Where the sky touches the land

The author lived in Ireland for about ten years in the 90s of the last millennium. During this time, the stories of the planned book series were written down. These stories mix fact and fiction. It is about the traditional storytelling of the old days in Ireland. The idea came to him at a storytelling festival in the small western Irish town of Kiltimagh, which he attended for the first time. However, he got his inspiration from the stories told by the people around the crackling peat fires, which conjured up a mystical atmosphere to accompany the stories.



In this first volume of the planned series, there are three frame stories into which these tales are incorporated. It is about self-awareness and love, prejudice and courage as well as death and how to deal with it. Above all, however, it is about storytelling itself:



The first story in this volume takes place in one of my two favourite pubs, Lil's Bar, by a crackling peat fire. Where else? As the only guest at that time of day, he is allowed to write a story at the regulars' table. The title story is born. It is about a strange encounter with an old man who expresses an equally strange wish. The attentive reader will not fail to notice that the narrator encounters himself.

By the time he has finished the story, the pub has filled up with guests and the regulars invite him to stay at the pub to tell the story he has written down. Afterwards, the men at the regulars' table discuss the story and quickly guess its meaning. As they liked the story, they ask the storyteller if he can tell more stories.

***

The firebird the next story. It is a mythology of being. What happens when the evolutionary model "Homo Sapiens" fails.

***

The third tells of the nomad girl Saóirse, who has just turned sixteen. At the start of a storytelling festival at the weekend, she is allowed to gain unaccompanied experience in the small town of Kiltimagh for the first time. It is a time full of stories and Saóirse learns about love. Watching over all of this is the wise old Méabh, who advises the girl to listen only to the call of her heart. This is not so easy, but as a result she ends up making a difficult and painful decision.

***

In the third story, an overtired driver is travelling west towards Galway along the sometimes-narrow roads. As he is about to fall asleep, he leaves the road to rest. In the darkness, someone knocks on the rear window and asks for a lift in accent-free German. During the journey, he recognises a former best friend from his

youth in the person who got on the train, and a journey back in time to a repressed past begins.

***

Finally, the reader learns the story of a storyteller who has forgotten how to tell stories. Then the protagonist suddenly finds himself in the role of an executioner.



Erich Romberg was born in Essen in 1950 and grew up in the Ruhr region. He still remembers the bombed-out houses of the post-war period, which he visited with his father to get out roof beams for firewood. The family just about managed to make ends meet.

Then came the economic miracle and the ruins gradually disappeared from his memory and the many open fields were covered with new houses.

All he remembers about primary school is that most of the teachers beat the children and a trainee teacher exposed him as a good essay writer. He still remembers being allowed to read out an essay about a walk in the woods because the trainee teacher thought it was so good. That was good, because the class teacher thought he was stupid. However, he was probably not stupid enough to be demoted down a class level.

After an apprenticeship in a trade, the essayist was drawn back to school, an evening grammar school in the Ruhr area. Here he was amazed to learn about the beautiful things of the mind. Although he actually wanted to do something completely different, he studied physics. As a physicist, he researched in various fields for a while and finally became an expert on the environment and climate.

Writing had accompanied him the whole time, it was a need to put feelings into poetry and stories. He learnt about the momentum that poems and stories take on when you simply write them down. They develop a life of their own and the writer doesn't know beforehand what will come out in the end, at least that's how it was for him.

Spontaneously, as he wrote his stories, he also ended his previous life and moved to Ireland, which he had been cycling around on holiday for the previous two years. On his first holiday, he got to know Kiltimagh. After his second holiday in Ireland, he rented the house in Kiltimagh from an Irish friend from Germany for five years. There he found leisure for writing and windsurfing, which he enjoyed equally. Publishing was not on the agenda back then.

Today, the author lives with his wife and underage son in a village in Saxony-Anhalt. The idea of leaving books to his son seemed increasingly appealing to him. The author hardly knows anything about his own father. He didn't want to burden his son with his own manuscript chaos. So he has now begun - against his physicist nature, love of chaos - to bring order to his manuscripts.