The theme was
INSIDE / OUTSIDE?

The writer is positioned outside the community he or she describes, by force or choice. At a distance, you get a clearer perception of what's going on, and the writer may be regarded as someone standing outside the lighted window looking in, driven by the desire to penetrate into the hidden and private. At the same time, the writer lives within his or her characters, and is thus in the deepest sense positioned inside.

More than ever, we live in a time in which everything may be weighed, measured and assigned a specific value. At an early age, we learn to place ourselves on a scale of social esteem based on age, gender, looks, ethnicity, class, money, intelligence, health, language, etcetera. We may also consider our position relative to these factors according to belonging: inside / outside.

"Standing on the outside looking in". The sharpened perception of the mechanisms of exclusion is found outside the lodgings of power, in the periphery. In order to formulate an outsider perspective one has to try to see through the offical truth, the authorized version of what is going on in a society and what is worth observing and writing about. Writing is also dependent on resources and channels, and not least on what one is allowed to express, on freedom of speech.

Whereas the entertainment industry favors the perspective of the privileged and allows the rest of us to peek into the boudoirs, serious fiction has taken upon itself the task of describing people in crisis. There is an ambition to give voice to the exposed, but also a demand: drama sells, but at the risk of tragedy being made into entertainment. Misery depicted from the outside in its own way tends to create the same kind of alienation as the glossy serial installments of televised fiction.

We are outside the others' experience, and moreover, we are also outside our own experience, in the sense that for the main part, we move inside an imaginary universe. ”Reality is formed only at the present moment, by means of language” (Marcel Proust), and the aim of literature might be to create a place into which we are drawn in order to be subjected to the essential; where it really is a matter of us, not of them.