Charlie Porters Nova Scotia House is ons Boek van de Maand april. Porter koos vijf van onze vragen om te beantwoorden. Lees over Athenaeum en Amsterdam, Nova Scotia House en Dash Shaw. 

What do you like best about Athenaeum Bookstore?  

Athenaeum Bookstore has got the alchemy that I love in a bookshop. Intelligence, personality, seriousness, humour, warmth, encouragement, enabling the reader to read. From 2008-2012, I was lucky enough to spend many weeks in Amsterdam when I was deputy editor of Fantastic Man magazine. The Athenaeum Bookstore would be like an anchor to my wanderings in the city – it’s one of my favourite bookshops in the world. 

Could you pinpoint the moment you decided to start writing this book? 

I was walking our dog in April 2020, in east London. I saw the construction of a new building, right next to a social housing estate from the 1960s. I started to think about who could be living in the flats that looked like they would be overshadowed. In the early 1980s, many queer people in London were forced out of squats and offered flats in what were then seen as undesirable social housing blocks. This gave me the characters, and I soon made a name for my imagined block of flats: Nova Scotia House. Then I realized: this was my chance to explore the effects of HIV/AIDS, and to try to reconnect with queer experimental ways of living from the 1970s that have been jeopardized by AIDS crisis. 

What did you enjoy most while working on this book? 

I love writing. For me, to be able to write is a pleasure. I write fiction in longhand, in capital letters. My handwriting is terrible, so I have to write in capitals to be able to read it afterwards. When I write in capitals, it takes a moment longer to get the word on the page, which gives me the chance to breathe, and my brain the chance to think of the next word, or words, or idea, or unexpected turn in a sentence. Writing is a physical act, and it is a physical act that I deeply enjoy.

What books are on your night stand? 

I’m coming to the end of Dash Shaw’s extraordinary Blurry – the characters are starting to swirl, the narratives are coalescing, it’s incredible to witness his audacity. 

What is your favourite spot in Amsterdam?  

My favourite spot is all about sentiment. In February 1992, when I was 18, I went interrailing on my own. Amsterdam was my first stop, I stayed at the YMCA on Vondelpark. One evening, I took myself to the cinema, to see Barton Fink by the Coen Brothers, which had just been released. The film wasn’t long, but, halfway through, the cinema cut the film for an interval. It was wild to me, this never happens in the UK. I remember the interval more than the film, it stayed in my mind, and I often thought about the cinema, and its peculiarities.

When I worked on Fantastic Man from 2008-2012, its offices were on Leidseplein. It was only after a couple of years working there that I realized: the cinema next door was the cinema where I saw Barton Fink, and experienced the jolt of the interval, all those years before. I was a wall away from where I had been.