Karate Chop is the first book in a new collaboration between the celebrated independent publisher Graywolf Press and the literary quarterly A Public Space. Nors spoke to me by phone from her home in Copenhagen. “It’s dark most of the year up here,” she said, “and we get pretty used to staring into the fire. That leaves its mark on the art—but we get more sun than Sweden, and we have more fun.”

Dorthe Nors: Very few people know that Ingmar Bergman was an amazing writer. I actually prefer reading him to seeing his movies, sometimes. The most important of his books to me is The Magic Lantern, a memoir, which is not only his autobiography—it’s an essential guide to how to live your life as an artist. I suggest all writers and artists read Ingmar Bergman because he's so articulate about what it's like. Like a mirror being held up in front of you.

It’s in this role—as a thinker about the creative life, as a kind of mentor artist—that Bergman has been so valuable to me. He’s played such an important role in my imagination that I fictionalized him as a character in my most recent book. That was fun, because the man was cuckoo. He lived his life completely outside what an ordinary Swedish person “should” live like. The Swedes are a little embarrassed about it, because—well, he had nine children from eight women. He never did what you're supposed to, and Swedes almost always do what you're supposed to do.

But also he was an extremely disciplined artist. He had no discipline in his personal life—I do—but he had extreme discipline when it came to his art and the way he ran his life around it.

For the last 25 years of his life, he was married to the same woman, and the chaos of his life had settled. He lived on a small island called Faro, north of Gotland, where he would plan his films, write the scripts, make the screenboards, and everything. He limited his activities: Besides working and thinking, he might go for a stroll. He would only drink buttered skim milk, and have one cookie in the afternoon—his ailing stomach couldn't take more than that. In the late afternoon or evening, he would have visitors over to go and look at a movie in his cinema. And that was his routine, every day. He didn’t try to do more.

That's pretty disciplined to me—living primarily in service to one’s art. But we also hear the other myth: that you must live yourself out.

You know the cliché: You're out on the town, you're doing drugs, you're drinking, you're running on the walls, you're pissing on the fireplace. It’s a cliché. Often you run into artists who live that life—and at one point, you find out that they're not actually producing that much art. They're living the life of the artist without the work.

If you live the kind of life that Bergman does—spending long hours in solitude, working with your art—sometimes people use medicine to smooth things over. They drink or take pills or whatever they do in order to deal with the painful sides of this. But so do people who don't produce art. It's not like only artists drink to cope. Doing so doesn’t make you more interesting or creative—and it may even destroy you.