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Submit your stories about expat life.
I’m looking for stories about expats exploring the complicated terrain of cultural differences, attempting to come into some sort of a mutual understanding.
I’d like to hear about how you navigated the ups, downs, sudden about-faces and gradual revelations of attempting to integrate yourself into another culture. Your stories could take place in the classroom, on the street from your perspective as a man or a woman newly aware of your gender in another culture, in a restaurant or a smoky kitchen, in wellies knee-deep in the mud, in a board conference room at a meeting with inscrutable colleagues, smoking a pipe around a campfire.
The point is, give us a sense of place and a sense of movement, internal as much as external. Move us through your changing perceptions as you adapt to life abroad. Please, please, avoid the maudlin and the cliché. Avoid a pretty little realization wrapped up like a Christmas gift with no tape snaking round the edges of the gift wrap. Show us the tape: the process. What cultural assumptions have you confronted? How? Where? What cultural differences have you bumped up against, have surprised you, interested you?
Please send your submissions (under 1,200 words) to sarah@matadornetwork.
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7 Comments... join the discussion!
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Well said! I like the bit about the tape – no pretty bows, please.
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Hey Sarah (and everyone!)
Question: can submissions be reprints from our blog? Or do all original submission matador rules apply?
Happy trails!
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Excellent: I’m emailing my expat friends right now! Look forward to reading this.
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As someone who’s (unfortunately) deadline-driven, what’s your timeframe for submissions? Whenever the cows come home?
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No set deadlines, but if you want one we can make one up. : )
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