A Journey Into Words

Interview with Dorothee Lang by Trace Sheridan, 34thParallel editor, about her novel Masala Moments, and the magazine BluePrintReview.

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Masala Moments

"Milan, Italy or Mumbai, India? That was the question yesterday when I left home."
- from Masala Moments by Dorothee Lang

With a potential strike from air traffic controllers threatening to ground planes and her travel plans, Dorothee Lang waited to find out where she'd land - to discover her destination. And while many travelers would find the uncertainty of their final destination troubling, Doro (as she calls herself) revels in experiencing life in the moment as it happens, with all that this entails including layovers, delays, and changes of plans.

"A friend once said that I would enjoy myself whereever I was, even stuck in transit, in an airport waiting for a delayed flight," Dorothee says.

Ironically, this is how her trip to India began, the same trip that inspired her book—Masala Moments—a collection of prose, diary entries, and travel tales based on her experiences.

"I thought of writing about Asia since the first time I went there, but it took a while to find the right approach," says Dorothee. In Cambodia, while repeatedly running into travellers who came from there, she learned where to go next: India.

Dorothee is led by a desire to capture life in the moment through her writing and to allow projects to develop and take shape, become journeys in themselves. Her love for traveling became the impetus for her writing, "With every journey I took, I felt more curious for the details of a place, of a moment."

It all began with her recording her thoughts and impressions of the places she visited in India. Upon returning she gathered what she'd written, entries from her diary, the poetry and short stories, and realized she had enough material for a book.

"One day, I sat down and gathered all these different snippets of travel memories, the diary pages, emails, the short stories, and realized I had half of the first draft of a whole book, part of it fictional, but all of it based on the journeys I'd made."

Dorothee created a website featuring her photos from India, prose, and flash movies.

The website prompted conversations with people curious about my trip, which both motivated her to write, and to tell short travel tales in the replies. For her, “India is sometimes easier described in a story than in facts."

Masala Moments made it's debut as a website and evolved into a book. It is only one of Dorothee's on-going projects where the internet feeds into her book projects and book material becomes content for her next web project.

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BluePrintReview

"It's always a bit of an adventure to see how an issue turns out - you can't really plan it, and that's the beauty of it."

Dorothee is the founding editor of BluePrintReview, an English-language zine that grew into what she calls, "a journey of another kind."

After finishing Masala Moments, Dorothee found herself at home, in the south of Germany, in a small town not far from Stuttgart.

"It was the first year that didn't start with a backpack journey — instead I was here, at home, not flooded with new impressions, but instead working with the memories of the journeys I made before."

She started BluePrintReview using a web page program and working with texts and photos that lingered in her travel-mail account.

"My idea was to include texts and photos that are remarkable, yet weren't necessarily meant to become part of an ezine, sent by friends and strangers, without title, without notation."

Dorothee is interested in the ways that seemingly disparate texts and images, created by different authors and photographers, connect and intersect when placed together on a page, as she describes, "like figures in a virtual gathering that brings upon unexpected constellations and correlations."

She looks for connections even in the projects she does and has a type of organic idea of inspiration—rather than multiple projects competing or depleting her intensity and interest, they can instead flow from one another and inspire her to do more. This is reflected in her writing, in the collaborative projects she's doing, and also in every themed BluePrintReview issue.

But rather than determine a theme and then request submissions, Dorothee lets the theme emerge. "I don't start with a theme, I start gathering possible texts, and through them, the theme develops." And if she were to have an issue where no congruent theme emerged, she says, "I would call this issue the disjointed issue—now, I actually look forward to running into this problem."

The name BluePrintReview came from her home page called blueprint21. "I've always fancied the word blueprint and the various meanings and aspects it holds; an outline, a rendered image, something not absolute, but in progress." She added the word review to the title because it meant to consider something again or from a different perspective.

The fact that Dorothee edits an English language literary magazine amazes her and is something she credits to the limitless reach of the internet. She never would have imagined the success she's found writing stories in English and having them published by magazines such as the Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, and others. As another year draws to a close, she wonders if the next year will finally be the one that sees her doing what a proper German author is supposed to do: withdraw from the world, write a novel—in German—and find a well-established publishing house for it.

Dorothee says, “If someone had told me in my school days that in a couple of years, I would be writing a travel novel about India, and editing an international e-zine, I wouldn't have been able to believe it. Impossible, I would have said. No way.”

The proper German novel maybe on hold, her writing isn't. Dorothee has two projects in the wings—she is currently working on the epistolary novel "Letters from China", a story about living and travelling in India, China, and Europe; and she is also participating in an international group of authors who work on a futuristic novel together.

Right now, she is in the finalizing stage of the next issue of BluePrintReview - one of the most intriguing parts of every issue for her. Dorothee says, "It's always exciting for me to finish the work and put the pages online. Every issue is like a small journey that leads to another unknown destination."

For her, the end of every issue is the best part because it is the beginning of another one, an excursion without a detailed map, without a fixed itinerary, without a tour guide, a blank page — the beginning of another "journey into words."

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about this interview & links

This interview was published in the print issue of the magazine 34th Parallel in September 2007. An online version of the interview (including photos) is online here: 34thParallel/Issuu#2 page 42-47.

Special thanks to Trace Sheridan and Martin Chipperfield for their inspiring editorial work.

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links:
>> Masala Moments / India web page
>> BluePrintReview
>> home