Sand Issue 8

NO. 8 €8

SAND BERLIN’S ENGLISH LITERARY JOURNAL

SAND is CHRISTINA WEGENER Editor in Chief

CHRIS TROISE Events Manager

LYZ PFISTER Managing Editor & Poetry Editor

VALENTINA URIBE Social Media Manager

FLORIAN DUIJSENS Fiction Editor ALEX BODINE Art Editor SOPHIE NIBBS Copy Editor & Distribution Manager

JESSE KOHN Intern & Copy Editor KARA ZICHITTELLA Graphic Designer JUNE GLASSON Cover Art SOLID EARTH Printing

YVONNE ANDREAS Administrative Manager

CONTACT SAND Journal DonaustraĂ&#x;e 50 12043 Berlin info@sandjournal.com www.sandjournal.com

Connect with us on Facebook for news and events: www.facebook.com/sandjournal ISSN 2191-429X Published in Berlin Copyright Autumn 2013

What if there is too much dark? What will we do if we find that the world is too full of murder and blood, loneliness, fear, and death?

Will we blunt our pain in frenzies, setting fire to the house and watching the gauze curtains “lift / like bandages from an old wound” (McNamara, p. 104)? Or will we instead press up against the cold glass and peer out into the night, hearts thudding as the fear gets closer (Thoroddsdottir, p. 40)? Where do we start to look for the light?

This issue of SAND is a fire with a slow burn. From the desolate landscape that Shane Michalik creates in “untitled (Notes for Jack Schaefer)” (p. 80) – a country so dry it feels as if the whole thing is about to go up in flames – to Olivia Parkes’ layered artwork (p. 26), where each calm façade contains a secret fire threatening to erupt, the pieces in Issue 8 ask: How hot does it need to be before the world begins to burn?

Jérôme Karsenti’s blue-swept Powder series (p. 110), then, is like a splash of cool, brushing the flame to ash. We are left with a burnt land: “deadwood, / tall stands; a sign, as for a gallery / or playground: We may walk among the dead” (Grumbling, p. 123). But even here is a breath of new, a dream, an antidote to the darkness.

“I want to trade all of my hope for faith,” says the matador in “Floriferous Sky” (MacLean, p. 90). His faith is a dream of sorts, just as a trash collector dreams desire for a woman beyond his reach (Jiwrajka, p. 51) or a young man dreams he is with child (Vardeman, p. 12). In these stories, the dream world is imbued with agency.

There is a richness of possibility, as in “The Flying Man” (p. 42), where a young boy chooses to greet his specter not with fear but with a gentle hand to guide him home.

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Somewhere between darkness and a dream is a nebulous place where writing happens. When we take the darkness and shape it with the written word, its hold is broken; our fear, when named, no longer quite so scary. The light we find in the world is the light we create with words; language is what we do with all the darkness.

Like Michael Regime, we too must learn to hear it (Vick, p. 124): “Even if you can’t understand it […], you should still listen for a while. Just shut up and listen.”

Lyz Pfister

SAND

No. 8

Editor’s Note

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Table of Contents twain CHRISTOPHER MULROONEY A Young Guy and His Dreams DAVID VARDEMAN Patent Pending WILLIAM GREENWAY

Face Off OLIVIA PARKES Murderers on Holiday?

VICTORIA GOSLING Sykurinn í öllu VALGERDUR THORODDSDOTTIR The Sugar of Things translated by VALGERDUR THORODDSDOTTIR

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12

19

Writing Corporeally: An Interview with Jan Grue BECKY CROOK

20

“You Get a Ball! You Get a Ball!” or, Anyone Can Be Oprah PAULINA JAEGER

26

The Shoplifter BEN MERRIMAN

31

Raddiwala MANASI JIWRAJKA WYO JUNE GLASSON

Conscience ADRIAN WEST 42

44

41

untitled (Notes for Jack Schaefer) SHANE MICHALIK

80

DROWNED BOBBY NEEL ADAMS

84

Floriferous Sky LUKE MACLEAN

90

48

50

51

That’s You! An Interview – of Sorts – with Thomas Wild BRITTANI SONNENBERG Ms. Grim Sets Small Fires Around the House AMY MCNAMARA

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104

107

Sans Titre (2) MATTHIEU BAUMIER

108

Untitled (2) translated by ELIZABETH BRUNAZZI

109

Powder 1, 7, 8 JÉRÔME KARSENTI

110

Ablutions LUTZ SEILER translated by BRADLEY SCHMIDT

115

Dream Work MEGAN GRUMBLING

123

Two Possible Ways Michael Regime Fell in Love with Language TRAVIS VICK

124

CONTRIBUTORS

125

62

40 Vernacular ELISABETH REIDY DENISON

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Untitled (1) translated by ELIZABETH BRUNAZZI

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Five Stories DUSTIN JUNKERT

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The Flying Man JAN GRUE translated by BECKY CROOK

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EL JAMES GRINWIS

105

Sans Titre (1) MATTHIEU BAUMIER

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9

MUTINY

FIVE STORIES

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Dustin Junkert

I juice more in the summer. Boy, do I juice more in the summer.

I like juice.

The theory I’m here proposing is that, in the absence of weather, if that is a thing, things fall apart. Piece by piece, puzzles are made.

The answers to my questions are nowhere to be found, and the questions themselves have gone missing.

You did not order that. My deepest apologies.

And here I am eating it, ignorantly, until now.

Miss Molly is going on about the carp. She seems to have forgotten everything surrounding it and is focused in. There’s a G. Cully waiting at the door for either an autograph or a signature.

There’s little discussion about the utter beauty of the dollar sign.

You always think I’m saying more, but I really mean just the object of the vertically impaled ‘S.’ The swastika, too, is breathtaking.

Please return to your seats. I have not said what I have come here to say. And now I will not say it for you, once again.

No. 8

THE ARGUMENT TO END ALL ARGUMENTS

When I was hired, the first thing I did was step into a well-candied office. I saw jars of jellybeans and Dum-Dums and gummy worms on the desk. My new boss was sitting there, a very fat woman, awaiting my reply to the question, “What do you think?”

“I feel like a little kid in a candy store,” I said, whereupon my boss erupted in laughter.

She was the sort of person who finds every joke a stroke of genius, and she routinely lost control of her little fat body, abandoning herself to merriment.

“It still hurts,” she said, “The ache of childhood.” Here’s another kind of thing she’d say.

She showered me with gifts during my time at The Architecture Foundation. On my desk at the end of the day I’d find books or whiskey. Once, after a troubling breakup, I was given a fistful of condoms. My boss greedily opened her palm over my desk and down tumbled a confetti of condoms.

“You must have sex, good sex, and right away, during this kind of thing.”

“I’m feeling better already,” I said, and my boss laughed herself to tears.

It was lunchtime, a time of generally high spirits around the office.

“I know I’m no Zooey Deschanel,” my boss confided, “but many men are wild about me. Young skinny men, too.” She pursed her lips.

“Though I know you, you’re into the supermodel type, the tiny thin ones. I don’t know why – they’re just bones everywhere.”

“Like bagging a bag of bones,” I said, whereupon my boss exploded in laughter while pulling her arms to her chest as if to shield herself from a blow.

I know what I will do if I choose sexual intercourse. First I will untie your shoes. I may back into you, hand you the reins. All the bedding can be found in the bathroom cupboard above the toilet, this is what the maid told me when I entered. Last I checked, what’s in there may still be damp.

The rules of logic can absolutely be broken. I once heard the argument that no argument can be fully convincing and incite real change by its own weight, and I was so convinced that I’ve been argument-free for almost a year now.

You have your cogito ergo sum and I have my subcontinent – we set them up and battle them like toy soldiers.

“Do you think this is too Kansas City? Too Usual Suspects?”

The fact that you asked me has made the world habitable.

Just leave me here. I will distract the lone guard, the one with the penis head poking out of his pants. Old Sorrento drizzles. I have kept to the churches, entering and exiting, hanging by the far wall, lighting candles and politely allowing others to go before me. Both my shoulders, as well as a spot on my chest are dark with blessings.

My forehead is irritated.

Who would think to ask for something like this? The world I’d have made would be crushing. More fragrant but more collapsible.

The scrubbing motion is no longer applicable, and I’m too humiliated to go into why.

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HONEST WORK

No. 8

LEARNING TO DRAW

The maids are always coming around. They are preternatural about cleaning, and the sacrifices they make are courtesy, fashion identity, and fragrance.

I have to guard Sixty Stories with my whole body. There is no hope of hiding something from these maids. It is as if they are Schiller and the Hotel Beverly is the mind.

This is not what annoys me. On one wall there’s a framed art piece that is a sheet of printer paper with the shape of a sasquatch painted red. It is hardly recognizable, I may not even be right to call it a sasquatch. Above the red figure are the words “Art Show.”

And the pests! They run from the maids so when you tell the maids about the pests they scowl the practiced scowl of a doctor who is, based on what you’re telling him or her, about to recommend a competent psychiatrist. Except the maid doesn’t find the pests “out of her expertise” as much as simply untrue.

Now I make my way along the edge of the pool. Alright, the maids are drumming up business amidst the deck chairs.

There on the roof, I was finally unobserved by man and God. I could see a pile of maids. Unbroken lines of them, in clumps. I was climbing down nervously through clouds of cigarette smoke.

The way I learned to draw is an easy story, but it would be difficult to make up.

As with all forms of love, thought, philosophy, and registration, I began with animals. They had occurred to me long before I got into all this business of drawing.

Everything was coming along there for a moment, then the unseen properties became more apparent than ever. The animals I set out to draw ended up with enormous holes everywhere and, all told, hardly any figure to speak of, really. The horses lacked heads and legs, while the ants were pretty much reduced to a short flat line, most of them. I wanted to get around this difficulty and on to other unavoidable problems – for I was also inventing a language. Do you understand this kind of situation or combination of situations?

It was more complicated than just filling in the missing parts of the animals – that would be like just making up memories from a time in your past you forgot about, or trying to will yourself back into a dream after waking.

Well, the soup was boiling over again and it was just one more thing I couldn’t pay attention to with enough… force.

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HOTEL BEVERLY

Olivia Parkes Rip – Converge – Face Off

MURDERERS ON HOLIDAY?

VICTORIA GOSLING

i.

Example Exhibit

As observers, we wonder who amongst the three is the murderer?

ii. iii. iv. v.

Concept Catalogue Venue Curator’s Note

Who here bludgeoned or poisoned, stabbed or shot their way into this pantheon – and more crucially, why?

i. Example Exhibit: Phyllis Chapman with John and Rosemarie Dickinson, Irish Coast, 1926

The trio stand upon the waterline. The first, Phyllis Chapman, cuts a blunt, matronly figure. Her raincoat is done up tightly over her bust and a hat partially obscures her face. She stands close on the heels of her daughter, Rosemarie, who in contrast gazes frankly at the camera. Her hands are in her pockets, her double-breasted Mackintosh open to reveal a hint of a white blouse. A breeze appears to be gently ruffling her hair.

But our interrogation reveals nothing: the figures might be bored, tired from their excursion, or merely self-conscious before the camera’s shutter. Only when we open the exhibition catalogue1 and learn of the crime – infamous in its day for the perceived unnaturalness of the act, its gruesomeness, and the unusual details that were made so much of by the newspapers at the time – do guilt and innocence take shape before our eyes. ii. Concept

Separated from the women by a few feet is John Dickinson, whitecapped, suited but tieless. One leg is thrust forward. His fist rests on his hip and through the crook in his arm we glimpse the sea. John looks neither at the camera, nor at his wife or mother-in-law. Instead it appears that he is focusing on something further inland, as though someone or something is approaching, moving towards the group over the stones.

It is our aim to present a series of photographs dating from the late 1800s to the present day in which we may observe the murderer at

1

The Dickinson murders – see catalogue page 67.

2

A contemporary parallel to the proposed exhibition might be Tate Britain’s

Impressionists at Villerville Sur Plage, which enjoyed a successful run in the autumn of 2009.

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The scene is innocuous enough: in the foreground, a slanting shore flagged with massive slabs of stone, behind which lies the wrinkled bed of the sea, a colourless sky, and just beyond the photograph’s remit, the place where all three meet.

We look closer, searching for signs of resentment, of pregnant ill will, as though the crime is already in existence, as much a fact as the sinking beds of seaweed or the large round buttons on Mrs Chapman’s coat. Does one of these three already know what he or she will do? Or is the knowledge still forming, resting within the murderer’s subconscious, a lurking darkness – a Kraken invisibly menacing the holidaymakers, concealed beneath the indifferent spread of the Irish Sea.

rest, the murderer at play 2. Decontextualized from his crime – viewed amongst relatives and friends, as he strides through the Austrian Tyrol, relaxes in a deckchair, or, grinning, waves a blackened sausage at us from above the sizzling barbecue – visitors will be forced to contemplate not only their prejudices, but, as I will go on to argue, their complicity, and confront the murderer within.

iii. Catalogue

Does one look at the photograph of a child and, aware of their later career choices, label said infant fireman, bureaucrat, or, indeed, curator? Why is society so quick to make the identity of murderer all encompassing, as though, once one has suffocated a parent with a plastic bag 3 or pushed one’s lover under a tram 4 catatonic, the drooling hysteric – may recover, may be redeemed of their title. Or

It is the curator’s humble wish that the catalogue is only made available once visitors have passed through the exhibition a first time. If we consider murder as theatre, then there are three essential roles: the murderer, the victim, and the detective. By withholding vital information, we force the visitor to play the role of detective, to search the exhibits for clues to establish the murderer’s identity,

so you would have us believe.

which leads to an imaginative act, the creation of a phantasy of the crime itself. At which point the visitor has switched roles and is no longer detective, but agent, or – to speak more plainly – murderer.

Alongside such spirited lines of enquiry, the proposed exhibition seeks to address a fundamental question: To what extent can murder be considered an art form? Murder has long been the subject of art, both high and low, and it is natural that art – essentially an act of creation – concerns itself with the ultimate act of de-creation, the bringing-out-of-being, the definitive privileging of one existence over another.

3

Criddle case – see catalogue page 42.

4

Hewson case – see catalogue page 14.

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To the curator, it is of vital importance that this role-assumption is undertaken.

Only by accepting that we, each and every one of us, are murderers, can we reach our full potential. We argue that in each human’s everyday choices lie small sequences of necessary killings. Which breakfast cereal, which shampoo? The train or the bus? To meet with a friend or work late?

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An example of the way the exhibition intends to provoke can be discerned in its playful titling, the vital question mark raising the issue of whether, since the photographs were taken before the fatal crimes were enacted, we are, in fact, looking at murderers at all.

By organising Murderers on Holiday? by each murderer’s medium (stabbings, poisonings, shootings, garrottings, etc.) and concept (murder for gain, crime of passion, sex murder, serial killing, etc.) the exhibition mimics the conventions of the established art world, creating an artistic canon of killers. The visitor is invited to consider whether art has historically been concerned with murder not for its sensational qualities, but rather because artists sense that inside the murderer resides a dark brother whose narrative of torment, taboo, and sacrifice reflects their own.

Unconsciously, brutally, by picking one over the other, we send

However, once this initial drama has concluded, we hope that the visitor will pass through the exhibition again, this time catalogue in hand, matching the photographs with the murders, recognising their own preconceptions and what we predict to be the dismal failure of their own ability to discover the mark of Cain, or indeed any essential difference that singles out the murderer’s face from those about him.

For example, to return to the Dickinson case with which we began this proposal, the catalogue entry reads thus: The Dickinson Murders On the night of August 28 th 1927, Phyllis Chapman, mother of Rosemarie and mother-in-law of John Dickinson, arose in the night and, having donned various items of clothing belonging to the couple, proceeded to fetch an axe from the woodshed. Finding the blade dull, she took the time to sharpen it before returning to the

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When the grocery boy called the next day with a delivery, he found Phyllis in her daughter’s blouse, a pair of trousers belonging to her son-in-law, and a bowler hat. The bloodstained axe was still gripped in one hand; the other was holding a cup of tea. When later questioned as to what could have led her to commit such a depraved act of brutality, Mrs Chapman replied that Rosemarie and John had been quarrelling, that they were falling out of love, and that she had been forced to take desperate measures in order to stop this process from going any further.

The night before the murders, the victims had had a particularly nasty argument during a game of Scrabble about the acceptability of the word FA, which Phyllis felt had forced her hand. iv. Venue Art does not exist independent of its audience, but can it exist without an audience at all?

We think not, and although White Cube, or even The Saatchi Gallery, would have been the curator’s venue of choice, since beggars cannot be choosers, we very much hope that having read this proposal, permission will be granted to host Murderers on Holiday? in the family and visitors’ room of this establishment.

The curator understands that this will be a daring decision on the part of the management and governors, and that an institution for

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those other possibilities out of being, and it is right that we do so, since to fail, to admit oneself inadequate to the task, to take to one’s bed in the face of life’s choices – from the large (what to do, where to live, who to love, and, essentially, what to give oneself to) to the small (marmite or jam, thin socks or woolly ones) – is to become that most terrible of things, a killer by neglect; one who dreams of innocence with bloody hands, one who, with all the moral bankruptcy of a Pontius Pilate, executes whole worlds of opportunity. Therefore Murderers on Holiday? can be seen in its broadest sense to propose that there is no innocence, that there are only differing degrees of guilt.

house, climbing the stairs, entering Rosemarie and John’s bedroom, and slaying them both in their beds.

the criminally insane must be seen to act responsibly. However, St

deed that would, were we more inclined to agree with him, find us

Bruno’s is known to be a forward-thinking model of psychiatric care, and I don’t doubt that a little controversy and subsequent press – perhaps followed by a carefully composed rejoinder in The Guardian from someone within the upper echelons? – would do nobody’s career any harm.

cross-referenced here under strangling and insanity.

And who knows what it would lead to? The Saatchi Gallery might not prove to be such a stretch after all!

Firstly, we would like to thank the therapeutic staff of St Bruno’s for allowing the devotion of so much time to this project, particularly during the weekly group creative therapy sessions, not to mention the assistance of staff in the library and internet suite.

If we follow his logic, the selection of the sample photograph was motivated not by suitability to the acknowledged criteria of the exhibition, but for reasons of tenderness, by the desire to protect those breeze-blown innocents – bored, tired, or indifferent as they may be – and halt them there upon the shore, to be dampened by the salt and plucked at by the four winds, safely beyond the reach of Mrs Chapman’s axe and her answer to the end of love, forever.

Secondly, we would like to use the opportunity to dismiss once and for all the suggestion that the curator include a self-portrait within the exhibition and write a description of the act that led to our permanent residence here at St Bruno’s. It’s true that at one time we toyed with the idea, going even so far as to select a portrait of the curator, Arnold Gladly with the late Mrs Lottie Gladly, taken on our wedding day in Chelsea, before rejecting the suggestion for reasons we will go on to explain.

As you may know, St Bruno’s resident senior psychiatrist, Dr Bone, has taken the stance of teasing provocateur, asserting repeatedly that what we are engaged in is a work of self-exculpating moral relativism, via which we have sought to avoid facing the reality of the

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Ultimately, however, and it is not that we disrespect Dr Bone, no, we esteem him as one professional esteems another, we must reject his conclusions and advice in this matter, perhaps not as firmly as during our last appointment – we wish Dr Bone a speedy recovery – but reject them nevertheless.

In the final reckoning we feel that the inclusion of a self-portrait would leave the curator open to the charge of self-promotion and unprofessionalism, and it is therefore on these grounds we must and do – once and for all, always and eternally – decline.

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v. Curator’s Note

Furthermore, he has suggested that ‘the obsessive collection’ of photographs that show murderers before their crimes indicates a deep but unrecognised need within the psyche to turn back time, or rather to freeze it before the fatal act occurs, suggesting a reservoir of underground sorrow, of crippling regret which for therapeutic reasons should be explored.

Valgerdur Thoroddsdottir

Translated by Valgerdur Thoroddsdottir

Þétt upp við rúðuna sjá strákarnir aðeins tunglið endurspeglað, kalt og bjart og hvítt. Það er óttinn sem nálgast.

Og hendurnar.

Kláðinn sem leggur það að jöfnu.

Meyjar hvítar einsog hvalir einsog

Pressed against the glass, the boys see only the moon reflected, cold and bright and white.

It’s the fear, that gets closer.

And the hands.

The itching that makes it the same.

Virgins white as whales as

meyjar.

Hráar einsog filma sem framkallast undir næturhimninum hægt.

Við sjáum aðeins fingraför.

Leyndarmálin þurrkuð út af ljósinu.

Og hendur okkar klístraðar af sykrinum í öllu.

Virgins raw as film developing under the night sky, slowly.

We see only fingerprints, our secrets erased by the light, and our hands sticky

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No. 8

Sykurinn í öllu of Things The Sugar

from the sugar of things.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN STÍNA VOL . 8 , ISSUE 1

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June Glasson Unknown – Sarah 2 – Sarah 1 – Meg

Vernacular Elisabeth Reidy Denison Here we speak sudden to fear, and the season of understanding is autumn, is midautumn, is the point in the night where you go upstairs or you go home.

Here we speak the same as war, in hallways in hushes, and here is the taste of exhaustion disguised as water, the state of being always at shoulders and never

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asking where we are. But disappointment lies too, lies down after all, next to questions half-posed and answers we have amassed over autumns: like, this isn’t a secret but it could be; like, the fields here end in theory; like, there will always be wars for us to go to, there will always be fodder for our visions of going.

Like this, no universalities: My words are water over your shoulders is the only reason we speak louder in sleep. And though you say this is where we live, in universalities, and I say I know, I keep seeing you in fields, here we speak at the feet of stairs, you in a language that I recall from dreaming, a language all essence and exception.

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untitled (Notes for Jack Schaefer) Shane Michalik

and

wild dogs make sounds. and the pigs. and I buried my head in the grass. white hair and potatoes. and the yelp. and this is before the knives came out.

Red lost his horse. or his horse was put down. broken. a fence. and the shotgun remembered before the sun was fully up and before we found the scared jackrabbits and before I knew what it meant to be you.

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PART 1

Red held my hand and the blue. his pants sprayed with blood and Pepper. my hands sweat and pine needles fell between our palms. the shadow of the house the fence the field the cattle the dog the baby in the yard the broken saddle grass old furniture an empty pool a pitchfork my best friend the smell of sky a thousand bees above the wood pile and the carcass of a dead horse I wasn’t meant to see.

and Red was too old. and I was too young. and we exchanged rings of grass. next to the creek that brought the blood down the hill – and poachers didn’t see our faces but heard the bark of the dog with his swollen face kicked in by the hoof of a bleating mother. and I fell in love with a man eight years my senior. (and out here you can get married at twelve)

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that was before. when I still heard everything. and this is the number of times one can witness death in a summer. the dog sniffed my heels and a fox crawled out from a dead horse’s ass and here’s where I found the moss as it hangs from pines like icicles and you can’t even hear us coming behind the searchlights and time will excuse the men and the sounds and small bodies tossed into the creek behind my bed.

PART 2

this/then

heads face a fire.

I’m next to a country boy. and this is not my country. and this town is not a town but a pile of pelts.

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this is Jack Schaefer’s world.

this is the house that Jack built. and these are the walls Red burned down. this is the beam to hang a coyote’s carcass and I’ll shove a fist in its mouth touch a tongue a tooth and wade through hay. that is the table where she reads the Bible as her husband walks heavy on the floor above.

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Bobby Neel Adams Barn Owl – Sheep – Coon

Floriferous Sky LUKE MACLEAN

No. 8

That’s You I want to trade all of my hope for faith. I want a passing hunger for the moment. I want a better time than now. I want plan B in a little blue box. I want to fill the blank moments of my past with slick candor and cunning chivalry. I want those moments on 16mm in the attic. I want a postcard from every Maria I’ve ever met and a milk-crate of mariachi in there too. I want a functional hat and a garrulous sidekick.

I want a metronome chest muscle and espresso for blood. A bigticket endorsement deal wouldn’t hurt. I have taken twelve Turkish belly dancers for wives, with scant a cook among them. They scour my bones like ravenous ghouls and pilfer my mustachio for the soup du jour. They say your testicles might help me in that regard and would be best paired with Chablis. Life ain’t all a piñata’s cracked up to be. You will see your pasture soon enough, but from Daliesque legs stretched to the sky. For I am the chosen one. Once as a young boy, I caught a pink salmon with my bare hands. My dark-skinned brother taught me how in a previous life. Today, I am the greatest matador of my archipelago. Tonight, we shall feast upon the petals of roses cast in your honor.

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An Interview – of Sorts – with Thomas Wild

BRITTANI SONNENBERG

At least this is the scene I imagine when Thomas Wild, academic and erstwhile journalist, describes his boyhood love of playing cowboys and Indians in Bavaria. Wild has lived in Berlin since 1994 and has long exchanged his Winnetou costume for a casual Oxford shirt.

I try to picture my childhood neighborhood gang in Atlanta playing games featuring German characters. I can’t. We favored ‘Army Dodgeball,’ a game where whoever was ‘It’ chucked a rubber ball at the other kids’ limbs (once hit, you tucked your ‘amputated’ arm or leg behind you), until you got too gimpy to dodge anything. I suppose this game may have had its roots in World War II, but none of us ever faked a heavy German accent.

“It’s hard to picture American kids role-playing Bavarian farmers,” Wild says simply, when I mention the discrepancy.

Wild is tall, nearly seven feet, though he doesn’t appear so when he sits. He has a blond He-Man haircut, a pleasant way of leaning

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forward to make points, and a childlike earnestness when answering questions. He grew up in a family skeptical of the US occupation, he says. His grandfather had been injured by Americans in the war and never forgiven them for it. “He believed the Americans were the reason he was in the war, not the Germans that drafted him, and not the Russians, because he was on the Southern front. The Americans were the obvious opponents.”

The following are further excerpts from Wild’s childhood, as related to me by Wild over yuppie cappuccinos in a café in Berlin’s West Kreuzberg2. They are presented here as dramatized reenactments in the vein of a Lifetime docudrama and do not represent reality in the nonfictional sense. Instead, they represent the liminal fictional reality that exists between Wild’s words and what I extrapolated. The result is closer to reconstructive surgery than honest reporting.

1

Winnetou:

Native

American

hero of wildly popular adventure

adaptations were shot in Yugoslavia,

novels by German author Karl May

with Frenchman Pierre Brice playing

(1842–1912). May, who suffered

Winnetou. May visited America for

from multiple-personality disorder,

the first time in 1908, years after the

dreamed

novels had been written.

his

characters

into

a

bucolic American wilderness that Formerly an American occupied

generations of German children read

2

with bated breath. In the 1960s, film

zone.

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A rustle in the rosebushes. “You hear that, Old Shatterhand?”

Thomas Wild, age six, dressed as Winnetou 1, creeps forward on his hands and knees, ducks behind a pear tree, and stretches his imaginary bow taut. A chubby cowboy stomping through the Wilds’ lettuce patch will get the punishment he deserves when Winnetou’s arrow wings its way through the white brute’s heart. Twing. The arrow flies, hits its mark. “You’re dead,” Winnetou screams shrilly at the cowboy, who takes an unaffected bite of the cheese sandwich Wild’s mother made for each of them and, heading towards Thomas, tramples another baby lettuce plant. This is always the disadvantage of playing cowboys and Indians with Gunther. He refuses to fall down dead because his mother won’t let him have dessert when he comes home with grass stains.

It’s like passing the tulips of Herr Mueller’s garden in high spring,

THE TENNIS CLUB “There was one girl in the tennis club [in my hometown] who had an American soldier boyfriend. She was very beautiful and everyone had a crush on her. He was very impressive as well. A glamorous couple. He was a very beautiful man.”

— THOMAS WILD

which emit a heady, relentless scent, unapologetic in their ripe orange color, their centers splaying stamen, molten gold centers, streaks of feathered amber up the sides.

THE FIGHT INSPIRED BY THE INTERNATIONAL HOCKEY TOURNAMENT — SABINE, TOMAS’ CHILDHOOD FRIEND

Mitteldorf Tennis Club, end of the day. Stray balls dotting the court, glowing like lemons. Sun low in the sky, then gone. Smell of teenage sweat. Heike, her white skirt swishing, is the only one not bothering to pick up balls, an unstated rule universally accepted: she’s too beautiful. Outside the club, kids begin to walk home in twos and threes.

Thomas lingers, waiting for Charles to arrive. Heike is waiting as

Ten years earlier. Thomas and Sabine are glued to the TV. It’s unseasonably warm outside, and part of their delight is derived from the Canadian hockey ring’s bright white ice. The local pond where they usually skate is a pitiful late February puddle. Sabine is eating

well, since Charles is coming for her. He appears like a mirage out of the near dusk, the buttons on his uniform gleaming, a surprising innocence in his face at the easy joy of seeing his German teenage girlfriend in a tennis skirt. He is the only African American Wild has seen outside of movies and TV shows. Charles seems shyer than those actors, unsure somehow, despite his bulk and beauty.

The couple kisses in the near shadows, Heike milking the moment, Thomas knows, and enjoying the straggling spectators the same way she checks the crowd after she has made a killer return at the net.

Charles and Heike leave on his motorcycle. As much as Thomas longs for Heike, he is oddly invested in her and Charles’ relationship – its presence adds a glamour to the sleepy narratives of the town.

her grapes and swallowing the seeds, a fact that obscurely irritates Thomas, age seven, who spits the seeds cleanly into his hand and slips them demurely into a handkerchief.

“Who are we rooting for?” she asks him. “The Russians? I like the uniforms.”

“The Russians?” Thomas splutters, scowling. “We can’t support the Russians. They’re the ones that won the war.”

“What war?” Sabine asks, an idiotic question that Thomas will not dignify with a response. The Canadians skate valiantly, making noble attempts to defend their goal. The Russians are brutal, unfair, barbaric. When the game is over, and the Canadians have lost, Thomas is inconsolable. He refuses to eat his asparagus at dinner,

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“What war?”

like a therapy session, it is largely a one-way street. Hence my decision

his room.

In the night, he is awoken by the sound of his grandfather walking down the hall to the bathroom. The unsteady limp, the labored tread.

not to mention my childhood anecdote to Wild – the assumed aim of the interview, after all, was to capture his perspective, not examine my own. Yet it is these moments of empathy that often guide the questions journalists ask, how we respond, and how we interpret those we interview. A parallel, internal interview always occurs alongside the one being conducted aloud: how would I answer this question? The following section mirrors this parallel interview through footnotes, omitting my actual prompts but adding my interior responses, creating an imaginary dialogue that never took place. With one exception. After I mentioned that I’d lived in China, Wild turned the tables on me and asked me a question about my relationship to the place. I fumbled for an answer, feeling suddenly unmasked.

I can easily relate to Wild’s anecdote. I recall – but do not tell Wild – the time I went to a restaurant with my family in Atlanta. I was around the same age as Wild in his story. The family at the booth next to us wore University of Georgia Bulldogs apparel. My father had played basketball at Georgia Tech, the Bulldogs’ archrivals.

The only time my father swore was when watching sports, and he saved his most venomous expletives for Georgia Tech/University of Georgia matches. I adored my father and gladly took on his hatred of the Bulldogs. When, in the restaurant, my father leaned over and spoke like an old friend to the man in the red Bulldogs hat, I didn’t understand – I thought we hated those people.

It sounds silly, a childish misunderstanding, but I’m still struck by how eager I was to see an enemy. How disappointed I felt when it was just another kid’s dad. We credit children as possessing an innocence that sees beyond adult prejudices, but I think children are hungry to inherit these prejudices, to fight grown-up fights. Our lenses are colored early, before we learn to intellectualize them, the same way we now impatiently tap our fingers on the table when we’re nervous, thinking it our own habit, forgetting the rhythm of our father’s fingers in the study twenty years earlier, while we built unsturdy Lego houses at his feet.

In 1992, after his high school graduation, Wild traveled to America for the first time. In New York, he said, he had the uncanny feeling of “coming home.”3

3

I was born in Hamburg in 1981, to

American parents. After six months we left, and it wasn’t until 2008 that

An interview is an unnatural, highly prescribed form of communication;

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I traveled back to my first ‘home.’

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shoves the plate away when his mother scolds him, and goes up to

“We took a train from Chicago to Albuquerque, 27 hours, to see the landscape, and it was like what I had grown up seeing in Karl May cowboy and Indian movies. I found the large, open landscapes fascinating. And I was so startled that this piece of land was a symbol for liberty and freedom, because when we drove through New Mexico, I thought, there is nothing I would connect with freedom here. The only things you can do here is fight against nature. And that was the first time I realized abstractly, and physically, that this fight against nature is apparently what is meant by [American] Western freedom. No legal limits, no exclusion by race or whatever. You can do what you want. The only opponent you have is nature, but not a hierarchy, not a social hierarchy. For me this is the opposite of freedom. Freedom would be something that is . . . in German you call it muße, and it means doing nothing. The freedom to do nothing.”5

Initially, I didn’t want to visit

had lived. A simple whitewashed

Hamburg as an adult. I was afraid

apartment building by a river, and

of being disappointed, either by the

that was all. There was little to see,

city or by a sense of alienation when

still less to feel. Florian was more

I arrived. Away from my birthplace, I

interested in finding the hospital

nonetheless

it,

where I’d been born than I was,

like missing a grandparent who

and nobody knew how to get to

dies when you are too young to

the Marienkrankenhaus. All my life

remember them. I pictured a large,

I’d announced Hamburg as my

mirror-like lake that my father ran

birthplace, my original Where are

around at record speeds. I imagined

you from? Now that I was there, it

pastries and beer and my mother’s

felt wildly anticlimactic. We stayed

glowing pregnancy. Perhaps this

with Florian’s relatives in a crowded

was influenced by the idyllic time

house with screaming children. I

it

4

“I came to Berlin because it’s the new German city where reunification is a part of everyday life, because I thought if I want to understand

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characterized

in

my

to

parents’

was quiet, a stark contrast to the

marriage, or at least in their retelling

apparent bellowing I’d done nonstop

of it. They seemed to shine there

my first six months of life.

like Hollywood stars, happier than When I meet someone new in Berlin,

I could remember them being in

6

the family backdrops from where

I admit I’m American, but add that

I had concrete visual memories:

I grew up in China and Singapore.

Philadelphia,

Sometimes

London,

Atlanta,

Shanghai, Singapore.

I

mention

Hamburg,

although I fear the assumptions that follow – that I am more German than

When I returned to Hamburg 27

I really am, that my German language

years later, rhododendrons were

skills are better than they really are.

in bloom, just as they were at my

Even though it’s what I crave more

grandmother’s mountain house in

than anything: to finally be some

North Georgia. The city felt green

decided nationality. To receive a nod

and full of breath. I was with my

that is not a raised eyebrow.

5

“When I meet someone, I say I’m from Berlin. When people ask if I was born here, I say I come from Bavaria. The first time I went to live in America, to teach at Oberlin, was the first time I felt conscientiously German, and European, and I liked it.” 6

belonged

German boyfriend, and we walked slowly to the street where my family

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“You go to the US and see certain things in the streets and feel, I know this, I’ve been here, because you’ve seen it in some TV series or in movies about New York or San Francisco. We don’t have these cities with skyscrapers and so on in Germany, even Frankfurt can’t compare to that, so that was something. That was an experience of meeting something familiar in a fictional way. In that very moment is a sense of belonging.”4

7

felt that’s the right place for me. You meet people who lived in the GDR on a daily basis. It’s a central experience of something that I did not know and did not experience while the Cold War was going on, and there is still a certain atmosphere of gray aggressiveness. It is a city with wounds, a city that has been cracked open, and because of this brokenness it is more tolerant. People can live one or two lives in Munich, but here they can live as many lives as they want.”7

existences,

“I can remember a scene [when I first moved to Berlin in 1994]. I used to live on Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse, when there were still coal heating systems. One day I met one of our neighbors; even though I had been living there for two years it was the first time I’d seen him.

He confronted me, saying, Why is the light in the courtyard still on?

You have to switch it off.

I did switch it off, I told him.

We have to pay it.

I know.

Well, whoever left it on couldn’t be one of the original residents here. It must be one of you new guys.

So there are distinctions that are made, not only between young and old, but between the natives and the invaders, the new occupiers.” 8 “The German academy has become a culture of experts, divided by disciplines, an influence from Hitler’s totalitarian regime. But the Jewish intellectuals who fled Germany, like Hannah Arendt, were much more multidisciplinary. When they founded departments in American colleges they took those ideas with them. When I first taught at an American university I felt a sense of homecoming.9

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Expats in Berlin lead ghostly particularly

relief of hearing multiple languages

the

on the subway and the brokenness

unmoneyed artistic types. We may

of bullet-holed buildings that Wild

or may not have a legitimate visa, we

referred to. You too can be broken

may or may not be able to respond

here, it seemed to say, and take your

auf Deutsch. We say we are artists

time to heal, along with the rest of

and that we are here to observe

us.

those around us, as inspiration for

our

various

projects:

the

grandmothers in the cemeteries feel our eyes on them and are suddenly chilled,

goose

bumps

springing

up on puckered skin despite their battered fur coats.

8

Am

I

an

preoccupation

occupier?

Is

with

city

the

my

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No. 8

what’s going on in Germany I have to be in Berlin. And I’ve always

a

mere pretense for something more sinister? Who belongs in Berlin and who does Berlin belong to? Last summer there was graffiti all over the city demanding, “Wem gehört die Stadt?” [Who owns the city?], when corporate interests threatened to purchase a swath of real estate bordering the canal where hundreds of Berliners flock from spring to autumn to sit under weeping willows and watch swans float by.

9

When I came to Berlin, I felt

something relax inside of me – the

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“One possible reason that English dominates the lyrics of music

10

So when they left or died, the

although there was a disturbingly

in Germany is that the original German chanson that was popular before World War II was often performed by Jewish musicians and artists.”10

music did too. Kayla, a Jewish

vehement denial of this from my

American friend planning to visit

Lutheran relatives when I announced

me in Berlin, recently told me how a

the possibility over Christmas. How

friend of hers reacted when she told

to escape your own foreignness?

him her travel plans. “I would never

How to speak German without

go to Germany,” he said. “Politicians

stumbling too much? How to turn

there talk about ‘getting over’ the

my vapor into solid in this haunted

Holocaust, about ‘moving forward.’

town, where it is dark at four and

How dare they? How dare they say

you fall into winter nights like a long

enough time has passed?”

well? What is a passport? What is a

“What is beauty? What do you – what’s your understanding of enjoying? We went to fabulous restaurants in one area of Cleveland, an Italian one, and when we drove there, we parked in a strip mall.

It was an ugly place with no sense of beauty, no sense for how enjoying sensual good food cannot be functionalized. For them, you just need a roof and four walls in order to dig in. No notion of Gesamtkunstwerk. There is a division of daily life activities. As opposed to islands of multicentral joy.”11

past? And could it be Thomas Wild 11

Is it perverse to love faded paint?

When is it appropriate to ‘move

was more himself in an American cowboy hat?

“When you return to China, independent from nostalgia, do you have experiences where your heart opens up? Where you feel something is given to you?”12

spring sun as lovely and not feel

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No. 8

beyond’ destruction? To count the guilty to still be alive? The Berliners know much more about being alive than most of the expat ghosts that

“I bought a golden cowboy hat once in Nashville. We were walking down Broadway, hopping from one bluegrass bar to the other, when we found a tourist shop with cowboy hats. As soon as I put the golden cowboy hat on, a woman looked at me and said, That’s you! and I thought, Maybe she’s right. So I bought the golden cowboy hat. My friends were really embarrassed because I wore it into the next bluegrass bar. At the very end of the room there were some free seats. Some other guys were wearing full gear, also cowboy hats, and they were looking at me in a not-friendly way. Walking through the crowd, I heard some woman say, That hat rocks.”13

haunt their new bars stuffed with old furniture. But what do the dead Berliners have to say?

12

Yes. In the steam of tea being

poured from great heights, in the mist on long strolls, in the blue space of snow outside.

13

My last name is Sonnenberg, which

means sunny mountain in German.

Since

I’ve

moved

to

Germany,

I’ve been told it’s a Jewish name,

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103

Two Possible Ways Michael Regime Fell in Love with Language.

Travis Vick

1.

His underwear raining onto a small spruce tree, then, for days, hanging there limp, like fruit, or words.

2.

The unbreakable babble of a river at rest.

Then, during heavy rain, how the same river will wake, screaming.

“Even if you can’t understand it,” Michael’s father told him, standing on the bank of the Red, “you should still listen for a while. Just shut up and listen.”

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BOBBY NEEL ADAMS was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina and presently resides New York. He has exhibited worldwide, and his photographs are in the collections of: International Center for Photography, NY, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Station Museum, diRosa Foundation, and the Norton Family Foundation to name a few. Adams has received grants and awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, LEF Foundation, MacDowell Art Colony, and the Hermitage. His book Broken Wings was published by the Greenville Museum in 1997. Adams is currently working on two series of photographs: “Close To The Ground” and “DROWNED.” MATTHIEU BAUMIER was born in 1968 and is a French writer and poet who has published novels, essays, and poetry. His poetry is featured in many French reviews and magazines, as well as in Agora, Word Riot, Ditch, Polja, Poezija, The French Literary Review, Groenlandia, Poetry Quarterly, The Enchanting Verses, Literati Magazine, The Inflectionist Review, and 3:AM Magazine. He is currently chief editor of the French international and weekly poetry magazine, started in May 2012, Recours au Poème: recoursaupoeme.fr.

ELIZABETH BRUNAZZI is a writer, cultural historian, and literary translator who lives in Paris. Her work appears most recently in French Cultural Studies and La Traductière. She contributes a column on contemporary poets writing in English to the online international poetry review Recours au Poème (recoursaupoeme.fr) edited by Matthieu Baumier and Gwen Duguy-Garnier.

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A man in Houston tossing his laundry to the street from a third floor window, shouting, “If we want to go back to Nature, for God’s sake, we can’t go in these.”

CONTRIBUTORS

Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and Prairie

German works into English (semi-kolon.com). In 2010, she founded SAND Literary Journal in Berlin and worked as the editor in chief until 2012. Also a writer, her essays and short stories have appeared in several magazines and two anthologies, and she is now at work writing her first novel. She currently lives in Delft with her husband and daughter.

Schooner.

ELISABETH REIDY DENISON is a contributor to Coffee & Stink, a D.C.centered blog of arts and culture, and her literary criticism has appeared in Berkeley’s Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal. A New Englander by birth and disposition, Elisabeth lived on the East Coast of Scotland for several enamoring years, and is based for the time being in her hometown of Boston. This is her first poetry publication.

JAN GRUE is a Norwegian author and researcher at the University of Oslo, where he conducts research on disability and illness. He recently published a short story collection Kropp og sinn (Body and Mind) (2012 from Gyldendal) to much positive acclaim. He has published two other short story collections and one children's book.

JUNE GLASSON is an artist and designer living in Laramie, WY.

JAMES GRINWIS is the author of The City from Nome and Exhibit of Forking Paths, which was selected for the National Poetry Series (US) and published by Coffee House Press in 2011. He co-founded the journal and chapbook press Bateau in 2007.

MEGAN GRUMBLING’s work has appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, Indiana Review, and other journals. She was awarded a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and received a Robert Frost

VICTORIA GOSLING is a writer, editor, and tutor. Founder of The Reader Berlin, partner in Lovegrove & Gosling, and editor of Berlin Stories for NPR, her novel Letters to G. was shortlisted for the Mslexia unpublished novel prize in 2012. She is represented by Zoe Waldie of Rogers, Coleridge and White.

Foundation Award for Poetry. She teaches at the University of New England and Southern Maine Community College, serves as Reviews Editor for the poetry and arts journal The Café Review, and is theater critic for the Portland Phoenix. Her short film Carrying Place, a Sisters Grumbling production, is making festival rounds.

WILLIAM GREENWAY’s tenth collection, The Accidental Garden, is forthcoming from Word Press. His ninth collection, Everywhere at Once (2009), winner of the Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award, is from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series (2003). He has published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review,

PAULINA JAEGER is a friendly girl from Portland, Oregon. She loves speaking Spanish and will live in Costa Rica this fall. Her poem “How Life Isn't Fair” won an Oregon Poetry Association “New Poets” first prize and appears in Verseweavers. Her flash fiction is forthcoming in HOOT.

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BECKY CROOK is a freelance literary translator of Norwegian and

MANASI JIWRAJKA is a medical student in Australia with a degree in

IRA Children’s and Young Adults’ Book Award. Her poems have

Neuroscience. She was born in India 22 years ago, and has lived in a few places around the world including Indonesia, the UK, and the US. Writing fiction has always been her other passion even though words elude her at times, in which case she draws.

appeared in The Literary Review, 491, Drunken Boat, Versal, and many other journals. You can visit her at amymcnamara.com.

JÉRÔME KARSENTI is an artist, painter, and poet. He grew up in Nice, studied in Marseilles and Paris, and earned a degree in architecture from the École d’architecture de la Villette, Paris. He has dedicated himself entirely to his painting and writing since 1997. He has been featured in exhibitions in Paris, Gallerie Impression (January – March 2002) and Gallerie Tsenka (July 2002 – July 2003). His latest major exhibitions were “AND” in Paris, September 2011, and “Shadow’s Contract” in Berlin, where he has been living since 2009. He was published in France by Derrière la salle de bains and Rue des promenades, (recently a novel You Cannot Be Serious, Man and a book of poetry Pupilles de fourmis).

LUKE MACLEAN lives in Montreal. His writing has appeared in Paper Darts, decomP, The Prague Revue, and Word Riot.

AMY MCNAMARA’s novel Lovely, Dark, and Deep received the 2013

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SHANE MICHALIK’s work has recently been featured in two chapbooks, “City” and “White Horse,” published by Sidebrow literary press, and online at metazen.ca. She is currently living in Napa, CA (USA) and is working to complete the "Jack Schaefer" series into a book about her vision of the American West.

CHRISTOPHER MULROONEY has written poems in Orbis, Weyfarers, Kaffeeklatsch, Tulane Review, Pomona Valley Review, Or, Pacific Review, Streetnotes, and Otoliths.

OLIVIA PARKES was born in London and grew up in Los Angeles.

She currently works as a writer and a painter, and is studying at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. oliviaparkes.com.

BRADLEY SCHMIDT grew up in rural Kansas, completed a B.A. in German Studies at a small liberal arts college there, studied German literature, philosophy, and theology in Marburg, and started a doctoral project on Schleiermacher in Halle before completing a masters in translation studies in Leipzig. He lives and works in Leipzig as a translator and lecturer. His translations of contemporary

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DUSTIN JUNKERT started writing in order to impress girls. Most girls aren’t all that impressed by writing, he has found. But here’s hoping.

Dustin lives in Portland, OR. He recently had an essay published in the New York Times, and poems in The Journal, South Carolina Review, the minnesota review, Weber, Georgetown Review, GW Review, Grey Sparrow, and New Delta Review.

BEN MERRIMAN is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago and Fiction Editor at the Chicago Review. New work is forthcoming in n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books, Post Road, and the minnesota review. Read more at benmerriman.tumblr.com.

German prose and poetry have appeared widely online and in print.

Klondike” was published in the 2012 edition of Glint Literary Journal.

He currently resides in Portland, Maine.

BRITTANI SONNENBERG was raised across three continents and has worked as a journalist in Germany, China, and throughout Southeast Asia. A graduate of Harvard, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her fiction has been published in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2008 and shortlisted in the Best American Short Stories 2004. In addition, her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Short Fiction, X-Connect, and the Minnesota Monthly. Her nonfiction

TRAVIS VICK’s poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, Brevity Poetry, Short, Fast & Deadly, Thunderclap Press, Tigertrain, and others. He studied poetry beneath B.H. Fairchild and Bruce Bond, and currently lives in Texas.

ADRIAN WEST is a writer and translator as well as a contributing editor at Asymptote. His work has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, 3:AM, and The Brooklyn Rail. His booklength translations of Pere Gimferrer's Alma Venus and Josef Winkler's When the Time Comes will be published in the fall of 2013. He is currently living between Berlin and New York with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.

has appeared in Time, the Associated Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and National Public Radio. Her first novel, Home Leave, is coming out from Grand Central in Summer 2014.

VALGERDUR THORODDSDOTTIR is a freelance writer and publisher based in Reykjavík. Her first book of poetry, a collaboration with novelist Kári Tulinius, came out last year. medgonguljod.com.

DAVID VARDEMAN's short fiction “Green” was published in the April 2012 issue of Crack the Spine and in the Summer 2012 print anthology of the same. His short fiction “Conversations with Mr.

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LUTZ SEILER was born in Gera in Thuringia in 1963. Today he lives in the Peter-Huchel-Haus in Wilhelmshorst near Berlin. Following an apprenticeship as a skilled construction laborer, he worked as a carpenter and mason. In 1990 he completed his degree in German Literature; he has been the director of the literature program at the Peter-Huchel-Haus since 1997. He has traveled in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and was Writer in Residence at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. He has received numerous prizes for his work.

Prenzlauer Berg: Kastanienallee 91 路 call 44 02 44 02 W枚rther Str. 29 路 call 44 03 77 0 visit our website: www.solid-earth.de

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