between Sozopol and coming back to New York,” Walsh said.

Now settled back into his everyday life in the States, Walsh has a new perspective on his novel manuscript — and a renewed sense of self.

“I don’t know that it was life-changing, but it was life-generating. I feel like I’ve arrived home with a little more life than before.”