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Never, would I ever go so far as to say I favor one group over another. Never would I do that. I would tell you that the Second Tongue Fictionaut Group includes members whose first languages are but are not limited to Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Greek, Dutch, French and Malaysian. Here is what Dorothee had to say in brief (I decided that next week, if she’ll have me, perhaps we can do a dialogue about translated literature.) Meantime, here’s this: THE CULTURED GROUP WHICH IS BETTER THAN THE REST OF US CHUMPS ONLY THINKING IN ONE OR TWO LANGUAGES.

Kidding!
Love,
Nicolle

From Dorothee Lang: I’m German, and English is my second language, so I was amazed when i met 2 other Fictionauts with a bilingual background: Finnegan Flawnt and Nora Nadjarian. Together, we started the “Second Tongue Group” in Fictionaut, and it was surprising to see how many other Fictionauts are bilingual Second Tongue is the group for the bi- and multilingual Fictionaut, and for native English speakers who live and write abroad or who write in another language than English.

The idea for the ‘Second Tongue’ group sparked in ‘The Hidden Workshop‘, through a half sentence Finnegan had included in a thread about editing: “…and English isn’t even my first language, folks.”  I read this, was stunned, and messaged back, to tell him that English isn’t my first language either. From there, it didn’t take long to come up with the idea to start a bilingual group. The group has 27 members now, and beyond others, includes Fictionauts whose first language is Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Greek, Dutch, French, and Malaysian…

Dorothee also heads up the wonderful BluePrint Review, which brings us literature from a self-proclaimed “International Approach”:

The new issue of Blueprintreview is in the going-live phase right now– it’s the first issue that goes live in sequences, as the theme is (dis)comfort, and having all the discomfort up in one go might be have been a bit overwhelming.

The issue also includes a story that came directly from the Fictionaut “recommended reads” page: “Coffee” by Karen Swartz. There also is a story from another Fictionaut up: “Different” from Susan Gibb. Susan Gibb and I met through Fictionaut, I admire her hypertext skills. Parallel to finalizing the blueprintreview “(dis)comfort” issue, the new issue of blueprintreview is now going into the submission phase. The theme will be: “micro cosmos”, it’s an issue dedicated to flash fiction (short and very short stories), and to ‘flash’ photography (crops, close-ups, blurred photos.) Here’s the call for submissions.

As always, I asked her to plug herself here:

My first short story collection in transit has just launched, it includes short stories from different places of the world.  in transit is published under the blueprintpress label, this is a bit of a longer story, and also marks the revivial of blueprintpress. The next blueprintpress project will be connected to the micro cosmos issue – “micro novels” Here are the links to my webpage and my blog.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.


  1. 1 Living ?s for Dorothee Lang « Living ?s

    […] founding editor; international group-writing-project coordinator; Second Tongue writing community co-founder; and, storySouth Award preliminary judge. On top of it all, she maintains her own website […]



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