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...came from my former therapist, Frau Hering. She was an old woman, when I came to meet her. I think, she was about 77 or so years old, a kind of a sage. I found her through friends, shortly after I had arrived in Berlin in 1995, to live here for a year (this year is still not over btw!!)  I was 31 years old or so and she was my first ever therapist. After moving to Berlin I decided, that it was about time to work out some difficulties and shine some clearing light into some corners of my past and my present, and while we were at it, maybe even of the future. I went to see her once a week. Every session cost about 100 Deutschmarks, which was A LOT OF MONEY for me back than. But somehow I never asked her for a refund or to pay next time. I always managed to get that money together, which seems, looking back, like a freaking miracle.  She had a small apartment in Waidmannslust, a northern part of Berlin, to which I took the S-Bahn. I lived in Schöneberg, later in Neukölln, s...

..but you can not write an entire book about your irritation. You’d probably be depressed after 10 pages into it (which I am) I have been irritated ever since I started the book and yet, never could let go. I threw away pages and pages and pages, again and again and again, but I still have the idea and about 500 pages of material. Growing. The first idea I had was: I want to write a book about women. Good. No, rather not good. It irritated me how many women my age or even 10 years younger were stuck in unhappy situations. So I knew, this novel might become sort of a feminist book. I was irritated right away, and embarrassed, just thinking about the reactions to it by, say: men. I would lose friends I'd never had, that one was for sure. By the way: its Gloria Steinems 81 st birthday today! Most women (maybe even all women) I knew had children and were in relationships and they did approximately 85% of the housework (rather more), on top of that fulfilling the perfect...

Sometimes, I wake up and immediately start to write in my disco notebook. It is silver and it glitters so much, it could blind you actually. I got it from my friend Greta Brinkman, a bass goddess and one of my oldest friends. We have been roommates too. She is cool. Which you can tell, since she knows to give me disco notebooks! Sometimes, right after waking up, sipping my coffee, I find my thoughts so deep and profound and interesting, that I feel the total urge to share them here with you all. Maybe I should not do that, but I can not restrain myself. So, take this, people and have a great day! What I notice, when I am still The cat purring beside me. He sounds like a tractor or a car engine. Content. I hear a little sound in my ears, a quiet sound. I call it stillness. Its where I dive into, whenever I sit on my zafu, or wherever I happen to remember, that this little sound is my home, is really everything I need. When I am still, which I hardly ever am, which I try to ...

For my workshop in Lisbon, I am supposed to write a 500 words text about, what poetry means to me. That's, what I wrote...of course it is too long: 568 words :-( I need to practise Haikus more! Poetry for me is: putting the essence of a thought, a feeling, an experience, an impression into words, as beautiful, funny and deep as possible, as true as possible. To catch truth in midair with pen and paper. It always has to do with the Aha-effect of: yeah, right, that’s exactly how it was. Recognition of resemblance. To write poetry is to breathe and also to live, even if this may sound self-important or vain. Maybe this is even true for writing and me in general. I started it when I was 12 years old and I never stopped. I wrote my first poems, when I was fifteen and founded a poetry magazine at school. We met weekly and were poets. They all loved my poems, so I felt happy, which wasn’t my usual feeling as a teenager. It elated me, to have something to say. My best experience was...

"Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us." Fernando Pessoa When one is writing, success is not necessarily something you wanna count on. In the beginning, when I was like 15-25, I thought, I would one day be famous and of course rich. But later I learned, step by step, that in my case it was rather realistic to say, it was about the writing itself and the adventure it meant, inside and out, to just keep writing, no matter what, and to see where it leads me to. I still never cease to send my writing out into the world, for contests, to publishing companies and the like. I try to follow the rule to send out something once every week. And in 50% of the cases I get an answer that sounds like: "interesting work, but no thanks", in 49% of the cases I get no answer whatsoever and in approximately 1% of the cases I get an answer that is like: " congrats, you were a semifinalist!" or "congrats, we will publish your poem in our e-book collection...

After finding Margaret Atwoods ten rules for writing fiction I sat at my desk (did I mention that I have new glasses, since this morning actually, its the kind of glasses which make you remember that you are old: when I look through the upper part, I can see the house on the other side of my street, I can see my neighbor sitting at her desk, when I look through the lower part, I can see the screen - if I get lost between the two parts of my glasses, my world turns kinda blurry. I am a bit nauseous since this morning, but it is o.k., I am hangin' in), so I sat at my desk, played with the glasses, thought about Margaret Atwoods rules, blurred my vision in all directions several times, got dizzy, and thought about my rules to writing, not just fiction, really anything. I came up with eleven rules. Here they are: Keep a notebook, write in it as often as possible, about everything that matters to you (this morning, before picking up the glasses, I started # 150, I am not kidding, I ...

This is the english version, not an exact translation, of a former german post called "Advice to myself". (Please excuse my bad english and I am sure, the zillions of punctuation errors. I swear I will try and find a class to take in it!!!)   I read an interesting post by  Rachel Papers , that made me remember the german text and so the strong urge to write about it again and in English overcame me. There is also the great film  Lost in Living  by Mary Trunk, that is strongly related to the subject matter. I wrote about it here . Please everybody who is a creative mom, I am very interested in your experiences and thoughts and everything! A few months ago, I posted a poem by Louise Erdrich on my Facebook page. It was called:  Advice to myself   I exactly recall that morning and the feeling, that it was the perfect poem for me. (By the way it was the poem of the day at Garrisons Keillor's    Writer's Almanac  . If you subscribe they will ...

“I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still.” — Sylvia Plath, “You Ask Me Why I Spend My Life Writing” That pretty much sums everything up for me. NOW. But until I was able to sum everything up in this sentence, which I gladly steal from Sylvia Plath, it was a long and winding road. I started writing, when I was 12 years old, and I believe, I did it to escape my unhappy childhood home. It opened a room for me, in which I could be somebody else. So I started writing basically, because I wanted to be a writer, which was basically somebody, or maybe even some thing, nobody in my entire family of workers, drinkers, housewifes and farmers had ever been in touch with. Writers were probably not even people. But if they were, they lived far far away from our home, indulged in a lazy and worthless lifestyle. I loved it, and definitely wanted to be just that. There was no book in our house, but the ones, I started buying with my pocket money. I spent all my pock...