In the summer 1975 when Steve´s parents saw Breschnev and Ford flashing by in Helsinki, I sat in a decaying old summerhouse just outside Helsinki sweating over the manuscript of my debut book. In the same week I also managed to infuriate my employer - a leftwing adult education association - by publishing a critical poem about the Apollo-Souyz adventure - peace in space etcetera. It was a very hot summer and I started every the day taking a dip in the muddy sea, afterwards I´d lie a while on the warm granite rocks listening to their murmuring to me: take your time. Overhead the security helicopters whizzed and snarled: time´s running out. Later in the fall the book was published. It was a co-operation with Birgitta Boucht and our proud motto was: Combine theory, praxis and poetry! Deardear.
Anything I would write about my life would include a lot of history. I can´t refrain from quoting av American labour union leader whom I and a good friend of mine tried to interview about his views on the Vietnam war: Girls, says he with an sardonic grin, I´ve been around for a LONG time! Harry Bridges his name was and he was head of the legendary Longshoremen´s Union, I met him in San Fransisco in January 1971.
FAMILY MATTERS
I was born in Vasa 1940 when the so called winter war still was raging - three days old I was in bombshelter with mom. Vasa was quite heavily bombed that winter. Dad was at the front somewhere in Carelia, where he was stuck most of the war-time. One Christmas he came home and I - three years then I guess - mistook him for Santa. So childhood was marked by war and separations - in 1944 I was sent along with tens of thousand of Finnish kids to Sweden "to safety"(so they claimed). Returning two years later I had trouble recognizing family members, all of them actually, except mom.
The family was big - even bigger than Kath´s - eight kids plus a master-cook grandma, who lived with us after the war. We were called "the family that was a carousel" - which sums up the general picture pretty well. There was an interest in music, theatre, even art and literature, in a spontaneous, wholly unsystematic way, thank God. Vasa then had two theatres, one Swedish (we lived opposite it!) and one Finnish. And seven cinemas, the latter beeing our great past-time.
The environment was completely bilingual - also my family - Gran spoke mostly Finnish with us. And then there were my parents´ Russian friends who would throw out occasional Russian words. I clearly remember how we kids on the block every day discussed, whether we would play in Finnish or Swedish - can´t remember any fights over the language issue. But the Nyström children went to Swedish schools, that was dad´s order.
I was an avid reader from the start, to my mother´s despair quite clearly. To find peace and quiet for reading I invented a number of vanishing strategies - climbing up trees, hiding in closets or reading under the blanket with a torch-light! In my early teens I started helping out at the City Library of Vasa after school - when I had put the books back on their shelves I could sit and read undisturbed - bliss. There I came across Emily Brontë´s Wuthering Heights ( a translation) and couldn´t stop reading. That was my first encounter with Yorkshire. I´ve kept returning to that magnificently multilayered book through the years.
STUDIES
In 1958 I left Vasa for studies at the university in Helsinki (the first in my family to go to a university): Nordic languages, Scandinavian literature and English philology (which included literature). I had great luck with my English teachers, they were really great lecturers, especially in comparison with a lot of the older Finnish professors, who seemed to think it was enough to read straight from papers and call it a lecture. In today´s perspective it´s next to unbelievable how non-communicative they were. There were of course exceptions, I hurry to add.
I also worked in the Nordic department as a professors assistant in the other half of the sixties, when student radicalism also hit the Finnish academic landscape and I became involved.
My main subject was Scand.lit. and I spent a couple of years studying in Copenhagen working on my master´s thesis. Later on I continued looking into the relation literature-politics in Danish literature of the thirties - antifascist cultural fronts and stuff like that. This work I have never - for various reasons - completed, but it was a starting point for a lot of radio programs on Danish lit. and culture for the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation: interviews, translations and readings of texts and so on.
Currently, I´m working on a book containing rambles in Copenhagen, combining city history with personal memories and literary allusions. Included are portraits of Danish writers, both historical and contemporary, sort of personal encounters. Needless to add maybe, but Denmark and especially Copenhagen has been kind of a second homeland to me.
WORK
In the early seventies while living in Helsinki I worked fulltime for the Swedo-Finnish radio - cultural & literary news and reviews - a very exciting period also in the history of Finnish radio. For a short period I also worked in Sweden at NFA (Nordic Folk Academy) near Gothenburg, planning seminars and courses with lecturers and teachers from all the Nordic countries, a quite educational time with possibility to meet all sorts of people from various fields, mostly cultural. I declined a continued job there and returned to Finland where I took up position as head of a small Swedish adult education association allied with the political left. I worked there for four years, brimful of exciting experiences and nerve-racking conflicts. The latter had to do political divide between "revisionist" and "Stalinist" left. We (meaning my colleague Birgitta Boucht and me)had a vision to reconcile the split by making people look at the history of the far left in Finland, documenting it from a grassroots level point of view. It turned out to be a "mission impossible" and after four years both of us quit and threw ourselves into the uncertain life of writing and freelancing. To our great surprise we both survived.
PERSONAL
I 1975 I met my husband Erik Ågren, a writer from working class background, he had then written a number of plays both for radio, TV and the scene plus a novel about his experiences in the war. In 1977 our son Dag was born. He is now about to finish his degree in physics, math and computer science at Åbo Akademi, where he works. He thus abandoned his childhood idea to become a writer "like mom and dad" - luckily for him most likely!
We lived together in Helsinki for five years and in 1981 we moved to Ostrobothnia, where we both had our roots, and set up home in Korsnäs, a small community 50 km south of Vasa where we still live. Years have rolled by with writing, teaching, building house and garden, growing vegetables and participating in local activities in manifold ways. In 1984 we started a small scale publishing project, which up to now has seen about thirty books finding their way to readers and libraries. Our books include local stories but also poetry and children´s books and we have looked upon this activity as a kind of educational process both for ourselves and for the writers we have published. Vasa - my actual home town - still beckons me and I might move there in some years time.
I´m very much looking forward to this co-operation as a way closing one of the circles of my life: the discovery of Yorkshire and what followed from that. Years of trying to persuade the Arts Council of O. that it was a good idea to start some kind of cultural exchange between Y and O and that Ralf was the right person to make that come true!
