[Bella’s intro: Writings on single people focus overwhelmingly on singles in the U.S. and a few other countries. I’m always hungry for more. I am so grateful to the Romanian scholar Adriana Savu for writing this important article about single people in her country – and why so they have so often been ignored.]
All sorts of people get in touch with me, hoping that I can put them in touch with other single people who want to live their single lives fully (and not just escape them). Others want me to point them to helpful resources. A few of the many examples are listed below in the next section, “What Are People Looking For?”
Every time I get one of those requests, I try to generate names or resources offhand. That’s not very efficient. Plus, I only know a very tiny fraction of the single people (or scholars of single people or professionals who work with single people) who might be interested in helping out or who might also want to be in touch with other single people (for friendship, discussion, workshops, or just about anything else except dating).
So, for anyone who is interested, I would like to start a Community of Single People. I want to know who you are so I can connect you with interested parties (as described below). Once the Community is launched, however, members who want to do more with the community can also use it in other ways (for example, to discuss on Facebook anything that interests them).
I sometimes get inquiries from people asking if some book of mine is available in some other language. It always breaks my heart when I have to say that it is not. That changed when I discovered a site that is a true treasure for translators and authors like me who want their books translated. Babelcube is a platform where authors can list books they would like to have translated and translators can find books they want to translate. In this post, I will include links to all of my books that have been translated into other languages, by Babelcube and other publishers.
Singled Out, for example, has been translated into Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. (Scroll to the end of the post to find the Japanese translation.)
Over the course of many years writing about single life, I have found that readers are very interested in the experiences of single people in places beyond the U.S. So am I, but I don’t know nearly as much as I would like to. I have had some help with that from guest bloggers. Also, when relevant articles appear in the news, I blog about them.
This past Sunday, the first day of National Singles Week 2012, was such a fun day for me. A journalist from Taiwan who had read the Chinese translation of Singled Out asked if he could come to Summerland to interview me for his series on various forms of discrimination. He was from the United Daily News, the newspaper with the largest readership in the Taiwan area.
I love featuring voices other than mine here at “All Things Single (and More).” Although I read widely about single life, think critically, study the academic journals, and do my own original research, my perspective is limited by my own life experiences. So, even though I always appreciate hearing from people who share my point of view, I also greatly value those whose single lives have been very different.
