Siv Cedering: Poet, Painter, Composer

Siv Cedering, a tall, striking woman with an abundance of reddish-blond hair and a slight Swedish accent, led a recent visitor to a sunroom that doubles as a painting studio in her large, comfortable house in Amagansett. Afternoon autumn light poured through the windows.

A series of paintings, some in progress and some finished, leaned against the furniture. They are part of a series to be shown at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle next year in an exhibit called "The American Dream."

Ms. Cedering is something of a Renaissance woman. She has published 17 books, including two novels, six children's books, and nine collections of poetry, and composed the music for a series of Swedish television programs based on one of the children's books.

The Arctic Circle

Her paintings have been seen in local galleries including the Elaine Benson Gallery, and in Colorado and New Mexico.

The cinematographer and director Sven Nykvist, who is perhaps best known for his work with Ingmar Bergman, made a film based on one of Ms. Cedering's novels, "Oxen." The film, "The Ox," was nominated for an Academy Award in 1992.

Siv Cedering was born in a town called (tm)verkalix, on the Arctic Circle some 600 miles north of Stockholm.

"There were about 30 houses there. It was a very small town, and the winters were very long. It looked very much like Vermont. There were lots of rivers, low mountains."

Westward Ho

She was 14 when her family "packed up everything and shipped it to California" in 1953, to live in San Francisco. Her father, an independent businessman who designed and built houses, "felt somewhat hampered by certain of the rules in Sweden," she said.

"Your vision of the place you came from changes when you come to a new country. It becomes a kind of dream. But there is also the idea of 'the American dream,' the parts of the country that have vanished."

"And that's what these paintings are about," Ms. Cedering said, indicating her recent works, several of which portray sweeping landscapes rendered in muted colors.

The paintings have a winning simplicity; they are smooth-surfaced, and the landscapes seem to have arisen from the imagination as much as from observation.

"Poetry Saved Me"

At the precocious age of 15, Ms. Cedering, who had been writing poetry since she was 7, was invited to join a San Francisco poetry workshop, and her work began to attract some attention.

Meanwhile, her parents had separated. Her father returned to Sweden. "In a way, the culture shock involved in coming to the United States was too much for him," she said.

The separation made things difficult. "We were suddenly very poor. It was not a happy time. But poetry saved me."

Ms. Cedering wrote her earliest poems in Swedish but switched to English in her teens. She remembers jotting poetry in her notebook on the 16-hour train ride from (tm)verkalix to Stockholm, and on the ship that brought the family to the United States.

"I think I was in love with poetry, with the music of the words. Everything I wrote rhymed then."

Always Working

Now, she said, she writes poems "in big lumps," leaving time for her other interests.

"I like creating things," she said, "and I don't like limiting myself to one form of creation. I'll work on a screenplay, then music, then children's writing, and of course painting."

"I have a lot of things that I'd like to do, and each day I decide what I'll work on. I'm always working on something."

Her most recent project is a long poem about Picasso's model Marie Therese, an idea that had been in the writer's mind for 15 years before she sat down and wrote 50 stanzas. She has since revised the work to 24.

Swedish Grant

Three years ago, Ms. Cedering won a substantial vote of confidence from the Swedish Writers Union, a grant of $55,000, spread over five years. "In Sweden they acknowledge the importance of books," she said, "far more so than here."

"To borrow a book in a library in Sweden is free, of course, but for each book that is borrowed, a few cents go to the author and a few cents go to state writers' funds." That money, she explained, is then distributed to writers in the form of grants.

"In America," said Ms. Cedering, "poets read poets, but for the most part ordinary people know movie and television actors. In Sweden, and in other countries, the arts are part of the fabric of the culture."

"Ordinary Swedes - people like many in my father's generation, who may have had only a sixth-grade education - nonetheless know a lot about books from the time they are young. And not just Swedish writers, but writers from different countries."

After graduating from her California high school, the 17-year-old Ms. Cedering returned to Sweden for a visit to her father. It was at this time that she discovered she was pregnant.

"I went to an abortion clinic, but changed my mind. I decided I did not want an abortion. In Sweden, abortion is legal. But I decided I couldn't destroy a baby and create poems."

Her father wanted her to stay in Sweden, and offered to help care for the baby, said Ms. Cedering, but she decided instead to go back to America, alone.

Teen-Age Pregnancy

"I went to New York. After three weeks there, I had $12 in my pocket. I would apply for jobs and they would laugh at me - I was seven months pregnant."

She supported herself for a time by giving piano lessons.

"My mother didn't want me to come to San Francisco unless I got married. This was the '50s, remember, so there was great shame attached to being single and pregnant."

Fortunately, she had met a sympathetic couple on the ship from Sweden and was able to stay with them until a few months after the baby was born.

Ms. Cedering's daughter, a producer and voice-over actress, lives in Los Angeles.

First Marriage

"I think that experience gave me strength," she said. "So many people say, well, how can I be a poet and a single mother and support myself and my child - and of course I was 17. I'd been offered a full scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley, and there was just no way I was able to take that offer."

Ms. Cedering married not long after. Her husband was a computer specialist whose work necessitated frequent moves. The family lived in Washington, D.C., Westchester County, and Massapequa.

She has another daughter and a son from that marriage, which ended in divorce in 1982. She married the writer and teacher David Swickard the following year.

College Teaching

Despite what American academics might consider a limited formal education, Ms. Cedering has taught at several colleges and universities, including the University of Pittsburgh and Long Island University, thanks to her impressive list of publications and endorsements from fellow writers.

Of her poetry, Artur Lundkvist, chairman of the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in literature, has written, "One does not have to read far before one is hit by the originality of this poetry, the unusual physical directness, the sensual presence as well as the mythological."

Free Spirit

She is at work now, along with the paintings and poetry, on a brand-new project: a series of mixed-media "poem-sculptures" in which she is finding great joy and excitement.

"Creative people should not be constrained by artificial boundaries, such as age," said Ms. Cedering. "I have an uncle who started writing in his 70s; he has published three books."

"I always want to keep the feeling of having that freedom to explore. The desire is simply to see how much I can do. To get some of that music in my head out."

"When I teach poetry, for example, I think I am teaching not so much craft as the freedom to create whatever you want."