Editing & Publishing Team
Dear readers,
another semester has passed and phew – what a ride it’s been! We’re beyond excited to present to you the newest issue of Literasea: Issue 3.
Once again, we have inspiring, captivating, funny, emotional, and impressive contributions to share, created by students and staff from the Europa-Universität Flensburg and Hochschule Flensburg alike. From poems that truly moved us to short stories, comics, photographs, artworks, and essays. Whatever you’re craving, one of our creative minds likely has you covered.
This issue’s theme is “multilingual.” Language connects us, sometimes in subtle, sometimes in loud ways. Some of us grew up with more than one language. For some, it means home, for some it is an escape. Some might even claim it holds little to no meaning at all. Yet, we all use it: to navigate, to express, to relate. It can be verbal or non-verbal, written, spoken or used to create art.
Language surrounds us, and we need it more than ever. Whether it’s someone shouting into the void, remembering a loved one, or simply sharing a quirky anecdote. Our contributors were free to explore what language means to them, and how to bring those ideas to life (or at least to paper).
As we wrote in our last issue: Literasea remains in motion. This time, our Editing & Publishing Team has shrunk considerably, but we’ve poured all our effort into crafting an issue that does justice to the incredible work of our writers and artists.
We hope you enjoy Issue 3 of Literasea and maybe even feel inspired to get creative yourself.
Your Editing & Publishing Team
………………..
Creative Writing Team
The (ambitious?) idea behind issue 3 was to throw the journal open and invite in any and all languages our contributors might want to use. As a European university in Germany, located a stone’s throw from the Danish border, with students and staff hailing from all corners of the globe, we are beautifully situated to celebrate linguistic diversity. Up here, for example, in this northernmost slice of Germany, we have Plattdeutsch, North Frisian, and Danish, mingling with Hochdeutsch and what I probably inaccurately refer to as Norddeutsch (a tip: just say ‘ne’ at the end of every question or statement you make). These languages jostle about alongside English, itself represented by staff and students from the USA and Canada and Ireland and England and Australia, but also by the many, many people for whom it is a second or other language. For many, probably most, of us wandering the EUF and Hochschule campuses, thinking and dreaming and planning and remembering and swearing and cooking and laughing in more than one language is simply the norm.
But, another interpretation of the theme cropped up, as we began to receive submissions from as far afield as Calcutta. Language as something we have a relationship with. Language as something we can fall in love with. Language as something we use to identify ourselves through. Essentially, the many ways in which we use our different languages, well, differently. I found myself drawn to that theme, too: I am a language teacher, but my personal language learning journey began in adulthood. Shortly afterwards, I began raising bilingual children. All of this has meant the many facets of linguistic identity are constant meditative companions of mine, as they are for the billions of people on the planet that live with and within more than one language.
My Creative Writing Workshop this semester has contributed writing in English (that is, after all, our purview) dealing with, as ever, a range of themes in a range of genres: short fiction, poetry, a conversational personal reflection. Their work joins writing from students and staff in German, French, Fering, Schleswiger Plattdeutsch, Arabic, and Burmese – a bouquet of languages doing what languages do best: affording us the very human ability to tell our stories.
Happy reading to you.