I'm Malu, short for Marie-Luise. I'm German and I live in Germany.

I studied English and Russian at uni in Heidelberg and have taught English for nearly 40 years at a secondary grammar school. I taught Russian there, too, for about 20 years, but, strangely, after the fall of the Soviet Union the interest of the students in this language dwindled to zero. The staff of our school decided not to offer Russian any more but introduce Italian instead.

I took over teaching Italian although I hadn't studied it but I'm married to an Italian and have learnt the language travelling and visiting family, I've learnt enough this way to teach beginners.

I like writing on travel and literature with occasional excursions into the fields of Food&Drink and Health&Beauty. I've been active on two British opinionating sites (dooyoo and ciao) for more than seven years and am now hooked on writing! Hopefully the members of Helium enjoy my articles as much as I like writing them.

I DO KNOW HOW TO USE APOSTROPHES AND UMLAUTS CORRECTLY, UNFORTUNATELY HELIUM DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO PRINT THEM! :-((

My passion is ...

Reading, travelling, writing

I know too much about ...

Trivia

My parents always told me ...

Can't remember, it was sooooo long ago . . .

My childhood ambition ...

To become the director of a zoo

Why I write ...

To satisfy my hunger for appraisal and monetary greed, of course, like everybody else here on the site. :-)

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

A book by a Bengali author

My first job ...

Harvesting potatoes

My best moment ...

I've had several

Arts & Humanities > Internet Writing & Blogging Website writing contests: Are they a positive way to expose your talent?

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Since people have learned to write, there have always been wannabe authors and poets who think that they can produce good literature which the world at large should know about. Before the advent of the internet the courageous sent their manuscripts to publishers, the timid kept them in their drawers.

Now, that there are sites which allow their members to publish whatever they think is worth publishing without a quality check, the inhibition threshold has disappeared in many cases, and literary achievements flood the net that had better been kept in the drawers.

Self-criticism isn't a...

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