The Edifice We Share: Writing About Buildings
Nadia Henderson on the homes that live within and outside of us and what buildings can tell us about the state of our characters’ relationships.
Nadia’s home in rural Sweden.
Image credit: Nadia Henderson
I keep writing about buildings. If it’s not a crumbling family manor at the centre of an inheritance row, it’s a high-end luxury apartment whose only constant tenant is a bearded dragon named after a dead celebrity, or a picturesque farmhouse at risk of disappearing into flames. Ostensibly, the collection of short stories I’m working on features people navigating weird weather events and a climate breaking down in turns quiet and violent around them. And yet, the buildings. I can’t seem to stop my focus from fixating on the structures that house my characters’ fears, griefs and joys.
Since my work on these new stories began, I’ve been trying to maintain a curious acceptance of the ideas and themes that take shape on the page. I’ve never thought it wise to scrutinise what I write too closely; to pick at the architecture of a story with too forensic an eye, lest the whole thing collapses into overbearing self-awareness. But it’s illuminating to chart where certain interests start out. Looking at the blueprints of this collection, I can see where my attraction to writing about buildings might have originated.
I moved from London to rural Sweden at the beginning of the pandemic, during a time when many of us were spending much more time than we were used to indoors. Unable to drive and with no job to take me out of the house, I gradually familiarised myself with a new pace of life in vastly different surroundings – always with my home base to start from, and return to. The quintessential timber-clad houses, painted in the area’s copper-mine red, established themselves in my line of sight, becoming synonymous in my mind with a new idea of comfort, safety, and style. It is in such a house I now live, and in which I wrote my first collection of short stories, Tools For Surviving A Storm. The foundations were laid on those pages: in an abandoned site which plays host to two sisters’ dangerous games; in a generations home, full of troubled ghosts, sitting in the path of a destructive flood. In my stories, the structures we occupy are often under threat.
A traditional Swedish 'härbre' cabin.
Image credit: Nadia Henderson
When I write about buildings, I am also writing about home. I am writing about the home we all share, Earth, and the extreme heat, the droughts and the floods; the systems that lock us in collective stasis and the political inaction that underpin the crisis we face. While I’ve always preferred climate change to serve as a backdrop in my stories, I’ve found myself increasingly unable to omit it. I see its impact unfolding, both locally and globally, around me; I can no sooner obscure it in my stories than I can neglect to convey my characters’ thoughts, movements or intentions. My writing has become a place of shelter for my fear and despair over the state of the planet.
My observations on the topic of home extended past the completion and release of my debut collection, into the great dearth of fiction ideas that followed. In 2022, I began what would become my first finished non-fiction project: Home Comforts, a series of personal essays distributed as monthly newsletters over the course of two years. The project encompassed my experiences of moving abroad and finding belonging somewhere new, while also reflecting on the cultural, political and societal meanings that make home, home. I wrote about the solace we seek in cuddly toys, the strangeness of relating to the political landscapes of two separate countries, the nuances of homemaking – all subjects turned over as one might dust off objects in their home. At a time when I was still finding my feet here, and with no clear idea of what my next work of fiction might look like, Home Comforts provided me space within which to root myself and nurture new ideas.
And so my writing on buildings broke through its own walls, circling around and above like the swallows that swoop into the unseen corners of my roof every summer. But buildings are also confining, and many of the characters in my new collection find themselves trapped: in lives that don’t feel quite right, in apathetic inaction, in power dynamics that seem impossible to transcend. Sometimes, it feels as though this is the unavoidable cruelty of being a writer; the placing of characters into situations and relationships that restrict and detain them, so that they might be forced into some new shape of existence.
Nadia’s writing space. Image credit Nadia Henderson.
As I grow more settled in Sweden, as the bricks of my experience slot neatly next to one another, the wellbeing of our planet and its peoples continues to disintegrate. Politicians in this country continue to veer recklessly off track when it comes to reducing emissions, and the green transition often feels all too extractive – especially in the north, where the opening of new mines has been strongly contested by the Sámi communities whose lives and traditions are under continued threat of disruption. Further afield, extreme weather events are upending lives and millions face forced displacement against a political backdrop which demonises migration. The edifice we share with each other – and with countless other plants, animals, waters and land masses – is collapsing, though it is not – it must never be – too late to restore it.
It’s into these walls I write: these walls pocked with fear and despair but also with hope and resilience and the steady trudging on of everyday life. A building, I’m learning, is never just a building. The ones in my stories are symbols which hold my characters’ aspirations and contradictions; all the bad and good of which they are capable. When we pull down the walls, all we’re left with is ourselves and each other – what we can let fall and crumble away, and what we can save.
Nadia Henderson
Nadia Henderson is a London-born writer living in rural Sweden. Her debut short story collection, Tools For Surviving A Storm, traverses the often-blurred boundaries between the human and natural worlds. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize and longlisted for both the Cambridge and Commonwealth Short Story Prizes. Nadia is currently working on a second collection, exploring how we connect to each other in a time of climate crisis.
Find Nadia online at: @nadiahendersonwrites
