Lyz Pfister

  • Tutors: Lyz Pfister & Josh Hamlet
  • Start date: 28 Oct 2017
  • End date: 29 Oct 2017
  • Time: 3pm – 6pm (followed by dinner); 10am – 3pm
  • Where: tbc
  • Maximum Participants: 12
  • Cost: €80, early-bird special: €65 if you sign up by 12 Oct

Eat Me. Drink Me. and Counter Service present:

Eat Your Words: A Workshop of Food & Writing

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a “food writing” workshop. It’s a writing workshop that
uses food as a tool and looks at it as a place of access and entry into writing about memory,
experience, shame, desire, nostalgia, etc. All the good stuff.

We’ll be parsing apart how food inspires and propels good fiction and poetry, practice getting
away from food clichés, and exploring sensuality, memory, first impressions, and
imagination through flash exercises, writing prompts, and spirited discussions. And did we
mention the interactive dinner party?

Join Eat Me. Drink Me. and Counter Service for two days of food, wine, fun, and the chance
to explore your writing in a whole new way. Without resorting to clichés like that.
Space is limited.

* Day 1 runs from 3:00-6:00 pm and is followed by a dinner; Day 2 runs from 10:00 am-3:00
pm.

Lyz Pfister is the blogger behind Eat Me. Drink Me., a food and culture blog that looks at
who we are through what we eat. She’s also the former editor-in- chief and poetry editor of
SAND, Berlin’s English-language literary journal, so she knows some stuff about words.

Josh Hamlet is the editor of Counter Service, a publication featuring stories, photography,
and art from restaurant industry insiders, upstarts, and wunderkinds. A restaurant industry
insider himself, with an impressive list of pop-ups to his name, he’s based in New York.

Image credit: Sarah Boisjoli

Eat Your Words: A Workshop of Food & Writing Read More »

July 2017

SAND Presents
Workshops with Kathleen Heil
on Translation, Movement, and Phrasing
 

Our Issue 13 contributor Kathleen Heil is a writer, translator, and dancer whose many skills eagerly intersect. We are thrilled to be presenting two weekend workshops with her this July: one on literary translation into English and another examining phrasing in both movement and writing.

Style & Translation Master Class

This two-day master class is open to literary translators at all stages of their careers, translating from any language into English, as well as those with writing or translation experience curious to know more about the art and craft of literary translation. In this master class we will explore what makes literary translation distinct from other writing practices and investigate ways to hone the components of style that make for effective literary translations including tone, rhythm, and syntax.

The weekend will culminate with an open reading in which participants can present either a short text of their own translation or a favorite excerpt in translation. Additionally, for those wishing to have a more in-depth look at their writing, there will be four slots available for manuscript consultation with Kathleen (of work in translation or one’s own fiction, nonfiction, or poetry).

When
Master class: 8 and 9 July, 3–6pm
Manuscript consultations: 8 July, 6–8pm
Open reading by workshop participants: 9 July at 8pm

Where
Location in Berlin TBA

Cost
90 euros; 130 euros with Rhythm & Phrasing workshop and payment before 1 July

Info and registration*: [email protected]
Manuscript consultation*: 50 euros for a full manuscript review in any genre with written comments and a 30-minute session to discuss the text (3–5 poems or one prose manuscript, 10 pages or less)

*space is limited; early registration encouraged

Rhythm & Phrasing: A Workshop on Composing in Movement and Text

This workshop is open to anyone wishing to compose with greater efficacy by refining phrasing in movement and written texts. By investigating rhythmic patterns in the body and on the page, we will explore how to build these structures into meaningful phrases, in order to compose with greater freedom, precision, and presence. Dance experience is not required to take part, but rather an interest in/experience with writing, movement, and/or performance.

When: 22 and 23 July 2017, 3–6 pm
Where: K77 studios, Kastanienallee 77 Berlin
Cost: 60 euros; 130 euros with Style & Translation workshop and payment before 1 July
Info and registration: [email protected]

space is limited; early registration encouraged

About Kathleen

Kathleen Heil is a writer, translator, and dancer. Her translations, poems, stories, and essays appear in the New Yorker, Two Lines, Penguin Random House, Fence, and many other publications. She holds a Master’s degree in Creación Literaria from the Escuela Contemporánea de Humanidades in Madrid as well as an MFA in Creative Writing & Translation from the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, where she also taught literary translation, creative writing, and dance. A former member of Dance Arizona Repertory Theater and Rumblepeg Dance Theater, Heil has worked with various artists in the U.S. and Europe and performed her own choreography in New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Madrid, and elsewhere. A 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literary Translation Fellow, she lives and works in Berlin. More at kathleenheil.net.

Workshops on Translation, Movement, and Writing Read More »

30 May 2017

Florian Duijsens, Fiction Editor,
on the Berlin Writing Prize

The Circus’s Nina Dörner interviewed our fiction editor, Florian Duijsens, about the Berlin Writing Prize, the meaning of home, and how the winner can spend a focused winter in Berlin (while staying for free at the Circus Hotel).

This is the second time SAND has been involved with The Reader Berlin’s annual writing prize. How did you develop your work together?

The English-language literary scene in Berlin is as welcoming as it is tightly knit, and Victoria is a key figure in this community, organizing events, retreats, and classes, and generally being a great supporter of writers throughout the city – she’s also a wonderful writer herself! Her dedication to the craft of writing is impressive, and just like us at SAND she’s a true believer in the craft of editing, the way the stellar writing in a strong submission can be made to shine even brighter through patient and precise editing. She’s assembled a marvelous troupe of judges this time around, and I’m very honored to be included.

This year’s theme is “Home is elsewhere.” What sort of responses are you looking forward to?

As a journal based in Berlin, we often receive thinly veiled memoirs of people’s visits to our fine city. And while it’s great to relive the thrill (and inevitable subsequent sense of deception) of discovering a new place, these accounts often treat this new city’s counterpart, “home,” as a stable concept, while to most of us it is anything but.

There are many writers who have addressed this question – I’m thinking of Joan Didion, W.G. Sebald, or Valeria Luiselli, but also former SAND-contributor and former Berliner Brittani Sonnenberg – and I am very excited to read work that similarly goes beyond mere travel reportage, stories or essays that tackle just what it is that we’re looking for each time we pack our bags.

Read the full interview at The Circus blog.

Florian Duijsens on the Berlin Writing Prize Read More »

8 June 2017

Stadtsprachen Magazin and SAND
Bring You Parataxe Presentation

What languages does Berlin write in? The PARATAXE event series showcases Berlin authors who write in languages other than German in discussions, lectures, and translations.

The June 2017 event presented Sonia Solarte (Colombia/Berlin) and our Issue 10 alum Ian Orti (Canada/Berlin) with texts translated into German especially for the occasion by Christiane Quandt and Joey Bahlsen. Stadtsprachen’s director Martin Jankowski also discussed SAND with Jake Schneider, our Editor in Chief.

Sonia Solarte was born in Cali, Colombia, where she worked as a teacher, psychotherapist, voice actress, and cultural appointee. She has lived in Berlin since 1988. From 1991 until 2013, she worked as coordinator of the S.U.S.I. Intercultural Women’s Center in Berlin. Since 1992, Sonia Solarte has been singing in the Orquesta Burundanga, which came to be known as the first all-women salsa band of Berlin. In 2009, she founded the “Trio Sol Arte.” Sonia Solarte has participated in various literature and poetry festivals. Her poems have been published in numerous national and international anthologies, literary magazines, and journals in several Latin American and European countries.

Ian Orti (featured in SAND Issue 10) was born in Canada to Ecuadorian and Irish parents. He is the author of the award-winning books The Olive and the Dawn, and L (and things come apart), as well as his most recent story collection Royal Mountain City Fugue. His short stories and poetry have been published in journals across North America and Europe and his first book was published in French with Les Editions Allusifs. Orti was featured in the Big Small documentary series for the Pop Montreal music festival by Australian director Tim Kelly and is a former columnist for McSweeneys in the US and Matrix Magazine in Canada. He has lived in Berlin since 2011, where he is now working on his next novel.

PARATAXE (supported by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa) and stadtsprachen magazin jointly introduce today’s multilingual authors and literary scenes of Berlin.

 

Parataxe with Sonia Solarte & Ian Orti – 8 June Read More »

14 June 2017

SAND Presents
Collective Love Story
at Love Story of Berlin

In cooperation with SAND, the new English bookstore Love Story of Berlin presented an evening on the universal theme of love in all its manifestations on Wednesday, 14 June at 8pm. Six Berlin-based English-language writers had written stories, novels, and essays depicting moments of love and heartbreak, casual dating, and coupledom, from the doldrums to cloud nine. In a collaborative workshop, the authors linked excerpts from their separate works into one collective love story, which they will present to you at our reading.

Jake Schneider, editor in chief of SAND, hosted the evening. 

Details

Time: 14 June, 8pm
Admission: free
Location: Love Story of Berlin, Kastanienallee 88, 10435 Berlin, Germany
Transportation: M1/Tram 12 Schwedter Straße, U2 Eberswalder Straße

Readers

Maree J. Hamilton is a staff writer for Autostraddle.com. Her work has also appeared in The Rumpus, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, Kaltblut, and The Emerson Review. She hosts monthly storytelling events in Berlin, and writes a mean limerick, as well as some nice ones.

Kathleen Heil is a writer, translator, and dancer. She has published in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Fence, and elsewhere, and performed in New York, San Francisco, Madrid, and other cities. Find her this July in Berlin teaching workshops on literary translation and composition in movement & text. More at kathleenheil.net.

Scott Martingell has been working as a voiceover artist in Berlin since 2008. He wrote and performed in dance pieces in Copenhagen for eight years and, as MC Jabber, was lyricist and co-vocalist in the Danish trip-hop band Blue Foundation, whose tracks featured in Miami Vice and the Grammy-nominated, Billboard#1 album soundtrack for Twilight.

Kate McNaughton was born and raised in Paris by British parents, which left her culturally confused but usefully multilingual. She now lives in Berlin. Her debut novel HOW I LOSE YOU will be published by Doubleday (UK) and Les Escales (France) in 2018.

Ben Miller is a writer and researcher at work on new fiction and the transnational history of queer identity formation between Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany and postwar California. His fiction, essays, and criticism have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Jacobin, Pelican Bomb, Lambda Literary, and The Open Bar at Tin House. Benwritesthings.com

Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His fiction and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, The Baffler, Dissent, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books. His debut novel The Zero and the One was published in March 2017 by Twelve Books.

Collective Love Story Read More »

19 May 2017

Berlin Writers and Rent
SAND Profiled in The Local Germany

The morning of the Issue 15 launch, The Local published an article profiling SAND after interviewing our editor in chief. The two-hour conversation with The Local Germany’s editor, Jörg Luyken, kept coming back to the pressing issue of Berlin’s housing crisis and its impact on the writing community here. The article begins:

Rising rents are tightening the screws on aspiring young writers, but the capital city still offers a uniquely cosmopolitan literary atmosphere, the editor of a Berlin literary magazine tells The Local.

Ever since Christopher Isherwood penned his classic collection “The Berlin Stories”, partly fictional tales of life in the dying years of the Weimar Republic, the German capital has had an allure for broke foreign writers trying to make a name for themselves.

Cheap rents and the fact that you are “sitting in the shadow of history” still act as a magnet for young writers almost a hundred years later, says Jake Schneider, editor-in-chief of SAND Journal, a biannual literary magazine based in Berlin.

“If you have a certain number of creative people in one place, the one-upmanship creates this creative ferment. That is definitely something that has existed here, and I hope it will continue to, despite rent increases. It is something that is exciting to share with people who aren’t in Berlin,” Schneider tells The Local.

But the difficulty for foreign writers to get their names on a letting contract, and the rapid increase in rents are putting a pressure on this community, he says.

Read the full article at The Local Germany.

Berlin Writers, Rent, and SAND Read More »

16 May 2017

Literature Away from Home
An Interview for LiteraturWissenschaft in Berlin

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Chris Fenwick from the LiteraturWissenschaft in Berlin blog spoke with Jake Schneider, our editor in chief, about being a English-language journal in Berlin, the local scene, and literature across communities. Here is an excerpt: 

Chris Fenwick: SAND is an English-language journal based in a German city. How do you think it differs from journals in English-speaking countries?

Jake Schneider: SAND itself is a Berliner by birth, even if virtually everyone who’s worked on it over the past eight years is a Berliner by choice, born elsewhere and likely to move on eventually. This a city of fleeting convergences, eager arrivals and sudden departures, and all that history has left many layers of unique creative residue, which is why we aren’t just a direct transplant from some other place where English is the official language.

In cosmopolitan Berlin, English now represents a kind of horizontal communication, often between people who grew up speaking a third or fourth language. English is the language people arriving here speak. That makes it a symbol of inclusion, while German is a daunting gate that fresh Berliners who are serious about settling down can only pass with years of study and practice.

So yes, the “global” status of English comes at the heels of the British Empire and (fading) American hegemony. But that background is irrelevant to international Berliners trying to meet halfway for a conversation. Compared to the scenes in languages like French, Russian and Hebrew that are by nature less accessible to people from other countries, the English scene represents a semi-neutral internationalism.

Maybe if we at SAND had more homogeneous backgrounds, matching passports and a common frame of reference, we would be a little more like those other English-speaking journals back “home.” But we simply don’t draw on a singular, default national experience. We don’t share any other home. Everything we publish is equally “foreign” and therefore equally relevant.

In addition to the expected Americans and Brits, we’ve featured contributors from all five continents, many of them living outside their countries of birth. For example, Avital Gad-Cykman, whose flash fiction piece “Two Peas” will appear in the new issue, is an Israeli living in Brazil who writes in English. (We’re very excited she’ll be here in person to read at the launch party this week.) Our team currently has at least seven nationalities. None of this is deliberate, but it certainly informs our perspective and the work we find interesting.

Read the full interview on LiteraturWissenschaft Berlin.

Literature Away from Home Read More »

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