It Happened. Make of It What You Will is a book of still frames: short, self-contained true scenes where something quietly shifts direction. Moving between Spain, the UK and Poland, Joanna Potepa records moments of pressure, movement, memory, and perception with precision, dry humour, and no appetite for moral lessons. This is not a standard memoir, nor a travel narrative in the usual sense. The book is built from small concrete details rather than explanation, and comes from the same field as Potepa’s visual work: structure, tension, and the instant when the usual order stops holding. Written in English as an original language version, it stands on its own while opening a path into the wider world of the drawings.
It Happened. Make of It What You Will is a book of still frames: short, self-contained true scenes where something quietly shifts direction. Moving between Spain, the UK and Poland, Joanna Potepa records moments of pressure, movement, memory, and perception with precision, dry humour, and no appetite for moral lessons. This is not a standard memoir, nor a travel narrative in the usual sense. The book is built from small concrete details rather than explanation, and comes from the same field as Potepa’s visual work: structure, tension, and the instant when the usual order stops holding. Written in English as an original language version, it stands on its own while opening a path into the wider world of the drawings.
Life rarely changes direction the way films suggest.
No trumpet, no thunderbolt, no dramatic before-and-after.
Most of the time, nothing explodes. The furniture stays where it was. The road looks the same.
And yet, beneath that surface, the field shifts.
Sometimes only by a degree – a barely perceptible tilt, like a needle moving across a quiet seismograph. You notice it later, when you look back and realise that your position on the map has changed.
These are not stories about my life. They are readings from that field: small, precise moments where space and time intersect – a step over an invisible border, a glance in a mirror, a beam of light missed by two minutes, a turn taken because of a brown sign, a child walking behind a car, a room that did not exist and still altered the air between two people.
Nothing spectacular. Which is why it matters.
I write them as still frames because that is how they arrive: frozen, detailed, slightly askew – like nodes in a network you only see when you stop pretending the world is linear.
They are not decoration.
They are measurements.
The Spanish chapters follow the road in order; the short pieces from Poland and England drop in between them like still frames, loosely attached.
Read them not as a timeline, but as a map of forces: faint lines, small arrows, axes that cross when they shouldn’t – and the white space between them slowly filling with dots of thought.
Some I took.
Some I almost took.
Some you will recognise as your own.
Most vectors shift quietly.
These are the ones I noticed.
●
I made myself a promise:
By the time I’m forty, I’ll travel abroad.
Small detail: I had no money for holidays, no grand trip booked, no new life waiting on the other side. Just that one sentence, already spoken – and my brain treats spoken sentences like contracts.
So the solution was obvious.
The day before my fortieth birthday, we went to Cieszyn – my husband, my daughter, and me.
That funny corner of Poland where “abroad” starts halfway across a bridge.
Evening. Ordinary weather, ordinary town. No fireworks, no airport, no dramatic farewell. Just the three of us and a river with two names, depending on which side you read the sign.
We walked onto the bridge from the Polish side.
Halfway across, I stopped for a second.
Behind us: Poland.
In front of us: Czech Republic.
Under my feet: my extremely literal interpretation of the word “abroad”.
We took those last few steps together, crossed the invisible line, and I thought: Deal honoured.
No new job. No new passport stamp worth framing. No life-changing revelation. Just a woman, thirty-nine years and three hundred and sixty-four days old, who had promised herself she’d be in another country for her fortieth – and, technically, precisely, made it happen.
We celebrated like you should in that part of the world: with knedlíky. Dumplings instead of champagne. A border crossed by foot, not by plane.
The first rehearsal was just a family walk over a bridge in Cieszyn.
The real show came two years later – with a suitcase, one-way ticket, and no backup plan.
It Happened: Make of It What You Will by Joanna Potepa is not the kind of book you read for a neat beginning, middle and end. If that is what you are looking for, this is probably not your book. But if you are willing to slow down and just sit with it, there is something genuinely beautiful happening here.
Potepa describes her own work as a book of still frames and that is honestly the most accurate way to put it. Each piece reads like a photograph that somehow also has a feeling attached to it. A stairwell, a toll gate, a road somewhere in Spain or Portugal, things that should be completely forgettable become oddly emotional in her hands. I am not entirely sure how she does it but she does. The book moves through several countries, Spain, Poland, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and that geographic wandering actually works in its favor.
The entire collection has this elusive, intermediate quality that makes it seem as though you're reading someone's long-destroyed recollections from a long trip that they never quite got over; as if all of the stories have little to do with each other, almost like cuts in a film between different people, but as soon as you stop expecting them to connect in a predictable manner, you begin to enjoy their rhythm.
What stood out most was her restraint; Potepa does not over-explain anything; she allows the reader to feel their way through the stories, which I appreciated very much; you can feel more emotion contained in one quiet little scene than you can find in complete chapters of books that are trying to be much more than what they are.
My only true criticism would be that at times, the minimalism can work against the stories. There were some stories where I found myself wanting a little bit more from each one, similar to a conversation that ends right at the most interesting point.
I found this book to be an impressive and confident work of art. The visual effect of the artist's creativity is visible on every page of this book. I highly recommend it to those who appreciate literary fiction, experimental literature & narratives that stay with you for a long time after reading the book. I give it four stars (for real and I am shocked as well).