My adopted hometown of Stockholm is in the southern half of Sweden, in the region called Svealand. It’s easy for me to forget just how much more of Sweden there is to the north of me than to the south. You can go up on the map a lot further than I have had the chance to explore.
I was invited to teach this August at a summer school for PhD students on the topic of the Wood Materials Biorefinery, focussing on how enzymes can be used to fractionate wood and add value to its molecular components. The school was organised by the Wallenberg Wood Science Centre (WWSC) and Treesearch. I immediately accepted the invitation when I learned that the school was taking place in Örnsköldsvik, a small picturesque town in Norrland, the northern half of Sweden.
My fellow teachers on the course were colleagues with whom I had been trying to write a collaborative review article for at least a year. We had struggled to get our schedules to match up, and belonging to two different universities in Stockholm and Gothenburg made it hard to meet up for discussions.
So we decided to extend our stay in Övik (as it is affectionately called) and turn it into a writers’ retreat. We would buy a week’s worth of food, hole up in a house somewhere, and just work solidly on the article for a week. We wanted to isolate ourselves from all of the usual work tasks that keep an academic from sitting down and writing productively.
We looked for a house on Airbnb that was within 30 minutes of Övik train station and the site of the summer school – close but not too close to civilisation and our teaching appointments. A peaceful location was our primary goal, and we found a big house in the forest, just five minutes’ walk from a beach! The house we booked was big enough that we could work collaboratively on the big kitchen table, and also retreat to separate working areas when we needed space. It sounded too good to be true. (Spoiler alert – it was exactly as good as it had sounded!)
My week began with a 6 a.m. train from Stockholm to Övik, a 6 hour journey made bearable by a free breakfast, sea views, and short science fiction stories on my Kobo e-reader. On arrival, I met up with my colleagues in central Övik, and we bought groceries for the week. Not the most efficient or well-planned food shop – we bought 4 litres of milk for 3 people for 1 week – but we definitely wouldn’t starve during our stay.
One of the major industries around Övik is pulp and paper production, which is why the WWSC students were in the area. Their week included a visit to a nearby paper mill. In Övik, when the wind is right, one can sometimes smell the sulphurous emissions from the paper plant – but this does nothing to spoil the beauty of the town, which sits just on the water. Övik is part of the Höga kusten (High coast) area of Sweden beloved by tourists, and the town sits on a natural harbour at the beginning of an archipelago that feeds into the Gulf of Bothnia.
Life by the sea is not so novel to me. I grew up in North-East England and have many friends who live in the seaside town of South Shields. But the rest of the Övik landscape did surprise me. As we drove out of town towards the house we’d be staying in, we entered a dense forest that extended really close to the shoreline. Our house was deep in the forest but only a five minute walk down the bank and you were on a sandy beach. Having large trees growing so close to the sea felt odd to me.
When we swam in the sea on our first afternoon I realised that the water was not at all salty, unlike the North Sea that washes in at South Shields. Only hardy grasses can grow on the sand dunes back home, due to the high salt content of the soil and in the air.
Life in the house was quite idyllic. Every day I would eat breakfast on the veranda, then work on my writing solidly for 5-6 hours. With none of the distractions that come from the office, the corridor, and the lab, I was free to be absolutely focussed on the task at hand, and I have never been so productive.
When I wrote my PhD thesis, I would sit and write for 10-12 hours per day, but I was so tired that a lot of what I put on the page was garbage and had to be re-done the next day. The time in Övik was truly productive – I made a lot of good work, and by the end of the week our collaborative review article was almost complete.
After writing for those intense hours, I’d walk down to the beach and sit or lie in the sun. I’d swim on sunny days, or wet my feet on windy days. Then stroll back up the hill for dinner and evening discussions with my colleagues about our progress and our plans for tomorrow.
One whole week with only one thing to do was blissful, and it led to some great writing. It’s unlikely I’ll get to do anything similar for a long time, because of teaching, student supervision, lab work, committee meetings, and conference attendance. But I am planning to organise one-day writing retreats with colleagues for future collaborative articles.
The ability to focus on one important task is a gift to anyone with multiple responsibilities, so grab the chance if you get one.
A Few Words... 