Transnational

Exberliner, founded in 2002 by three journalists from the UK, Romania, and France, is Germany’s largest publication in English, with focuses on culture, reportage, and politics in Berlin, especially its international community. In the summer of 2019, their reporter Madeleine Pollard interviewed our Editor in Chief about what sets SAND apart, Berlin as a haven for international writers, and the question of how newcomers from abroad (especially literary ones) fit into German identity and public cultural funding policy. Here’s an extract:

Is Berlin still the haven for expat writers it’s supposed to be?

Berlin is just miles ahead any other city I know when it comes to its support of non-national literature – i.e. literature in languages besides the country’s official language. This year, the Senat opened applications for writing stipends for non-German-language authors. Do you know of any other city that gives foreign authors a salary for a year to write their book in their own language? It’s only open to six people per year, but they receive €2000 tax free every month! We don’t have the same pressure to conform to what people are doing in the UK or US. Obviously rising rents are a huge issue, but despite the expenses, the writing here is becoming much more sophisticated – maybe a little less avant garde. When I first arrived, there was an English book launch three or four times a year. There’s so much going on now that you’re constantly missing stuff, which really says a lot.

In the latest issue of SAND, the theme is “Out of Place” and in your editor’s note you invite readers to “drop place altogether”. But wouldn’t you agree that a lot of literature produced here has emerged from this very sense of Berlin as a unique place?

There’s a lot of extremely place-specific writing that’s coming out of Berlin because the city almost automatically inspires an interest in the archaeological onion peels of its successive and simultaneous identities. But the theme of this edition was sparked by these posters in Berlin which offered to pay foreigners to “go home”, and the political uproar over the xenophobic takeover of the Interior Ministry. We have this crisis with what it means to be a Berliner. The fact many Berliners don’t identify as German despite having a German passport isn’t just a reflection of their failure to integrate; it’s also a reflection of Germany’s failure to include them in its self-definition. In the city that accepted the most refugees in 2015 and has been the site of an international literary renaissance, we are at the frontline of these questions as to what it means to be out of place.

Read the full interview at Exberliner.

Expanding the Definition of German Literature Read More »


In December, at the 2018 Stack Awards in London, we met Haydée Touitou, who had just accepted a handsome wooden trophy for her work with the magazine The Skirt Chronicles, which she co-edits with Sofia Nebiolo and Sarah de Mavaleix. For the next installment of our ongoing Profiles in Transnational Publishing series, we asked Haydée to describe what inspired the three of them to publish an independent magazine at the intersection of gender and genre for an international readership.


How would you describe The Skirt Chronicles to our readers?

The Skirt Chronicles was born out of a shared observation between Sarah de Mavaleix, Sofia Nebiolo, and Haydée Touitou. We couldn’t find a publication made by women that didn’t identify as a women’s magazine. Nor could we find an intellectual publication which was also interested in photography and clothes. There are a lot of magazines we love, yet we felt there was still a place to be filled for a cultural and fashion publication that also had an attachment to literature. These are undeniably two of the starting points that led us to build The Skirt Chronicles. There is a challenge in representing a woman’s voice without a large audience assuming that voice is only directed at other women. That is one of the reasons we are proud to say The Skirt Chronicles reflects a feminine voice, yet does not exclude anyone from the conversation. We are three young women editing a cultural publication that aims to be as intellectual as it is beautiful, as informative as it is challenging, and in doing so, we wish to attract a wide, diverse readership.

 

What are the joys and challenges of publishing independently in France for an international audience?

Just like the three of us, The Skirt Chronicles is based in Paris, France, yet with a strong attachment to the people abroad who make it possible. Even if the publication is finalized in Paris, it is also made outside of France. Our contributors live in New York and London, but also in Kingston and Athens. We nourish each volume with our experiences abroad, with the aim of representing and celebrating different cultures and generations. Since we manage our own distribution as well as the handling of the orders placed through our online shop, we understand firsthand where The Skirt Chronicles readers can be found. It is always quite a pleasure to send packages out to China or Brazil, always wishing them well, for the journey can be quite long. That is why we decided to publish in English from the beginning: we wanted to address as many readers as we possibly could. And the English language does serve as a modern-age Esperanto as well as carrying such a beautiful tradition in literature.

 

It’s interesting that you call English a kind of modern-day Esperanto because Ludwik Zamenhof created Esperanto specifically to avoid the imperial or cultural baggage of a typical lingua franca (which, in his era, was French).

That’s true, however what is usually called International English does provide some sort of common ground. Outside of British or American stylistic and cultural expectations, it has maybe somehow reached an existence of its own. Because of the linguistic specificities of English, it is quite feasible to make the language one’s own, and in our particular consideration, it remains the less exclusive language. Of course when we are able to do so, we would love to have translations eventually included in the publication.

 

What is your relationship with the local and international publishing communities, and how is that specific to your location? 

Since Paris is predominantly seen as one of the fashion capitals of the world, numerous independent fashion magazines are based in Paris. Titles like SelfService, Purple, or Double do represent a part of the publishing community here. However, France also has a tradition of revues littéraires [literary journals], and it would be safe to say those worlds hardly ever interact. In this sense, it doesn’t really feel like Paris has a determined publishing community even though when you walk in places like Librairie Yvon Lambert, you definitely feel part of a society of printed matter enthusiasts. We do feel part of a more global publishing community since we each have friends who also publish magazines such as Apartamento, Her, or Kennedy Magazine whose editor in chief, Chris, is also a contributor to our Volume IV, for instance. There are a lot of independent publications today, but we feel that the more support we offer each other, the more everyone can benefit from this growing publishing community.

 

Have you found any tricks or strategies that you could share with other people publishing across borders? 

The main advice we would maybe give is to be well aware of what shipping costs and distribution entails. For now, we found our balance with La Poste, completed by occasionally calling upon Fedex, but we can’t say that there is one shipping service that beats them all. We do try to carry with us copies when we travel, and bring The Skirt Chronicles to stockists who can’t necessarily afford shipping costs. Since we are based in the European Union, it sometimes feels quite absurd to remember free circulation isn’t a global reality and that it sometimes is quite a hassle to be able to ship goods. In terms of strategies, the only one we have tried out so far is sincerity! It feels like the main way of reaching out and touching people across many borders.

Profiles in Transnational Publishing: The Skirt Chronicles Read More »

After the last two installments in our ongoing “Profiles in Transnational Publishing Series,” about Iceland-based ICEVIEW and Paris’s Skirt Chronicles, we turn our attention to the longest-running English-language magazine I’ve encountered yet from a place the British Crown never claimed: Kyoto Journal (KJ), which most recently released its ninety-fourth issue after thirty-one years. At Indiecon 2018 in Hamburg, we happened to be at adjacent tables, and their Director Lucinda “Ping” Cowing read a copy of SAND #16 between selling issues of KJ. (They later republished an essay from it, “Thirty Six Times” by Jodie Noel Vinson, on their website). Meanwhile, I engrossed myself in one of their own colorful and elegant editions, which bring together reportage, photo essays, poetry, interviews, profiles, memoir, and reviews on Japanese and Asian themes.

Last October, with this series in mind, I had a long Skype conversation with Ping about our respective journals and cities, a wide-ranging chat that for months I have struggled to sum up here. Most of all, I was struck repeatedly by the many specificities and commonalities of our chosen homes of Berlin and Kyoto – even though, at that moment, we were Skyping between Innsbruck and Lisbon. That discrepancy is not uncommon for transnational publishers, who are so often journeying (mentally and physically) between our chosen homes, our countries of origin, our far-flung readers, and elsewhere.

If Berlin – a city that keeps dismantling and remaking itself – attracted us for its anarchic opportunities, what magnetized KJ’s US-born founding publisher John Einarsen were Kyoto’s intricate living traditions. He and his contemporaries fell in love with Zen philosophy, austere aesthetics, and the city’s close relationship with the natural world as seen in local art forms such as ikebana, ink painting, and porcelain ceramics.

In some ways, that Kyoto is being drowned out by a technophilic modernity of video games and manga. Still, Ping told me, as soon as you take a side street away from downtown, you can see traces of it: surprise shrines, an artisanal tofu maker, a fifteenth-generation gold-leaf paper shop, and tiny old houses sandwiched between concrete and steel. Decades ago, the journal’s first generation of editors worried that they had missed Kyoto’s 1970s international heyday, when the city boasted a vibrant avant-garde theater and film scene. KJ 16 already asked “Is Kyoto Dead?”; seventy-seven issues later, both the journal and the city are still evolving, still going strong.

Just as SAND views worldwide writing and art through the lens of our eccentric German hometown, KJ sees itself as a Kyoto-centric forum for wider Asian culture, both in the journal’s pages and beyond. The journal describes itself as a “community that transcends place while respecting and celebrating regional and local identity.” As an example of this community, Ping mentioned the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles, which seeks to preserve and continue the craft of traditional Cambodian fabric-making and was the subject of a documentary by a Tokyo filmmaker. She also described the work of Ann Tashi Slater, a Japan-based Tibetan-American writer and regular contributor who wrote a jaw-dropping (and mouthwatering) essay for KJ about the Tibetan enclave in Darjeeling, India, where both Slater’s grandparents and the Dalai Lama resided. Narratives about Asia’s distinct cultural corners intersect far too rarely, and Kyoto Journal’s point of view is both deeply local and refreshingly – not naïvely – continental.

On to logistics. One of the journal’s greatest challenges comes from having so many readers in the States. KJ is printed in Kyoto, which has clear advantages when it comes to testing proofs and colors, but that places the printed copies at least one ocean – and six weeks’ shipping – away from US subscribers. Ping called this situation “painful,” and Berlin felt positively central in comparison. Other hurdles were more familiar. Like us, KJ is staffed by volunteers. Like us, they’re at the mercy of overseas postage rates. And like us, they have trouble securing public funding as a foreign-language publication, even though their work clearly raises the city’s international profile and draws visitors’ attention in ways a Japanese-language magazine never could. The Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs presented the journal with an award, but the state hasn’t offered any financial or institutional support. In other aspects, after all these years, KJ is miles ahead of SAND and most independent, transnational publications we’ve chatted with. They have fourteen Kyoto-based editors and several more abroad, the journal is stocked in major hotels, and they’ve made serious inroads into fiscal sponsorship. On top of that, they publish quarterly!

Finally, we turned to our personal statuses in our chosen homes. The same traits that drew so many of KJ’s makers and readers to Japan – the country’s insularity and traditionalism – can often make those “outsiders” feel less welcome. This is enshrined in the law. For example, visa options for creative freelancers are dismal to nonexistent. Permanent residency takes at least ten years, the “cultural activities” visa forbids working, and Japanese citizenship is basically out of the question. Although ideas of Germanness are also exclusionary, our relatively open immigration system here – with dedicated visa types for freelancers and artists and an open door for all Europeans – felt idyllic in comparison. Again I was reminded how directly “boring” logistical hurdles, such as immigration laws and housing costs, shape creative communities.

I was pleased to hear that instead of reproducing a narrower national vision, KJ takes an active interest in Japan’s cultural and ethnic minorities, such as the well-established Chinese- and Korean-Japanese communities. “We’ve tried to look at each of their experiences,” says Ping. “We know they are part of the Japanese experience, and the issue of what it means to be Japanese.” And the new 94th issue is, in fact, devoted to perspectives on Kyoto by people born outside Japan. KJ also sees itself as part of the local community, holding bilingual events in a neighborhood Japanese-language bookstore, for example. KJ’s insider-outsider perspective is ideally suited for exploring these questions: the roles of tradition and modernity, local belonging, and regional and global connections, as they are expressed in arts, crafts, writing, and culture.

Transnational Publishing: Kyoto Journal Read More »

In summer 2018, SAND joined the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), a New York-based network of hundreds of literary journals and small publishers, mostly in the United States. SAND’s Editor in Chief Jake Schneider was interviewed about the experience of publishing an English-language journal in Germany for the CLMP blog. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the interview:

What are some of the challenges you face publishing in English while existing in Germany?

Publishing in English in Germany is rewarding and gratifying. As an editor anywhere, nothing beats the feeling of a holding a freshly printed issue in your hands and remembering all the love and hard work that went into it. I’d like to emphasize that first.

On to the challenges. It’s fair to say that all independent literary journals are in precarious financial straits, but our location also rules out many of the usual fundraising strategies. In a country where a great many artistic projects are taxpayer-funded—where the arts are still mostly considered a public good—we are largely ineligible for that support, even as taxpayers. But because Germany’s public system functions relatively well, there isn’t the need for the same culture of donations as in the US. And it’s similarly hard to find advertisers. So, for nine years now, we’ve covered our printing costs mainly through issue sales and admission fees to our launch parties. I’m pondering these dilemmas, though. We want to raise more funds so we can start paying contributors at last.

But Berlin is not synonymous with Germany. Not long ago, and for nearly four decades, the city was occupied by four countries and two rival ideologies. West Berlin was physically walled off from both East and West Germany. This urban island, ringed by rivers and lakes, attracted artistic misfits of all stripes: draft-dodgers, muralists, clubgoers, musicians, squatters, punks, and underground poets. Their legacy remains: it’s not your standard European capital.

In other words, Berlin has a long history as a community of outsiders in creative isolation, a metropolis in between countries and systems. SAND sees itself within that history—not as more foreign occupiers, I hope, but as a creative community within this hotbed of self-driven artmaking. And literature in English and many other languages is thriving here. We’re proud to play a part in it.

Read the full interview on the CLMP blog.

Publishing in English in Germany Read More »

Printed Tongues: On Running a Bilingual Print Publication in Remote, Northern Iceland

by KT Browne, Editor of ICEVIEW magazine

Whoever said that print was dead was so, so wrong. I remember hearing this somewhere, sometime ago and thinking my god – how could it be? To say that I was discouraged when I heard this would be an understatement; I was crushed. I knew then that I wanted to work in publishing, but I wasn’t quite sure how, and I definitely didn’t know how I’d be able to do so if print, as someone somewhere claimed, was dead.

Or perhaps “dead” wasn’t exactly the term that was used. It might have been more like “on the way out” or “digitized.” Whatever the case, it was enough to drive me forward because, well, what else is the fear of failure supposed to do?

ICEVIEW Magazine is a proud print publication of creative writing and visual art based out of northern Iceland. It began in 2015 and has been published annually since then. Our goal has been twofold: to bridge the communication gap between locals and visitors of Iceland, and to examine artmaking and creativity in the context of travel. The former, as it turns out, quickly became the framework through which each volume developed, and we learned that cultivating the cultural importance of language—especially smaller ones like Icelandic—is as crucial as publishing the work itself. Each volume of ICEVIEW is published in both English and Icelandic, and this bilingual platform has allowed its audience to expand exponentially.

Of course, being based in a non-English-speaking country and publishing half in English does pose its challenges. We are always faced with the question of who we’d like our audience to be and the possibility that we might be, on some level, “disregarding” the Icelandic tongue by not publishing solely in Icelandic. But to that I say Nei! Most Icelanders know that their rapidly growing and diversifying society is a huge asset, and that part of this growth involves the acceptance of multiple languages as part of the fabric of society. Yet all that being said, having all our English content translated into Icelandic and vice versa is something we’re proud of and one of the cornerstones of our mission. To be able to give a short story or a poem another life by bringing it into another language is a unique opportunity. Thankfully, ICEVIEW’s bilingualism has only been met with positive feedback in Iceland. Here, in a country where literature is so historically revered, everyone seems really thrilled that Icelandic is being preserved and creative writing is being presented to a wider, English-speaking audience.

Beyond language, community-building is an extremely important part of what we do, but being based where we are presents another set of challenges altogether. For those who have not been to the north of Iceland, I will do you a favor and summarize it for you—it’s remote! Towns and villages are extremely small and family-oriented, which makes building an urban-style community of like-minded people a bit more difficult, especially when language barriers come into play. For this reason, building a digital, international community has been crucial for ICEVIEW’s success, and is, I would imagine, crucial for any independent magazine. It is, of course, also incredibly lovely to discover similar literary publications around the world to connect with—like SAND.

Still, fostering our local community is essential, too. We would not be able to function, for instance, without the generous support of a local cultural organization in Northwest Iceland that invests in small-scale arts and culture initiatives and cultivates the creative life of the region. We are long-time collaborators with a local artist residency, NES, whose team was crucial to getting the ball rolling on our outreach. We also have a good relationship with Iceland’s bookstore chain, Penninn Eymundsson, who sells our issues around the country much to our unending delight.

So from where I’m standing, print isn’t dead. Far from it. It is alive and thriving and so long as I continue to receive emails from the odd traveler passing through Keflavík Airport—I happened upon the latest issue of ICEVIEW on my stopover to Paris, or Brussels, or Malta and just wanted to reach out—I will rest easy and dream of freshly printed paper slipping between the fingers of someone somewhere across an ocean.

Profiles in Transnational Publishing: ICEVIEW Read More »

“Hike Up that Second Mountain”: The Stockholm Writers Festival

 

On 13–15 April, our friends up north will be holding the Stockholm Writers Festival, the Swedish capital’s first-ever writers’ conference in English. It is devoted to helping emerging writers “find their path to published.” The program features a keynote by prizewinning novelist Elinor Lipman, panels and workshops with established writers, editors, and agents, as well as plenty of chances to meet fellow Scandinavia-based writers. See their website for more and to sign up quickly before they sell out. Our conversation with Catherine Pettersson, the festival’s founder, ranged from the geography of dubbing habits to the collection of an aristocratic hoarder and, along the way, gave us a picture of Stockholm’s vibrant English literary scene.

 

SAND: How did the idea for the Stockholm Writers Festival come about?

Catherine Pettersson: I’m a writer myself and for years I’ve had to travel to other countries that have no reputation for being even bilingual. Italy has a big literary festival, Paris has big English-language literary festivals, and Stockholm didn’t have one. It’s crazy because I get the feeling that Sweden is even more highly bilingual English than Germany, which is pretty good in on the grand scale of things. 

 

If you look at a map of English skills around Europe, Scandinavia basically wins.

What’s surprising about Germany is that you guys dub television programs.

 

I think the countries that tend to speak better English have smaller languages that cannot financially justify dubbing. Here it’s a huge industry, and every major Hollywood actor has a German “dubbelganger.” Their careers get linked together.

I guess that’s the unintended consequence of being a small market. You have this disadvantage, but you speak great English. On the flipside, it was surprising to us that Sweden didn’t have any conferences in English. They do have a crime festival every summer that’s in English and Swedish, but primarily Swedish. 

 

So how would you describe Stockholm’s English-language literary community? Would you call it a community? 

From my viewpoint, it’s a community. I’ve been part of a writer’s group, Stockholm Writers Group, that has been aroundcontinuously in existence since 1994. K – kind of amazing. 

Now, thanks to digital, it’s getting easier and easier to build these communities. One of our members, Cassie Gonzales, is now teaching at Emory University, and whenever she’s back she holds mini craft workshops on Meetup, which are always oversubscribed. She used to tell me this, but I was traveling and just listening to the ambient bitching about why didn’t we have something of our own. And I thought, “Well, yeah, why don’t we? Why are we waiting for somebody to do this for us?  Why can’t we do it?”

 

You look around and you’re, like, “Why is this not happening?” And then you realize the number of people who could do it is actually fairly small and if you’re the one thinking it, then you should be the one doing it.

Exactly. The classic refrain: “If not me, who? If not now, when?” It was a slow dawning, not an overnight epiphany. Years of bitching and moaning and then going, “Well, wait a second, I’m a professional marketer. I run events. I know people. We can get really good people.” And then I was going to other conferences and I cold-pitched one of the agents we have on the program.  Brooks Sherman is kind of a rock star right now. And he said yes. Because they want to travel, they want to get out there.

Anyway, we’re kind of using the power of tourism, literary tourism, to get at some of these heavier hitters and then mixing it up with really great local writers. And that’s how we’ve made it possible financially.

 

Is it hard to publish when you live farther away from English presses and agents? 

Actually, I think it’s easier to succeed at a distance these days. Thank God we don’t have to post manuscripts with self-addressed, stamped envelopes anymore and wait months for a response to come through the post.

With digital, it’s gotten physically easier to transact the process. What’s harder is being away from your source material if you’re writing about your home country. That feeling in your bones of the zeitgeist is something that you lose from a distance. Then again, writing about alienation and being “the other” is more tangible when you’re living the life of an expat.

What’s been really interesting is that a full thirty percent of the people signed up for this are Swedish writers, even though the whole reason for doing this is that we’re unapologetically English, English, English.

 

That’s very impressive, and definitely a difference between the two places. If we announced a similar festival, we would not get thirty percent German writers. There is a kind of unwritten divide, which we’re really trying to bridge now.

Yeah, that really surprised us too. But then I talked to a couple of the Swedish authors we have on panels and I said, “Does that surprise you?” and they said no. Because everyone wants to get into the English-language market. And there’s a lot here for readers but not much for writers.

 

Have you noticed any patterns in English-language writing from Stockholm?

The writers I know are doing everything from plays to poetry to memoir and historical fiction. So there are no solid patterns. But we did notice from the First Pages Prize that a lot of the stories set in Stockholm leaned more toward Stieg Larsson than Astrid Lingren.

 

Can you say a bit more about the contest? Even if it’s too late to apply now.

The contest is to encourage unpublished writers to become published ones. It looks at just the first five pages of any genre. The idea is to reward exciting writing and fresh voices. And we’ve been over the moon at the quality of the more than 250 submissions.

 

What other “institutions” are there on the Stockholm English lit scene?

There’s the English Bookshop. And actually, one of our board members, a wonderful guy named Adnan Mahmutuvić, started the transnational creative writing masters program in English at Stockholm University. I think that’s remarkable. He’s the one judging the contest, by the way, and the process has been fantastic.

 

Sarah Hollister was saying that you don’t have a magazine like ours there, but we definitely don’t have a university creative writing program in English. So are the people in your writers’ group and the master’s program mainly from English-speaking countries?

In my particular writing group, it really is native English speakers. We’ve had Australians and New Zealanders and Americans and Canadians… and a couple of Swedes. Maybe two that I can think of since 1994.

They’re much, much more varied in Adnan’s Stockholm University class, of which I’ve met probably a third. Mexican, Finnish, Greek. Was there a Swede? There may have been a Swede in there. And only a couple of Americans. That really surprised me.

 

How would you sum up the festival for someone who hadn’t visited your website?

Well, in a phrase, it’s “find your path to published.” It’s this idea that, as an author, especially if you’re a newbie, you think that the big mountain to climb is the manuscript and then you realize there is a second, much higher mountain behind that one that you couldn’t see. So you need the craft, but then you also need the gear to hike up that second mountain, which is the industry: How you get an agent? Should you go indie, should you go traditional? If you undertake either of those journeys, how do you equip yourself?  

So there’s my pithy little elevator pitch.

 

These are the kinds of things that writers are not necessarily as good at. They’re good at writing and then there’s a whole other stage of the process.

Exactly, and the sad thing is how many writers that kills. I mean a lot of writers die right at the foot of that mountain. I think it’s a shame.

I was going to say, you should really come up to Stockholm and come to this writer’s festival!

 

I would have loved to! I was really excited to hear about it and then frustrated to find out it was two days after the London Book Fair.  

We set our date first and for some reason, they wouldn’t cancel. The bastards.

 

For the lucky writers who do get to make the trip to the festival, what’s one place they should see while they’re in Stockholm?

The Hallwylska Palace in the center of the city. The house showcases the artifacts of an aristocratic hoarder. Although much more tastefully appointed, naturally.

 

Interview by Jake Schneider, Editor in Chief

 

Catherine Pettersson, founder of SWF18, was born American and chose to become a Swede after falling in love with a man she met on an airplane. She plies her trade as a marketing consultant by day. And writes fiction at night. (Or, actually, in the morning, but night sounds more dramatic.) Reach her at [email protected].

The Stockholm Writers Festival 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.

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