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Alicia Oltuski received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and has taught memoir writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia. Her book about diamonds, The Movement of Precious Objects, is forthcoming from Scribner.

Rose-Anne Clermont, a New York native, first came to Berlin in 1998 as a Fulbright fellow, after earning a Master’s Degree in journalism from Columbia University.  Her articles and essays have appeared in International Herald Tribune, Spiegel on-line, The Root, The Women’s International Perspective and Die Zeit. She lives in Berlin with her German husband and their three sons.  This piece is from an ongoing series called Bush Girl that she plans to publish as a book. For more, visit her blog: http://currentsbetweenshores.blogspot.com.

Image courtesy of Keith Mallett

Stephanie Snider received her MFA from the Yale School of Art, and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Bronx Museum, NY, the Hudson River Museum in New York, Galerie Thomas Schulte Berlin, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin and others. She was the recipient of the Berlin Prize/Philip Morris Emerging Artist Prize in cooperation with the American Academy in Berlin. Her work namely takes the form of drawings, paintings and sculpture dealing with personal memory and history as well as social and cultural space through the lens of fictional architecture and design. It will be exhibited from January 9 to February 7 at Danese, 535 West 24th Street in New York.

Dan Crane is a writer, musician, and retired professional air guitarist. He is the author of To Air is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist (Riverhead, 2006) and co-stars in the award-winning documentary Air Guitar Nation. He also plays in the faux-French band Nous Non Plus. Crane lives in Los Angeles with his air guitar. For more, please go to dancrane.com or nousnonplus.com

Image from serifofnottingham.blogspot.com

Martina Nitsche is a Hamburg-born artist who spent twenty years in New York and currently lives in Berlin. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited widely in New York, Europe and in Asia. This work, a microscopic exploration of the inside of the body, both physical and emotional, is mixed media work of canvas, chemistry, photography and ink. For more information about this series or to see more of Nitsche’s work, please visit: mnitsche.com

Julian Gough, in his youth, sang with cult Irish band Toasted Heretic. They released four albums, and had a top ten hit with “Galway and Los Angeles“, a song about not kissing Sinead O’Connor. He is the author of two novels, Juno & Juliet, and Jude: Level 1. In 2007 he won the largest prize in the world for a single short story. In 2008, Jude: Level 1 was shortlisted for the Everyman Bollinger Wodehouse Prize. He has written for the New York Times, Prospect, Irish Times, Financial Times, and The Guardian. He blogs on his website at www.juliangough.com. His first collection of poetry, Free Sex Chocolate, will be published in 2009. Born in London, and raised free-range in Ireland, he lives in Berlin.

The pre-war, stone row houses on my street in Tempelhof are painted colors unusual in drab Berlin: rhubarb red, periwinkle blue, hunter green and three different shades of yellow. Every house has an old cherry or magnolia tree out front. On the long oval patch of common green in the center of our street, we meet for block parties at the end of the school year or for Christmas caroling in front of a bonfire. We can knock on our neighbor’s door if we’ve run out of milk. We water each other’s vegetable gardens when we go on vacation. We keep an eye on each other’s kids. We gesticulate wildly when a car drives too fast down our block. Although we rarely go there, we love to remind everyone how close we live to the excitement of Mitte. We drive almost everywhere in our minivans, but we boast about the subway’s proximity anyway. (Rose-Anne Clermont)

On the rare late fall day when blue sky pierces Berlin’s chronic dark gray, I bike across the river from my Friedrichshain neighborhood to Treptower Park.  Unlike Tiergarten, whose lovely ponds and clumps of flora are constantly interrupted by city streets, the paths in Treptower Park stretch luxuriously for miles, like a good long yawn.  The walk along the river is crowded with others craving the sunshine: blinking older couples with their ancient dogs, shivering teenage girls in thin tights and mini skirts, the odd indie rock band doing a photo shoot for their upcoming ill-fated album (the good looking singer strides out in front, the dumpy drummer skulking in the back, the photographer-girl-groupie clicking away).  When the path dead-ends, I cut across a parking lot to the paved trail that snakes back through the woods, my favorite part of the ride.  The autumn trees are aflame and the leaves churn in clouds of violet, gold and rust under my wheels.  Sometimes I shout things or sing, happy to delude myself with the notion that I am miles from anywhere and not only a few meters from the main path.  Treptower Park’s biggest attractions are its oversized Soviet War Memorial and the creepy abandoned amusement park in its center, but I like it for the most obvious of parkly reasons: its ability to suspend my urban disbelief. (Brittani Sonnenberg)

This is actually a eulogy, for a cafe on Knesebeckstrasse that closed last year. It was called The Kitchen. The food was delicious. The proprietress, Patricia Ferer, a warm and wonderful person from St. Louis via New York City, was always welcoming. But it was more than that. Sometimes the stars align such that a particular place sums up the experience of a generation or at least a neighborhood. The Kitchen was such a place. Open only 2 years and 9 months (almost exactly as long as the original, 1970s-defining Studio 54, as fate would have it) The Kitchen gave Charlottenburg a center where there had been none. People came by to eat lunch, to buy dinner to go, to drink coffee in the morning. But mostly they came by to meet each other. This corner of Berlin is notoriously lacking in community, but for a brief moment we had a real hang-out, where people talked between the tables and made lasting friendships. During the grey winter months it was cozy inside and on long summer afternoons its outdoor tables basked in sunshine. It was the rare place that always felt like home. (Anna Winger)