In Exile: Erica Johnson Debeljak / The Stationary Exile

In Exile is a collection of literary essays written by three selected writers who have specific life expiriences of living and working outside of their countries of origin. They are challenging stereotypical borders of language and cultures often bringing out to the daylight humourous, ironic or serious and sad situations of an individual with fluid "roots". In Exile is produced and e-published by Institute of art production KITCH.    
 

"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life – and herein lies the secret – takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch away." -- Milan Kundera

In Slovenia, the country where I have lived for the last ten years, every border seems to be only a fraction of an inch away. The villages and fields and barns, the houses and stone chimneys and narrow footpaths that occupy these fractions of inches, in Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe and the world, often strike outsiders as negligible and unimportant. They almost never possess the mighty eminence or cultural distinction of capital cities that are usually more centrally located.

DOWNLOAD COMPLETE ESSAY "THE STATIONARY EXILE" (PDF)

 

Erica Johnson Debeljak is an American writer and translator who has lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia for the last fifteen years. She had two books of non-fiction published in Slovenia, Foreigner in the House of Natives and Srečko Kosovel: The Poet and I. Her fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in Wasafiri, Common Knowledge, Bryant Review, The Literary Review and Eurozine, and is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. Her most recent book of translation is Barren Harvest: The Selected Poems of Dane Zajc, published by White Pine Press. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of New Orleans.