The distance that English gives me

I teach English in Baku and I have been writing in English since 2018, which is a choice that requires some explanation. Azerbaijani is my first language and the language of my family and my city. When I write about my own experience in Azerbaijani, certain things feel too close. The emotional proximity is different. English provides a kind of productive distance, a thin layer of glass between me and the material, and behind that glass I can look at things I would look away from in my mother tongue. I don't think this makes the writing better. It makes it possible. The short stories I write in English are set in Baku but addressed to a reader I imagine as slightly outside it, someone who can see the city without the familiarity that Azerbaijani would assume. The architecture of the Old City, the buildings going up along the Caspian coast, the specific social pressures of being a woman in my profession in this city. I write plainly, because plain English in a non-English setting carries its own strangeness. I've sent three stories to literary journals and had two rejections and one acceptance, in a small online journal based in Berlin that publishes writing from post-Soviet countries. I'll send more.