Renato Baretić

I can draw it for you, I can show you photographs from there, I can tell you stories about it, I can write a hundred lines of text, but still – you won’t be able to see what it is, where it is and what the “Writers’ House” is really like. Because – you very well know where Pazin is, maybe you have been there and have photographs and memories, but you have no clue nor do I have means to evoke how beautiful, good and pleasant it is to participate in a literary night just a step away from the Pazin gorge, at sunset, accompanied by a low hum (This is Istria, nobody yells here and everyone is heard on time) of the swollen Pazinčica…

I have some modest experience with literary scholarships and I have been involved up to a certain point in bringing foreign writers for one month creative stays in Croatia. I am thus aware how much everyone and everywhere try to find accommodation for the guest writer in a breathtaking location or a location which at least puts on the first, most important morning smile. My experience, as I’ve said, is modest, but I can affirm with great confidence that there is no crazier, madder, more inspirational and fascinating place for writing out new stories and describe till then non-existent worlds.

At first moment the Writers’ House might seem similar to those announced in classified ads of the “Selling three-story house in the centre of Split. 52.5 square…” type, but as soon as you have visited it from top to bottom (you enter in the middle and choose where to start from, I recommend – start from the top!)  you will see where all the excitement described in the previous lines stems from.

I haven’t written almost anything for the past two years, apart from a heap of journalist texts, sometimes I think I’m not going to write ever again, but having recently visited the Writers’ House it seems to me that right here my fingers and my head might start working again…