Preface
Editing & Publishing Team
Dear readers,
we are delighted to present to you the very first issue of our literary journal Literasea – a literary magazine that hopefully will serve as a platform for creative experimentation for students and staff of EUF in the future.
Our Editing & Publishing team consists of students from the Kultur – Sprache – Medien degree program. Our diverse degree program offers us plenty of opportunities to work on different projects, which is how this journal came about. Over the past few months, we have worked hard to not only hold the first printed edition of Literasea in our hands but also to have a website filled with literary content.
For most team members, this is the first project of its kind. It involves many hours of joint work, accompanied not only by laughter, but also by occasional discussions and many brainstorming sessions. There were many decisions to be made to end up with a cohesive journal.
We now hold the first issue of Literasea in our hands and couldn’t be prouder to present to you the German and English texts of numerous authors and artists.
We hope you enjoy reading and discovering Literasea!
Your Editing & Publishing Team
Preface
Creative Writing Team
Most of the writers in this first issue of Literasea are part of my Creative Writing class. This semester, the class was almost exclusively a workshop. That means the sole purview of our weekly meetings was to share our responses to a fellow writer’s work. A workshop’s job is to provide feedback and guidance which, in turn, supports the writer in their next writing phase of the project. Workshops can be a daunting, difficult, but always a dynamic place, as all writers learn to give and receive feedback. The writer at the centre must learn to be workshopped as much as the writers sitting in the weekly circle must learn to workshop.
The issue’s theme strikes me as particularly perfect given large swathes of our workshops this semester were spent discussing characters. Possible backstories were sketched, motivations excavated and debated, the hunt for the why a fervent, ongoing one. When you read the stories, I like to think you might see both the roots and fruits of these conversations and excavations. And then there are the poems, a whole sea of them, words strung together so carefully, stitched so deliberately with full stops and commas or allowed to crest enjambment’s wave. Words swimming perfectly in synchronisation, words I promise you will return to, time and time again, and each time, see something new in.
I am inordinately proud of the work that has gone into creating this first issue. Please, enjoy it.
Liv Hambrett, May 2024.