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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 9 AUGUST 2020 4 THIS WEEK BOOKS Author and performer Loranne Vella, whose debut short story collection Mill-bieb 'il ġewwa was just shortlisted for the National Book Prize, speaks to TEODOR RELJIC about the varied inf luences that inform her work Like a punch in the stomach First of all, congratulations for being shortlisted for the National Book Prize. You're no stranger to the Prize, of course, but how does it feel for this book in particular to be receiving this kind of attention? Thank you. I'm very happy, of course. mill-bieb 'il ġewwa is my first collection of short stories, so yes, it's the first time that I find myself in the short story cat- egory of the National Book Prize. It has always been important for me as a writ- er to not get stuck in any one category, or genre. I wrote these short stories just a few months after handing the manu- script of my novel Rokit to my publish- er at Merlin. Having spent almost five years in the company of [lead charac- ters] Petrel, Benjamin and Veronica, I desperately needed to experiment with a style and methodology that would be the opposite of Rokit. This experiment resulted in a collection of very short sto- ries – some are barely three pages long – with just one quick but penetrating glimpse at each character, a technique comparable to that of a camera zoom- ing in and out of different apartments in the same building. I wrote most of the stories during the summer of 2016. Short story collections are fractal, multifaceted beasts by nature. But is there a unifying factor behind mill-bieb 'il ġewwa? If so how did you first pin it down, and how is its influence felt throughout the stories? Short stories can read like a punch in the stomach. These are the kind of short stories that I enjoy reading, and con- sequently the ones I wanted to write. I thought of writing a series of stories which I could treat as different sides on a multifaceted object, a many-head- ed monster, if you like. Before I actu- ally wrote any of them, I was thinking of myself, the writer, as this inquisitive, voyeuristic eye looking from the out- side at characters alone in their homes. I knew this was going to be the unify- ing factor – each story as an apartment, with the building as the collection. I al- so knew that there might be one empty apartment, in which case I would focus on an object instead, and I would treat it in the same way as I would a human character. This does not mean that the characters in mill-bieb 'il ġewwa nec- essarily live in the same block of flats. Whether they do or not is irrelevant. This building is the image I had in mind a priori, the one which served as a trig- ger for the whole project, and which I carried with me throughout the writing process almost till the very end. The collection is also tied to a theatrical performance. Were the stories the main prompt, or was it the other way around? How would you say they inform each other? The stories came first. I was ready to submit mill-bieb 'il ġewwa for publi- cation in 2017. The only problem was that I couldn't find a publisher. It seems readers prefer novels to short story collections. This was problematic for me because I knew that the characters would end up haunting me until they found an audience. I can't seem to be able to move on to the next project until I complete the previous one. And com- pletion for me means making my work public. So while I waited for a publish- er to show interest in this collection, in 2017 I got busy creating a performance art collective in Brussels – Barumbara Collective. As you know, I dedicate half my creative time and energy to litera- ture, the other half to performance. However, I hadn't been involved in the- atre work for a while. Now I can truly say that the disappointment I felt when I received my first ever rejection letter from my publisher gradually, or perhaps very quickly, evolved into this creative urge to (re)approach theatre but this time round through my literary work. So the second large-scale project by Barumbara Collective became this in- terdisciplinary performance art event titled Verbi: mill-bieb 'il ġewwa, which took place in December 2018. This per- formance was a collaboration of eight Maltese and other European artists from different artistic spheres – drama, dance, installation art, photography, film, light design, music and sound de- sign, literature – and it was manifested in a contemporary art space, Valletta Contemporary. As the title shows, it was inspired by some of the stories in this collection where each story focuses on an individual character in the act of performing mundane activities such as drinking a cup of coffee, taking a show- er, combing one's hair. These seem- ingly habitual and quotidian actions (which I refer to as 'everyday verbs'), in reality reveal more profound char- acteristics when examined closely, such as remembering specific moments in one's past every time one such action is performed, the different ways in which we struggle to hide our fears and weak- nesses, the actions we take to shape our future. At the centre of each story is the idea that our actions hide and yet reveal who Loranne Vella and fellow performers launching 'mill bieb il-gewwa' with a reading and performance in November "The abolition of censorship just a few years ago obviously also plays a huge role in the freedom which Maltese authors now exercise in their creative work"