Meeting with Michaela Vieser
Nature, Writing and Spirituality
Fondation Jan Michalski © Tonatiuh Ambrosetti
Event completed
English
Free, on registration
Michaela Vieser talks about Nature Writing and Spirituality, why as a German this is still considered a taboo topic and how this has led her to write a novel set in Japan in 1690.
She outlines the work on “Kumano” in which she portrays the life and walks of a nun from the Japanese Kumano order and how she crosses paths with the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer. Three landscapes meander through the novel: firstly a Japanese religious painting of an enacted landscape, secondly the sensory landscape of the wandering nun and thirdly the dissected landscape of the German physicist.
Michaela Vieser comments on her real encounters with Japanese mountain ascetics, why slime molds are important to understand Japanese nature and spirituality and how a Mandala by a Japanese polymath has become an iconic image in present-day Japan as a roadmap through the anthropocene.
Biography
Michaela Vieser is a storyteller and author, publishing books of fiction and nonfiction and radio features. A “topic explorer”, she applies a method of extended research, combining information from the sensual as well as the scientific world. As a SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) graduate she studied Japanese Language, Culture and Arts, and she also lived for a year in a Japanese Buddhist monastery, to learn the Way of Calligraphy, Sword-fighting, and Tea.