Where the sky touches the land

Erich Romberg was born in Essen in 1950 and grew up in the Ruhr region. He still remembers the bombed-out houses of the post-war period, which he visited with his father to get out roof beams for firewood. The family just about managed to make ends meet.Then came the economic miracle and the ruins gradually disappeared from his memory and the many open fields were covered with new houses. All he remembers about primary school is that most of the teachers beat the children and a trainee teacher exposed him as a good essay writer. He still remembers being allowed to read out an essay about a walk in the woods because the trainee teacher thought it was so good. That was good, because the class teacher thought he was stupid. However, he was probably not stupid enough to be demoted down a class level.After an apprenticeship in a trade, the essayist was drawn back to school, an evening grammar school in the Ruhr area. Here he was amazed to learn about the beautiful things of the mind. Although he actually wanted to do something completely different, he studied physics. As a physicist, he researched in various fields for a while and finally became an expert on the environment and climate.Writing had accompanied him the whole time, it was a need to put feelings into poetry and stories. He learnt about the momentum that poems and stories take on when you simply write them down. They develop a life of their own and the writer doesn't know beforehand what will come out in the end, at least that's how it was for him.Spontaneously, as he wrote his stories, he also ended his previous life and moved to Ireland, which he had been cycling around on holiday for the previous two years. On his first holiday, he got to know Kiltimagh. After his second holiday in Ireland, he rented the house in Kiltimagh from an Irish friend from Germany for five years. There he found leisure for writing and windsurfing, which he enjoyed equally. Publishing was not on the agenda back then.Today, the