editorial

We will try not to talk nineteen to the dozen in this editorial, but are you familiar with that urge to spill your guts before it's too late, before your teenage years are over? To savour the bittersweet nostalgia while you have a storm trapped inside your chest? To be reckless once more, and sure of being forgiven? To feel you have come to your full strength now, ready to hunt down the wolves? To balance on tiptoes on the threshold to the house of love, and then bring it down with a crash?

In our last teenage issue, we present you with a selection of watersheds, starting points and transfers, proving that although dreams may be hard to beat, they do take a beating sometimes.

One diamond stud in this issue is the multi-lingual poem cycle 'Between Home' by Julia Scheit, which earlier this year won the K.R.A.S.S. prize awarded by the city of Essen, in a competition for students, schools and apprentices in the city's bid for the title of European Capital of Culture 2010. Congratulations to our Ruhrpottmädel and events manager Julia, just back from her sabbatical tasting the creative writing - and other - delights of Liverpool, Cultural Capital of Europe 2007. Our consolation prize for it not being Bremen in 2010?

And talking of prizes: 27th May 2005 saw the award ceremonies for the fifth annual Daniil Pashkoff Prize, initiated by Writers Ink e.V. in Braunschweig. We are proud to announce that among the prize winners in the over-21 age group were three authors from this issue: Julia Boll (first prize for prose with her story 'Desert Skyline'); Franziska Kreuser (third prize, for her story 'Angel') and Katrin Oellerich (honourable mention for poetry with her double poem 'Tiger'/'Kids'). What emerges in the under-21 categories is particularly encouraging, and the prize is a wonderful way of promoting writing among the next generation. A special prize (in the form, interestingly, of a creative writing workshop: what a great idea) went to author B. Eleven, the pseudonym of Form 11b of the Gymnasium Große Schule in Wolfenbüttel, for their 130-page mystery novel of 'drugs, crime and death' Black Spring. Congratulations to Sabine Meier and her twenty-two authors. If you are interested in the Daniil Pashkoff Prize or in joining or supporting Writers Ink, visit them at www.writers-ink.de.

And talking of web sites: we are back online and our homepage has now been completely redesigned and restructured. We have added new depths and dimensions of text, image and sound, of news and memory. Our archive is being extended to include the editorials and contents pages of all back issues, as well as selected favourite texts from the past, our special free issues, and photo reminders of readings and launches. One new feature will be the newleaf audio book. On some of the pages you will still find the Watch this Space - Under Construction sign, but that just means that the next time you visit the site you'll find something new. Our thanks go out to our office manager Steffi Wiechers and David Leinhäuser, who between them re-built the complete site, a mammoth task. Thanks, too, to Ulrich Achenbach and Karl Heinz Wagner of the faculty computer lab in Bremen for their untiring technical advice, assistance and patience.

So let's sink one at the nineteenth hole. If we can find it.

Julia Boll, Simon Makhali and Ian Watson, June 2005

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