Teutonic

I'm flying high, a little bit at least! The writer friend who challenged me to write that personal narrative about the Aboriginal Australia course finds, after reading the first half, that I "write very well," with great "energy." He's even asked me to participate in a reading series he coordinates! Me a writer? Hooda thunkit!

I'm haunted by having been told early in my graduate career that I had a tendency to write "teutonic prose" - by which I think the speaker meant something like a Wagnerian orchestra of a sentence rumbling with qualifications, subordinate clauses and parenthetical observations. Here's an example of what he had mind, with the excuse of triple authorship, at least one thinking in German while writing in English:

"Introduction" to Lived Religion: Conceptual, Empirical and Practical-Theological Approaches: Essays in Honor of Hans-Günter Heimbrock, ed. Heinz Streib, Astrid Dinter and Kerstin Söderblom (Münster: LIT, 2008), ix