Thursday in Residence with Toine Heijmans
Nature’s rules

Every first Thursday of each month, from 6.30 to 7.30 pm, a writer in residence opens a window on his or her work, universe and motives, in a free form of intervention. An hour of carte blanche to share, followed by a drink.

The great wide open of the oceans is as generous for a writer as the vast and uncompromising wilderness of the high mountains. These are places where man becomes so small, and so dependent on nature and his own choices, now and in the past, that it allows the novelist to get to the core of his protagonists. A former mountaineer and avid sailor, the Dutch writer Toine Heijmans sends his characters away in a boat in Op zee [At sea], to the Alps and the Himalayas in Zuurstofschuld [Oxygen Debt] or into the floodplains of a river, the scene of the book he currently works on at the Fondation Jan Michalski. The question is: can freedom be found in the wild, or are nature’s rules more demanding than those of the society that sailors, mountaineers and vagabonds try to escape?