Diaspora, Manatees and the Weird: Samanta Schweblin & Ricardo Domeneck on Writing in Berlin

00:00:00: When does literature happens?

00:00:03: This magazine on the table is just, what is this, an object?

00:00:07: So someone has to came, the reader, and read a piece, and go through the words of a writer.

00:00:17: And it's in this movement that literature happens.

00:00:20: It's something that happens in the present.

00:00:26: You're listening to Berlin Review.

00:00:28: I'm Tobias Harbocorn and this is a live conversation recorded at the Literature's Berlin Last Sahr.

00:00:35: This was the large of our third reader and while the magazine has now reached its fifth edition, many parts of the conversation about how to be a writer and a reader in disorienting times are just as alive and urgent.

00:00:47: today.

00:00:49: My colleague and interview editor Samir Salami spoke with two writers featured in Reader Three.

00:00:56: Samantha Schraebling from Argentina is a master of the long and short narrative.

00:01:02: Her story collection, Seven Empty Houses, won her a National Book Award in two thousand twenty-two, and we're proud to publish in our year three a story, a fabulous animal that speaks about death, a fateful phone call, and the wish to become a horse.

00:01:19: Ricardo Domenech is a writer and critic from Brazil.

00:01:23: He's the author of four poetry collections of his own.

00:01:26: And in our reader three, he took a deep dive into the life and work of the Brazilian novelist Victor Herriger, who died way too young and only twenty-nine in two thousand eighteen.

00:01:38: Together with Samir, both writers, who've been living in Berlin for a number of years, discuss how their writing was shaped by literary magazines, diaspora, and keeping the weird alive in a world that feels like a mix of cheap satire.

00:01:54: and unending police reports.

00:01:57: Here is their conversation.

00:02:06: Samantha, I'm curious.

00:02:08: So was there at one point in your life or in your career, was there any moment where literary magazines played a significant

00:02:16: role?

00:02:18: So when I was twelve, thirteen, there was a magazine in Argentina that was called El Pendulo.

00:02:25: That was amazing because It was a very multidisciplinary magazine, so you had fiction, some chronicles, cartoons, illustrators would work there.

00:02:39: And, for example, all my first encounters with very international science fiction authors, like, for example, Ray Bradbury, Ballard, Philip Kadik, Lovecraft.

00:02:51: This was the place where I met them, and I read them for the first time in between.

00:02:57: also very good Latin American authors, Mario Lebrero or Angelica Gorodische, they published mostly science fiction and fantastic literature.

00:03:10: But also I think it was very important because in this magazine it was not only about the authors but also about the readers.

00:03:19: So readers would have small columns and give them opinions about a particular book or criticize something.

00:03:27: and also I read for the first time literary interviews when you as a boy a girl sing for the first time.

00:03:37: oh yes there is a routine when you write something.

00:03:40: oh yeah you have to work a lot with a piece of work to really make this work.

00:03:46: you know I think I started to think about that

00:03:49: process

00:03:50: Thanks to this magazine.

00:03:54: Was there a similar like initial moment or something else?

00:04:00: I mean when I started there were a few magazines already in activity in Brazil.

00:04:04: and of course when you are an unpublished writer there's always

00:04:07: that illusion that when you

00:04:09: need to get published because your life is going to change you think that like you're going to walk the streets shining a little bit more than the others.

00:04:17: but for me personally the great experience was actually starting a magazine with other poets my age because I always feel that of course like you you're always looking up to older writers and you look for a mentor or so and so on.

00:04:31: but I always tell younger writers nowadays that I feel that you really having a group of writers your age of your generation is extremely important.

00:04:39: so it's starting like the first magazine that started in two thousand seven with three other Brazilian poets Angelica Freitas, Madeleia Garcia and Fabiola Nucalisto and Escodo Modo de Usar e Companhia.

00:04:49: It was really important to create somehow this community of writers and to start understanding what are the questions of my generation?

00:04:58: Do we want

00:04:58: to answer the questions from previous generations or do we have different questions

00:05:02: that we want

00:05:02: to answer?

00:05:03: So for me, this creation of this community and also the idea of being a writer or a reader, I always like to feel that writing is just the most intense form of reading, in a way, that it's such an intense form of reading that you're creating the text that you read.

00:05:19: I mean, I know that sounds maybe a bit too metaphorical, but in

00:05:23: a way I like to feel

00:05:24: the writer as just a very intense reader.

00:05:26: I always found this a very Latin American topic.

00:05:29: Writing is just like a kind of natural extension of intensive reading.

00:05:34: someone.

00:05:36: I want to ask you something that in a preview this is not our first conversation we already talked a few years ago about your work and your literary career if you want and then you there told me Once you arrived in Berlin, you discovered your generation.

00:05:59: The other writers of your generation that were writing in Spanish from Latin America, but that you didn't have access to in the same sense that you had in Berlin.

00:06:09: Can you tell

00:06:09: us a bit about

00:06:10: this?

00:06:11: And also maybe if magazines again played a role in that, not just that

00:06:15: you got the books, but also

00:06:16: maybe magazines.

00:06:18: played a super important role because I remember in the for example in the seventies we have the military coups in Argentina.

00:06:27: in the seventies we have

00:06:29: two

00:06:30: super important magazines El Escarabajo de Oro y El Grillo de Papel who was Silvio de Paraguirre, Liliana Hecker and Abelardo Castillo were directing these two magazines and they went from Argentina through all Latin America.

00:06:48: So but the big problem here even in between the Spanish speaking world is like for example even in the eighties and the nineties if you publish something a very good book then the Spanish in Europe will publish

00:07:04: you

00:07:05: like in

00:07:06: Barcelona.

00:07:07: that would take three or four years and then if it worked in Spain then they will put the book in the rest of the small countries in Latin America.

00:07:17: So, for an Uruguayan to read a Chilean, it could take like ten years.

00:07:22: It was crazy.

00:07:24: It was like that.

00:07:25: And if you don't write at Elismo Machico, it's even worse.

00:07:28: Yes, exactly.

00:07:29: But we don't write those things anymore.

00:07:33: So, for answer your question, when I came here, it was at the beginning of the... it was twenty... I was suddenly like living like a thirty minute walk-in from one of the biggest libraries with an Iberian American age.

00:07:52: You can say it in German.

00:07:54: I think the official name is El Ibero.

00:07:58: It's very

00:07:59: close.

00:08:00: Next to the Stave

00:08:02: in

00:08:03: Fotsdamerplatz.

00:08:04: So here

00:08:04: for the first time I could find all this book just at hand.

00:08:08: and I started to read more Latin American people being here in Berlin.

00:08:14: Ricardo, what about you?

00:08:16: How did arriving in Berlin, you arrived quite early, right?

00:08:20: You're here... In

00:08:23: two thousand and two.

00:08:24: Yeah.

00:08:24: I mean,

00:08:25: that distance is always good, in a way, because there are so many things that you take for granted or that you take as just natural, even in the language, things that it's almost like when you

00:08:35: start

00:08:35: repeating a word and it starts becoming absurd.

00:08:38: When you are in another country surrounded by a language that sounds completely different and also has a different structure in many ways, you start realizing the constructiveness of your own language in a way and that starts playing more of a role.

00:08:51: I feel that I started playing a bit more with sound because the sound of the Brazilian Portuguese became more clear to me by being here.

00:09:00: And there are some things that we can see with a certain distance as well, that when you are enmeshed in the country, at the same time, I don't know, you probably lose certain things.

00:09:07: You probably lose a certain context with the zeitgeist of the country in a way.

00:09:13: But now it doesn't really matter if you are in a small town in the middle of the country or in Berlin, because through the internet you can still participate in the conversation.

00:09:21: So it's still possible to be present even

00:09:23: though you're absent in a way.

00:09:25: So you're also publishing your own magazine.

00:09:30: It has a wonderful name.

00:09:31: I'm very jealous of this name.

00:09:32: Paysche Boy.

00:09:34: Paysche Boy is what you in Germany call a ziku.

00:09:37: I think in English there is manatee.

00:09:40: I don't know if you have a picture of these animals.

00:09:42: They are very big.

00:09:43: They live in the sea.

00:09:45: But they breathe.

00:09:46: So they have to get up every five or nine minutes or so to take a breath.

00:09:50: And so you can whale watch them or sea cow watch them.

00:09:53: But you only see them coming out.

00:09:55: And they are extremely big animals.

00:09:58: And they only eat grass.

00:10:01: So I was thinking, what is behind your magazine?

00:10:03: Is it like, is it a vegan and voracious magazine or what is behind it?

00:10:07: No, it's not.

00:10:08: I don't know.

00:10:10: Okay.

00:10:11: Why?

00:10:11: Like now I have to go into my unconscious to find out why I named the magazine that way.

00:10:16: I mean, at the time I was really interested in this concept of zoopoetics.

00:10:20: That's something that is being discussed a lot in Brazil right now, which is like,

00:10:24: how can you

00:10:25: present the consciousness of another species?

00:10:28: in human language?

00:10:30: and then Kafka goes into it and so on and so forth.

00:10:34: All the writers that tried to present the consciousness of another species.

00:10:38: and in a country like Brazil where we have this very strange and schizophrenic.

00:10:44: even relationship with nature Brazil always wants to separate very clearly this is civilization this is nature and so on so forth.

00:10:51: also because they wanted to prove to the Europeans that they are also civilized.

00:10:55: they also have stone buildings

00:10:57: and stuff like this

00:10:58: and it's a very schizophrenic relationship I think that Brazilians have with nature even though we are surrounded by it.

00:11:04: I also feel that it's very It's a very different relationship that we have with nature.

00:11:09: also to here because every time a German asks me to go take a stroll in nature, even though I've been here for a very long time, I still have that Brazilian programming comes into my mind.

00:11:21: What do you mean?

00:11:22: That's dangerous.

00:11:24: Because here,

00:11:25: nature... I thought you would say there is no nature.

00:11:28: I mean, there is something that you call nature, so

00:11:30: completely

00:11:30: humanized.

00:11:31: Every tree has been millimetrically chosen to be here and here and here and so on and so forth.

00:11:37: But the big predators are gone.

00:11:39: The worst that can happen to you is meet a wild boar that might, you know, actually cause real damage.

00:11:45: But still, it's different from, like, you know, in Brazil, you have to be careful with the spiders, the snakes, and depending on where you are, it's still... have big predators.

00:11:51: so there's this feeling of nature as dangerous and we're discussing of course because of the climate collapse and so and the Amazon and this is very this has always been very present in Brazil.

00:12:03: but I think there's a shift in how we're discussing

00:12:05: it now.

00:12:06: and I was looking for an

00:12:07: animal.

00:12:07: I'm gonna try to not talk too much.

00:12:09: sorry for the monologue but I also feel the Brazilian writers they

00:12:13: love like.

00:12:14: there's an obsession with the jaguar Like, there's always the jaguar, because it's this dangerous animal.

00:12:19: And everybody wants to be a jaguar.

00:12:20: And I prefer the capybara and the manatees.

00:12:26: I think somebody has to be prey.

00:12:28: We can't all be predators, you know?

00:12:29: And I don't mind being a prey, so that's

00:12:35: it.

00:12:36: Everybody should read, though, the wonderful story, My Uncle, the Jaguar.

00:12:41: That's a really good one.

00:12:42: By Gemma de Sousa.

00:12:44: I think it's... There must be a German translation.

00:12:48: There is

00:12:49: a German

00:12:49: translation.

00:12:50: Exactly.

00:12:51: My uncle

00:12:53: the jaguar.

00:12:55: Animals are a perfect cue to make a transition.

00:12:59: that is known.

00:13:01: Samantha, animals appear a lot in your stories.

00:13:04: But in that story, there is a horse.

00:13:08: An injured horse, a suffering horse, there is a dead boy, there is two people that once lived in the same.

00:13:16: I think it's not a part of Buenos Aires, right?

00:13:18: It's a city in the Gran Buenos Aires.

00:13:21: And there is a kind of strange non-communication about this tragic case of the death of that boy.

00:13:29: And the horse plays a certain role.

00:13:31: And

00:13:32: I was

00:13:32: struck by one sentence.

00:13:34: At one point, I don't think it's the narrator, right?

00:13:38: It's just the character.

00:13:40: They were talking for some time on the phone.

00:13:42: There's a lot of silences and pauses.

00:13:44: And then she says, suddenly I knew what this phone call is all about.

00:13:48: Do you sometimes have this feeling when you read your own stuff that you suddenly know what it's all about?

00:13:53: Because it's hard to tell what your stories are

00:13:56: about.

00:13:59: No, it's easy

00:14:00: to tell.

00:14:01: No, it's a good thing, of course.

00:14:03: No, it's a good thing.

00:14:07: Rebekah Solnit says that a good book is a hurt bumping in someone else's chest and I love this saying and I think it's about that.

00:14:16: so like for example I mean the title of the new book is The Good Evil, the Buen Mal, so it's this strange relationship between the good and the evil and what is good and what is evil.

00:14:28: but it's not something in general.

00:14:30: it's a very very very specific thing that I want to share.

00:14:34: I really like the title.

00:14:35: it triggers some ideas about morality and so on and I think the dedication or the quote the motto I don't know how to say that in slogan in English The rare, the weird, I don't know how to translate this perfectly, is more certain.

00:14:55: I think so, yes, it's from Silvino Campo.

00:14:58: Yes,

00:14:58: and I was thinking about this a lot.

00:15:02: As we already mentioned, you're a writer who was born in Argentina, we have another writer who was born in Brazil, and we all know what's happening.

00:15:10: We

00:15:11: kind of know, we can assist the horror picture show that happens with Millay and now Trump, of course, yesterday Bolsonaro was leading a protest march against to give him amnesty.

00:15:25: Amnesty, right?

00:15:27: He tried to speak English, it didn't work well.

00:15:33: But still, yeah, these things are happening.

00:15:34: So do you feel that like... how you work with the weird is getting even more difficult.

00:15:41: Is it enough to just, I mean, do you know what I mean a bit?

00:15:47: Maybe I can put it.

00:15:49: Maybe I can put it in another way.

00:15:51: I was thinking a lot about satire these days.

00:15:54: It's satire.

00:15:55: You're not satiric writers, but is satire still possible when everything is like a real satire in real life in this

00:16:01: velocity?

00:16:02: So I was thinking about the status of the weirdness in literature, maybe in general.

00:16:08: Satire has a lot to do with Millet, so I understand that word there.

00:16:14: I don't know.

00:16:15: I think to write is to... Do the exercise, the actual physical exercise of testing yourself against the things that could hurt you.

00:16:28: And we write something, but then the reader came and read these stories in its own context and something new happened.

00:16:37: And it's very amazing when that happens.

00:16:40: So for example, in my book, I heard and I read people talking about the last short story as the first Milaista story in Argentina.

00:16:52: And of course, when I wrote that story, I was not thinking about Milaista.

00:16:56: at all.

00:16:56: But it's the story about... Thank God.

00:16:59: Thank God you were not.

00:17:00: I mean it's the story about someone who is having a good life and everything is well organized and suddenly someone entered in her house and basically destroyed everything with his own ideas of what is good, what is bad, what is moral and what is not.

00:17:15: And a lot of people under these days context in it and they are doing that reading in this story.

00:17:25: Yes, that's how fiction works.

00:17:30: I think there's a lot of stuff that when you look at politics in Brazil right now or in Argentina that there's something that could seem satirical but I can't look at it as I'm looking at it as horror and I think it's a different genre for me.

00:17:44: I'm trying to approach the whole thing now like from the concept of homology.

00:17:48: I think that, like Mark Fisher wrote a lot about that in his book, Ghosts of My Life, but he takes it from the idea of like, homology, that like, you know... a past that is dead but continues to haunt the present.

00:18:03: and I think in a way what we are seeing in Brazil is has a lot to do with the ghosts of the dictatorship.

00:18:09: and then we're back again to Edinger's novel which is so much about these ghosts from the dictatorship which we thought were dead.

00:18:17: we thought that this is the past.

00:18:19: this context is closed but it's not and just as much as we're seeing here in Europe that we thought that the ghosts of the Second World War were also this, they're all dead now, this context is gone, but there's a haunting, there are ghosts that continue to haunt the political present.

00:18:37: I mean, I always liked that image.

00:18:40: from horror movies of the house that is haunted because it was built on top of an Indian cemetery, which is an image of colonial guilt, I think.

00:18:48: It's no wonder that it comes out of American movies, but I think any country in the Americas is, I mean, this is a very apt image for any country in the Americas.

00:18:57: It's a house that is haunted because it was built on top of an Indian cemetery.

00:19:01: And then when you talk about Brazil, they're not just the indigenous, but you also, then all the dead of the, obviously, of like, years of slavery and then the dead from the dictatorship.

00:19:12: and Brazil has this tendency of like.

00:19:13: no we look forward we're looking to the future.

00:19:15: we don't have to look to the past.

00:19:17: there's always this this obsession of like.

00:19:19: no like this is a chapter.

00:19:20: this is

00:19:20: closed.

00:19:21: but somehow it we are accumulating these ghosts that at some point have to explode

00:19:27: in

00:19:27: violence.

00:19:28: and of course I mean there's some.

00:19:29: there's so many things which are ridiculous about Millet and about Bolsonaro.

00:19:34: it's I don't even like to talk to him because it seems to me like such

00:19:37: a small man really

00:19:40: tiny, so tiny, but I think the danger there is not so much them, but the forces that find them useful.

00:19:47: And that is what's so dangerous.

00:19:52: Okay, I think we could also take two questions and then... Yes, of course.

00:20:05: Hi guys, thanks for the

00:20:07: amazing event.

00:20:08: I want to come back to I think the first point that Samir said about the fact that

00:20:14: you are both

00:20:15: diasporic writers.

00:20:17: How do you think the fact of being part of a diaspora impact your writing after coming to Berlin?

00:20:24: Sometimes the fact that you are very far away from your country makes you feel paradox... paradoxically, even more belonging to the country.

00:20:34: So I wanted to hear more about it from

00:20:37: you.

00:20:38: Thanks.

00:20:40: I have to be honest, I never used that word, diasporic, to refer to myself or to my writing.

00:20:47: I understand the use that was made here, and I respect it, but I feel that like coming from Brazil, knowing that that word is usually used in the context of the Afro-Brazilian literature, me choosing to be in Berlin just doesn't feel like I deserve to use that word.

00:21:08: Now, like being, so many Brazilian writers, you know, it was very, it was very typical maybe fifty years ago for Brazilian writers to be diplomats, a lot of them were diplomats, so a lot of the Brazilian, a lot of Brazilian literature was actually produced abroad, like this respect, all these writers produced a lot of their books abroad.

00:21:29: I feel sometimes that like, like I said, being here in a way makes me look at things that maybe I wouldn't see otherwise, so I find it positive.

00:21:43: But I'm always conscious of this distance, always cutting certain connections with the country as well.

00:21:50: So every time I go back, I feel that I need sort of to catch up with certain things.

00:21:55: But I mean, I don't mind the word exile.

00:21:58: in a way, but again, also that word again feels really heavy because I think of the writers who had to leave Brazil during the military dictatorship.

00:22:07: I'm here because it's my choice.

00:22:10: Yeah, I agree with what you said, but also when you said, I'm here because it's my choice, I thought, was it really our choice?

00:22:20: Because when they asked me, why did you stay in Berlin?

00:22:24: I always say, oh, you know, the canals, the parks, so many languages, the different tribes.

00:22:30: I have this amazing library.

00:22:35: But deep down, I mean, I stayed here because in Berlin, working half of the week, I mean, it took me, so it took me half of the week of working to buy the money that I need to buy my free time to write.

00:22:54: So in Argentina I had to work from Monday to Saturday and then I wrote in Sunday and here I have to work from Monday to Wednesday and I have four days for writing.

00:23:05: and that was the real reason.

00:23:07: and that's something that I mean most of the writers who are very successful outside Latin America and for Latin America an author that means to earn money in euros or in dollars.

00:23:20: I mean I'm sorry that I'm talking about money but money is the thing that we need to buy our free time to write and we want to write.

00:23:26: so this is important and most of these writers are living abroad.

00:23:31: so then the diaspora I know is not the same than the the political diaspora but it is a kind of.

00:23:39: it was not forced.

00:23:39: I'm super happy here but there is something there that is not fair if I compare with many friends that are as talented as me and they can't write in Argentina because they are just having three works just only for paying the rent.

00:23:57: you know there's so many talented people

00:24:03: that are just stuck there.

00:24:04: I mean for me I left Brazil in two thousand and two.

00:24:07: it was a completely different political context.

00:24:09: where

00:24:09: there was I mean I didn't feel there as safe as a homosexual.

00:24:13: so for me in that sense I could.

00:24:15: I could also say well in a way you know I left because here you know it seemed like the whole The city was just ruled by homosexuals.

00:24:25: From the mayor to the director of the clubs, I was like, well, great.

00:24:29: We're finally the majority.

00:24:30: That's how I felt when I arrived.

00:24:32: So there was also this sense of being... definitely a much safer space.

00:24:38: and in that sense like I don't want to take that lightly I just want to be careful.

00:24:42: also you know I just want to have some sort of like how can I put it?

00:24:45: just parameter you know in the sense of like

00:24:49: of

00:24:49: how much in danger I was or in that moment which I think it could be really dangerous.

00:24:55: but yeah definitely you know I managed somehow one way or another to live in Berlin

00:25:02: from

00:25:03: writing and reviewing and translating and it would be impossible in Brazil.

00:25:08: I have friends

00:25:09: who

00:25:10: and like during, I mean, and I'm not playing the hero here, but like during the COVID, I literally had to help some friends who are writers, amazing writers paid electricity bill, you know, because they just everything stopped and so on.

00:25:24: And in that sense, like Berlin is really incredible.

00:25:27: And

00:25:28: I don't think this would be possible in... other European capitals either.

00:25:33: Sorry, let's maybe take the... there's one more question, right?

00:25:38: Hi, I also have a similar question.

00:25:40: I met a Swedish poet a few months ago and he was living in Paris for a long time and moved back to Sweden.

00:25:47: and I asked him why and he said he was losing his prepositions.

00:25:52: And I was also thinking, do you have any similar experience, what you're losing in your... in Portuguese or Spanish?

00:26:01: My commas went crazy around... My commas really went crazy because the comma in German is so... it's just different from the comma in Portuguese.

00:26:12: So I can give you that.

00:26:13: My commas really...

00:26:15: I really have to watch.

00:26:16: My commas are wild.

00:26:17: Thank God you're a poet.

00:26:18: I mean, who needs commas anyway.

00:26:19: I just

00:26:20: punctuate my

00:26:20: poetry.

00:26:24: Well, I'm still writing in Spanish, I can't write in English, I can't do German, so I'm still working on my realm.

00:26:35: But,

00:26:38: so I'm living mostly in a Spanish speaking bubble, and this Spanish speaking bubble is not only from Spain, but here I'm surrounded by all the different kind of Spanish that we have around the world the Spanish people and the Chilean and the Mexican and the Cuban and the Venezuelan.

00:27:03: so it's strange because I started to.

00:27:08: I mean they have amazing words to name things that I can't name with my own language.

00:27:13: So I take these words.

00:27:15: Why not?

00:27:16: They are amazing.

00:27:18: But then my Spanish is not so, you know, so porteño, as we say to the people who write around in the city of Buenos Aires, as it used to be.

00:27:29: And I still consider myself an Argentinian writer.

00:27:33: I mean, I'm here in Berlin, but the moment I put my fingers in the keyboard, I'm... back in Argentina and I write about Argentina.

00:27:41: But then the Argentinians read me and they are like, what is this word?

00:27:47: So it's very hard because it's my very particular.

00:27:52: Spanish is my tool.

00:27:55: And at the same time, I don't want to eliminate these words because it would be unnatural to start to work in a language that is not really my language.

00:28:06: I want to do the more natural thing to do.

00:28:09: but at the same time also, I don't want to distract the reader.

00:28:14: I don't

00:28:14: want the readers to stop and go to the dictionary and come back.

00:28:19: I'm writing with fiction, I'm a short story writer.

00:28:21: I want the reader there, the twenty minutes, reading.

00:28:25: So I'm always paying so much attention of all the words that I'm using and also kind of fighting what is more important to do.

00:28:37: to have a natural Spanish that is only mine, or to just, I don't know, force something that is not mine.

00:28:43: So that puts, as you said, Ricardo, it puts even more attention in my own sounds and in my own words and how an Argentinian reader would read me,

00:28:59: yeah.

00:28:59: I'm just gonna say that I only write in English if it's for a performance piece, when I'm collaborating with like a German sound artist and he needs to understand.

00:29:06: I mean, I'm a writer, I really like to be understood.

00:29:09: Well, like I want the text to be understood, you know?

00:29:12: And I only write in German if they pay very well.

00:29:16: But I have a difference to Samantha.

00:29:18: I really love sending the readers to the dictionary and giving them a lot of work.

00:29:22: I don't mind that forcing them to read a few times.

00:29:25: It's okay.

00:29:26: But it's poetry and fiction is different.

00:29:29: Okay, I think that's a good way to start to end this panel.

00:29:34: I did not exhaust my list of questions, but I learned from Ricardo that we should always stop and stop when it's going well, so

00:29:42: I would invite you now.

00:29:44: Anything in life.

00:29:46: To us.

00:29:46: To relationships, jobs, interviews.

00:29:55: That was Samir Salami in conversation with Samantha Shriblin and Ricardo Dominic.

00:30:01: You can find both their texts

00:30:02: in Berlin Review

00:30:03: Reader III and

00:30:04: at blnreview.de.

00:30:07: If you like this conversation and you'd like to support our work, the best way to do so is by subscribing.

00:30:13: Subscriptions start at just five euros a month at blnreview.de

00:30:17: slash

00:30:18: subscribe.

00:30:20: Our audio producer is Kate and Roberts.

00:30:23: My name is Tobias Harlequin.

00:30:24: Edit of Berlin Review.

00:30:25: Thanks

00:30:26: for listening.