Daily Inspiration: Meet Jesper Soerensen

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jesper Soerensen.

Hi Jesper, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Four years ago, I moved from Denmark to Colorado together with my husband, who had gotten a position as a researcher with the University of Colorado Boulder. Our arrival date was March 13, 2020, just six hours before the US closed its borders to foreigners for almost two years. Looking back, it feels almost like when you see someone rolling under a closing garage door in an action movie, that’s how rushed it felt.

We were supposed to have landed in Denver on March 17, but when we woke up in Copenhagen on the 12th to the news that the US would close its borders the very next day, we had to move fast. And then, two days after our hurried arrival, everything stopped as the country went into lockdown. When I arrived in the US, I had written four chapters of my first book, Charles Dickens: The Stories of His Life, which is an introduction to the life and novels of Charles Dickens.

Those many months trapped at home in Boulder, waiting for the lockdown to be lifted and for the approval of my work permit application, gave me the opportunity to focus on my writing full-time. Having the luxury of sustained focus for a considerable amount of time really made me grow as a writer, and the project got me through those lonely first six months in the US. But on a personal level, things were not going well.

My husband and I were both feeling extremely lonely, not knowing anyone in the US, and with no opportunities to get to know new people in sight. We tried to alleviate our loneliness by moving from the outskirts of Boulder to Downtown Denver, as we were longing for a bigger city.

The move lifted our spirits for a while, and I eventually found work in Denver and continued writing my book in my spare time. But still, things were not really opening up, and so many bad things were happening, locally and nationally, that we grew worried, and after 14 months in the US, we moved to Berlin, Germany. We didn’t know many people there either, but at least we would be much closer to friends and family.

It was in Berlin that I got my book accepted for publication by London-based Olympia Publishers. I had written all but the first and the last chapter of the book when I arrived in the city, but with needing to improve my rudimentary German language skills in order to begin almost immediately in a new job where only German was spoken, I had suspended all work on the book. But then came Olympia Publishers’ request to see the full manuscript, and I managed to muster up the energy and enthusiasm to get the book across the finish line.

We quickly came to regret our rash decision to move to Germany, and after just 10 months in Berlin, we moved back to Denver in early 2022. And this time everything was different. For the first time in over two years, we were able to go out and take advantage of Denver’s plethora of cultural offerings. We discovered what we couldn’t see the first time around: that Denver is a major cultural hub abounding with creative talent.

I recently had the honor to have a creative nonfiction essay published in the print anthology We are The West: Tributaries, published by Denver-based independent press Twenty Bellows. I got to see many of the anthology’s contributors read their work aloud at the book release party at the Petals & Pages bookstore in Denver, and I found there a warm and generous community of writers.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
There were two major obstacles on my way to getting my book published. The first was finding a publisher. When I first started writing the book, I wrote it in Danish and didn’t have any intention of writing it in English. It never even occurred to me that I could do it. I intended the book for Danish readers because there had not been published a full biography about Charles Dickens in Danish for well over 60 years, so I thought there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled. Alas, the Danish publishers didn’t agree.

When I sent book proposals and sample chapters to the publishers, they kept getting rejected on the grounds that a biography about Dickens was too narrow a subject for the Danish market. Worried that I would not be able to find a Danish publisher, I decided to have a go at translating a few chapters into English. It was a great struggle, but I found that translating it from Danish to English also helped me improve the Danish manuscript. Moving forward from that time, I wrote the book in Danish and English simultaneously.

The second major obstacle in completing the book was that it was written through a time of numerous and major disruptions. From the time when I began writing the book until I handed the finished manuscript to the publishers, my husband and I had lived in four different cities in three different countries, with everything that entails in terms of bureaucracy, apartment hunting, job searching, settling into new jobs and new environments. Oh, and also raising two puppies along the way.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I do a lot of humor writing, and during the past year I have had several humor pieces as well as creative nonfiction essays published in various publications. I share news about my writing on my social media profiles, and much of my humor writing can be found on my Medium profile.

My book, Charles Dickens: The Stories of His Life is out now from online booksellers everywhere.

The anthology We Are The West: Tributaries is out now from Twenty Bellows. I am featured in the anthology with a creative nonfiction essay titled Iconoclast.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://olympiapublishers.com/authors/jesper-soerensen
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soerensen.jesper/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soerensen.jesper/
• Other: https://medium.com/@soerensen.jesper

Image Credits
Fadil Inceoglu, Christina Soerensen, Twenty Bellows, and Karsten Wind