Mariet Steinmann

I am 24 years old and currently living in Meyerton, a very small town just south of Johannesburg, SA. In about a month’s time I will be going to Rochester and taking an extended road trip through Northern America. While I have traveled extensively through Southern Africa, I feel that it’s time to broaden my horizons a little and indulge in my nomadic ways a little bit further from home.

I am an avid writer and have a deep and profound love for all things written. It is my dream to write something beautiful and eternal- something that resonates true to what it means to be human with subjective experience in a shared world.

To do this, I intend to travel and learn as much as I can about life, the universe and everything. Being an African woman, I am fascinated with the way that cultural and historical practices shaped oral and written narrative traditions. I have a deep-rooted love for cultural storytelling. I love to collect such stories and want to share them and what they say about people with the world. Reading about different people with different cultures fills me with a sense of adventure and longing to experience those lives myself.

My career aspirations at this point in time are to practice writing as much as possible and sharpen up my writing skills. I also want to travel and write about the many different aspects of traveling and storytelling and hopefully get some of these writings published somewhere other than my own journals. I started out my career and studies with film making, but changed over to African Languages and English and now have a Post-Graduate degree in both Afrikaans and English Literature and Linguistics. But, I am now at a point where I feel that language is not exclusively academic. I would like to sustain my creative impulses not merely by analyzing someone else’s creative story, but by creating them myself. Language is, after all, just as changeable and wonderful as the stories of the world.

When I’m not lost in a good book, I also enjoy music and all outdoorsy types of stuff. I’m classically trained in opera, but as Meyerton is very city-like with no real outdoorsy things to do, I’m very much looking forward to some singing in the mountains on my upcoming travels through the US and Canada.