I lived in Berlin for five and a half years before I was accepted as a candidate for Notre Dame’s MFA in Creative Writing. The city is my home and foundation. It is where I spent the formative years of my adult life. In 2014, I co-founded a small, experimental poetry press, TABLOID Press, with artist and poet Nat Marcus, in Berlin. We have since developed an internationally recognized publishing practice. I’m learning German this summer in steps to begin publishing works in translation and communicating with German-speaking poets and artists. I hope to be of better aid to Berlin’s communities as a bilingual publisher and translator.
In all the time I lived in Berlin, I have been underconfident in German. Demands on my schedule when I was working full time as an ESL teacher didn’t allow for a lot of extracurricular freedom or devotion to the German language. It didn’t always matter although it was often an irritation. Berlin is an accepting place when it comes to English speakers, almost to a fault. But I’ve hit a wall in terms of movement and cultural access. Learning German will change my relationship to the city and let further light in, opportunity, eavesdropping, chatter. After two intensive courses at Goethe Institute this summer, I will become more confident speaking socially, I will have a command of grammar that is grounded in daily usage, practice, casual application. My main goal is to move out of doubt.
One thing I will miss is being anonymous in language. The experience of silence when one doesn’t understand the ambient language of a place stills and distills thought. This silence made me a writer. But with more and more recognition of German I hope to find more material in my mundane environment, to develop a compassionate and curious mode of daily listening that lends to the archival act of gathering material. Learning German will blend into the creation of texts, amplify awareness of language as a structure for understanding self, aid a transcultural sense of being.