RADICALLY SLOW A CONVERSATION WITH BETTE A. ON HER NEWEST COLLABORATION WITH BRIAN ENO INTERVIEW BY KRYSTI JOMÉI & JONNY DESTEFANO Slow Stories by Dutch author Bette A. is a collection of short stories that mutated across two decades. Written, rewritten, and pared back over time, the stories shed plot and excess, becoming shorter, stranger and more distilled. Two of them expanded beyond the book into Slow Stories: A Collaboration of Storytelling, Music, and Art, Bette's latest multimedia cocreation with artist and musician Brian Eno. Each limited edition bundle serves as both a portable gallery and music box. With a hardcover book, a vinyl recording of two stories — The Endless House and The Other Village narrated by Bette and scored by Brian — and a one-of-akind signed painting created by both artists, there’s a total of 444 available. Proceeds go to the Heroine! Movement, a global storytelling collective centering around women role models, co-founded by Bette, and Earth/ Percent, a charity channeling funds from the music industry to organizations that do the most impactful work around the climate emergency, co-founded by Brian. We connected with Bette who was in Amsterdam, bringing our worlds together with a conversation that moved at its own pace, unfolding with the same openness and attention of the project itself. Birdy: You and Brian put out the book, What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, last year. And now, Slow Stories, a multi-faceted creation that’s so symbiotic and organic-feeling. How did this project come about? Bette A: We have a very similar approach to making art, which is not very goal-oriented, it's very process-oriented, we’re very much in the moment, and just having fun and not really thinking where it's heading. We were working on What Art Does, which is about the theory of making art, and I said, “My publisher would like me to record some stories to music.” And a minute later, we were in the studio. I never thought we would use my voice because I have a Dutch accent. He said, “Just try it. Record it.” And he kept saying, “Go slower, read slower.” At some point I was reading at an incredibly slow pace, just half a minute between sentences. The first sentence in the first story is: “A girl was born in a village in a desert.” And Brian wanted me to read: “A … … … girl … … … was … … … born … … … ” Birdy: Wow. Bette A: So that was very new for me. We put his music to it and started experimenting with different tracks and audio. And I realized it’s really doing something to the story. Where normally you’re so plot-oriented when you’re reading, you want to know what is the next thing, where is it going? But if you linger on, “A girl was born …” and then you get one minute of Brian’s beautiful music to kind of rest your brain on that, the sentence just unfolds like a flower. You get all these associations, visual imagery. So we immediately thought, Oh, this feels right. This is what we want to do. Birdy: I love that. Creating anything meaningful should be like play, but it’s also beautiful that you challenged yourself with recording your voice being a writer for decades. I can only imagine how different of a process that must have been. Bette A: Absolutely. It’s the realization you can rely on the listener or the reader very much to ignite their own imagination. I've never liked adjectives and elaborate descriptions. I just like to say, “There was a forest.” What I’ve learned from this process is that when you give your listener a lot of time, they will generate an entire forest in their minds and it’s enjoyable. And Brian’s music really helps with that. Poets are very comfortable leaving a lot of white space on the page. And we fiction writers always want to get to the thing that’s happening. So it gave me a lot of confidence in giving the sentences an enormous amount of space and working with Brian helped me a lot too because he is very minimalist. We also made paintings together and he’ll paint a couple of lines and say, “Oh, this is great,” and I think, It's just the beginning. But it’s because I have this preconceived notion that everything has to be elaborate and take a certain amount of time. Well actually, sometimes simple is a great place to sort of hang the hat of your attention on and then let your imagination do the work. So that’s what I learned from Brian, to pair down a bit, keep it minimal and trust more in the listener or the reader that they want to do some work as well. Birdy: We feel the same way. We don’t want to insult the intelligence of our readers. We are intentionally image-driven and often ambiguous as we assume that people are willing to dive in and make their own interpretations. It is a balance though, because you want it to be great, but you’ve got to let go and just trust that what you're doing is going to be understood. Bette A: It comes sometimes from insecurity to want to do more work and elaborate more 19 PHOTO COURTESY OF BETTE A.
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