Maren Sandt

About Me

I spent the first 34 years of my life in Germany and have managed to publish some minor pieces (poetry and prose) in German literary magazines and anthologies.

Since 2007, I have been living "overseas" - first in Japan, then in Maryland. And while my kids (and the M.A. I am getting in "Modern Europe: History and Literature") are keeping me busier than I've ever been, I throw out random poems in this language that I love but do not call my own.

Why do you write?

Just before I turned four years old, I wrote my first two poems. One rhymed, the other one didn't, and they each had two lines.

I have always written and always felt that it is the most natural thing in the world for me to write - more natural even than talking. I guess that reveals I am at heart an introvert, but I generally hide it well.

Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian writer, put it this way: "[...]I exist only when I write, I am nothing when I don't write, I am a complete stranger to myself, fallen out of myself, when I don't write." ("[...] ich existiere nur, wenn ich schreibe, ich bin nichts, wenn ich nicht schreibe, ich bin mir selbst vollkommen fremd, aus mir herausgefallen, wenn ich nicht schreibe.")

Any favorite authors? Books?

German: Judith Hermann ("Sommerhaus, später", "Nichts als Gespenster); Franziska Gerstenberg ("Wie viel Vögel"); Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry; Max Frisch ("Santa Cruz"); Paul Celan. (Celan and Frisch both were lovers of Bachmann's. Oh my.)

English: E.E. Cummings ("it may not always be so, and I say..."); Dorothea Lasky ("Awe"); Margaret Atwood ("The Tent"); Oscar Wilde ("The Picture of Dorian Gray"); Shakespeare (Sonnets); C.S. Lewis ("Till we have faces").

I have been searching for contemporary writers of English short prose, but haven't really found anything that grips me yet. I'd greatly appreciate suggestions!