In Faraway Gardens
Swiss novelist Peter Stamm describes the importance of places in his writing.

It was summer. I was sitting in a garden in Marina di Castagnetto in Italy. Eight of us had rented a villa together, and the atmosphere was strained. Long discussions dragged on late into the night. Cliques formed. There were quarrels and reconciliations. But on that particular day, the others had left for Siena, and they weren't due back until evening. I had the villa to myself.

The white plastic chairs were still under the pine trees, where we had left them the previous day in search of shade. It was hot, and the air was sticky. I could hear children playing in the grounds nextdoor. There was the noise of a motorbike in the distance.

I had meant to spend the day reading, but instead I started to set down in words this strange feeling of self-imposed solitude, of being trapped in the heat, and of physical inertia. It wasn't until several months later that a story grew up around this brief scene of two to three pages. In 'Passion', the faraway garden becomes the Gethsemane of a dying relationship.

Time and time again, places provide a starting point for my stories, settling at their centre. But in my memory, the Italian garden was more than a coordinate marked on my mental map: the garden had a particular time; it was linked to specific meteorological conditions; to a social situation; and to a psychological state. If I were to have visited the garden in winter or in the first flush of love, it would have formed the core of a very different story, or perhaps no story at all. The places at the heart of my writing represent moments of intense perception. Even as a child, I loved to imagine myself in other worlds. I was seven or eight, or so I'm told, when I objected to having to walk to school with my best friend. That was the only time I had for thinking, I explained. Thinking meant leaving the present and -- instead of walking heavy-hearted to school -- setting off on a journey of discovery, into the unknown. Cycling to my music lessons through the winter landscape, I was on a polar expedition. Running to the local shops, I was fleeing from enemy soldiers.

It is this kind of thinking -- when my mind is both wandering and focused, when my body loses consciousness and my gaze disappears somewhere between myself and the world -- that allows me to write.

I try to understand my daydreaming. It didn't become writing until much later, and I still fall into it, even when I'm not writing. It has always been my way of conquering other people and the world, of making them my own; of ordering my experiences, and finding my way. When I daydream, the superabundance of information available to my senses takes on tangible, memorable form. I turn the world into stories.

It's difficult to explain how this happens. I don't picture or imagine anything: in reality, I'm in an unreal world. I don't know what this world consists of; I only know that it isn't made of pictures -- it isn't visual. For the most part, my will has no hold on the world of my stories. I can move through it, but I have little power to change it. If I try to, I am in danger of falling out of it, of waking up.

For a long time, I kept this other world to myself. The more vivid it became, the more difficult it was to describe it or hold on to it. When I first started writing, my words failed to come alive. As a child, I set out to keep a diary of the summer holidays. The experiment soon failed. The entries became shorter and shorter, until they ended up as mere abbreviations: '3rd August etc.' Before a fortnight was up, the diary had stopped entirely.

I have never been interested in describing my life, which has been fairly uneventful. I lived my life: why would I want to write it down? In the texts that I read and in those that I wrote, I wanted to gain distance from myself, to experience something new, to learn something, and to find something out. The world in my head was bigger and more exciting than the world that I lived in. The fact that it wasn't real didn't bother me at all.

Since I couldn't write, I read. I can't remember the titles and characters; only some of the places -- the lonely island of Swiss Family Robinson, the American South of Tom Sawyer, and, later on, the strange worlds of Jules Verne.

When I was a child, some of my books contained little maps, which I would consult as I read, following the journey of my hero -- my journey. But the maps weren't much good; they only showed the places as little dots. The places in a book are linked together like the places in a life. Geography does not play the deciding role. The space of literature is not homogenous. Perhaps that's why I've always loved darkness and mist, for then distances become hazy: your immediate surroundings become invisible and distant visions come to the fore. But under the blue sky of summer, when the whole world lay open as far as the eye could see, I felt trapped. All kinds of worlds can be projected onto the whiteness of mist or the darkness of night. Out of the fog, a bull can emerge, like in Fellini's Amarcord.

I don't know when I started to write, but I do know that I often used to write at night. At night, I would be undisturbed: nothing could stop me but tiredness. There is something atemporal about the night. After midnight, the clocks stand still, and they don't start up again till dawn.

Since then, I've learnt to write during the day, preferably on a train. When you're travelling, the clocks stand still as well. The journey becomes an empty, timeless space. It's as if you're in a spaceship moving at the speed of light as the earth recedes into the distance. Chronological movement seems to stop when spatial movement begins.

Writing in the train, I travel over land and through my texts. I get to know the timetables. I always travel in a circle, but when I return to Zurich, I'm on my way home from Norway, America, Ireland or a garden in Italy. And I'm pleased to be back -- in a world that isn't as infinitely expandable as the world in my head, but that is much more varied, with a radiance and a depth to it that no daydream or text could ever possess.

Peter Stamm was born in 1963. After a few semesters spent studying English, Psychology and Psychopathology, he took up a career as a freelance author and journalist, writing for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Weltwoche, Tages-Anzeiger and the satirical magazine Nebelspalter. He has lived in Paris, New York and Scandinavia, and is now based in Winterthur in Switzerland. He is the author of two novels, two collections of stories and several radio and stage plays. His books have been translated into fourteen languages, and he has received numerous awards and prizes including the Rauris Literary Prize (1999). His latest collection of short stories, In fremden Gärten, has just been published by Arche. Agnes (published in English by Bloomsbury, in a translation by Michael Hofmann) and Ungefähre Landschaft were both reviewed in new books in german. His books will be published in the US by the Other Press, New York.