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The Burning Heart of the World

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Tenacity

Blue-Naped Chlorophonia, photo by Caren Jahre

Last month I went on a two-week journey to Colombia, the highlight of which was a nine-day birding trip that departed from Barranquilla and went through the Sierra Madre Mountains and to the Guajira Peninsula. In the cloud forest and on the Caribbean coast we got up before dawn to go in search of rare and endemic birds, including the Sapphire-bellied Hummingbird and the critically endangered Blue-Billed Curassow. In addition to hundreds of species of birds, we also saw Howler Monkeys, Cotton-Topped Tamarins, a vast array of wildflowers, and dozens of butterflies. I knew that Colombia was one of the most biodiverse places on earth, but to see the variety of flora and fauna was an absolute delight and a welcome distraction.

When I arrived home on February 3, a sense of dread overtook me. Now each time that I look at the headlines about the rampage of the horsemen of the apocalypse, I think of all the suffering they are unleashing, and my heart is torn to shreds. I feel like a tiny piece of flotsam in a raging sea and want to sink to the ocean floor. Then I take a deep, slow breath and think, I can’t let them paralyze me with grief and rage. That’s what they want. They want us to feel powerless in the face of their cruel, venal wrecking machine. But we have an obligation to ourselves and to each other to take meaningful action.

Daily I repeat the mottos that help me keep me afloat in these turbulent times.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

~ Grace Paley

Choose your lane, find your people.

~ Mariam Kaba

Freedom is a constant struggle.

~ Angela Davis

The voice of the people is louder than the roar of the cannon.

~ Armenian proverb

I have been volunteering with The Ark Immigration Clinic at CBST, and continuing my mentoring of young writers in and from Palestine via We Are Not Numbers and the Gaza Scholarship Initiative. I’m also trying to figure out what else to do locally to mitigate the worst effects of the horsemen, and have been feeling inspired by the organizing of the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement and For The Many in the Hudson Valley. The Working Families Party is also doing great work.

On a recent Substack post entitled You’re Not a Superhero, Joshua P. Hill of New Means put it beautifully:

You don’t need to save the world, you can’t save the world, but together we can move in that direction. It takes thousands and millions of us doing what we can taking the steps in front of us, reaching out to connect with others and to expand the actions we can collectively take and the power we can collectively wield.

In recent podcast interview (see below for link), the ACLU’s Chase Strangio said in a similar vein, If I could have listeners remember one thing, it is that our power grows when we are in solidarity with each other. Right now, there is a sense of collective exhaustion, fear, and not knowing where to turn. But the single thing we can do is build power with one another. And then my action item is to go take a risk for somebody who has less power than you do.

My literary mentee and friend Sahar in Gaza, who has been struggling with despair herself, reacted to my angst about the sociopaths at the helm of the U.S. government by sending me this message:

They won’t be able to steal our hope and our strength. We will weaken and grieve at times, but we will always get back up, right?

Yes, my dear wise Sahar. We will always get back up.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy Kricorian

New Year, Old Stories

detail of digital collage featuring a crying woman, four red-gloved hands, and a gold and red heart

The first phase of the Gaza ceasefire started on Sunday, and my friends in Gaza experienced the relief of knowing that they had survived fifteen months of a relentless and brutal military campaign against them. One friend went to the shore for the first time in months without fear of being killed by a drone or a quadcopter. Another said they felt joy akin to that of a national holiday, despite the devastating losses that they were still reckoning with. Much is still unknown about what comes next, but there is hope and there will be nights without the constant sounds of missiles, rockets, and drones. I have heard that Trump may force Netanyahu to stick to the phased agreement because Trump, ever in competition with Obama, wants a Nobel Peace Prize and he also wants a deal between Saudi and Israel. Trump has no ideological commitments, unlike Biden who is an avowed Zionist, and perhaps in this case his self-interest will result in something less horrible. May Gaza rise like a phoenix from these ashes and mounds of rubble.

With the ascendancy of Trump and his horsemen of the apocalypse, I’m going to take my news in controlled daily doses. They want us exhausted and demoralized, so we’re going to have to pace ourselves for the hard work ahead.

In other news, when esteemed fiction writer and Nobel laureate Alice Munro died in May 2024, the obituaries were full of praise and the remembrances were glowing. In July, Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner published a piece entitled, “My Stepdad Abused Me. My Mother Chose to Stay with Him” that reverberated like a bombshell throughout the literary world. Skinner detailed the sexual assault she suffered at the hands of Munro’s second husband and the woefully inadequate way that her parents responded to the abuse when they learned about it, her father months after the incident and her mother years later.

In the 80’s and 90’s, Munro had been one of my favorite writers, and I still have my copies of her books on the shelf. When I read her 1994 Paris Review interview, I had copied out a few lines that I loved into my book of quotations.

I’m doing less personal writing now than I used to for a very simple obvious reason. You use up your childhood, unless you’re able, like William Maxwell, to keep going back and finding wonderful new levels in it. The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home. Maybe it’s advisable to move on to writing those stories that are more observation.

In December, heavily researched pieces about the deeply disturbing story of her daughter’s abuse and Munro’s reactions to it, including ways the writer plumbed the experience in her fiction, were published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Writers took to social media to express their dismay and disappointment about someone they had considered to be a literary model, and there were a number of articles about how this new knowledge informs readings of her work.

Last week, New York Magazine dropped an article entitled “There is No Safe Word” about writer Neil Gaiman’s years of sexual predation, which he denied in a statement that I found less than convincing. His former spouse Amanda Palmer didn’t come off too well either. I wish I hadn’t encountered some of the grim details described in the piece, and you might want to read about the article rather than reading the thing itself.

What are we to do about the work we admire by people that we discover have done hideous things? Cultural critic Glen Wheldon has decided to keep past books, but not to engage with future work (which is not an option with Munro, who is no longer alive and writing). I often think about Louis Ferdinand Celine, whose vertiginous and compelling 1932 novel Voyage Au Bout de La Nuit I read and loved when I was a grad student in Paris. How to reconcile the fact that this brilliant author also wrote virulently anti-Semitic pamphlets and embraced fascism? In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik claims that, “You can’t separate what’s powerful about his writing from his vile anti-Semitism.” He goes on to suggest that the work and the man require a compound response: “an ability to admire, a refusal to censor, and a readiness to condemn.” I find myself, in this rare instance, agreeing with him.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy Kricorian

Recommended reading

Mohammed El-Kurd’s new book PERFECT VICTIMS will be published by Haymarket Books on February 11, and you can pre-order a copy here.

An excellent piece by Jane Partizpanyan via the Armenian Weekly about Genocide in Gaza, a media cover-up, and our moral obligation as Armenians.

Also from the Armenian Weekly, Armenian Women Bake Bread and Hope: “…during the blockade, we understood what bread truly means — standing in line all night for just one loaf and returning home empty-handed without knowing how to feed our children.”

Samia Saliba has made a list of 31 recommended SWANA books being published in the first half of 2025, and my novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD (which can be preordered here) is included.

Recommended viewing

Wonderful lecture on the origins of Armenian-American music by Ara Dinkjian via Houshamadyan.

January 20, 2025

Comfort and Light

Advanced Readers Copies of the novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD in a cardboard box

Last week’s excitement was the arrival of the advanced reading copies of my novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD from Red Hen Press. (You may preorder the novel from Bookshop by using this link that supports the International Armenian Literary Alliance.) I am in the process of correcting the page proofs, and I have been working with the publicist to set up book events for the spring. The full details are not yet available but below is an overview of the current lineup.

March 26-29 AWP Conference in Los Angeles, events at the Red Hen Press booth

Monday, March 31 at Diesel Books in Brentwood, in conversation with Talar Chahinian

Tuesday, April 1 panel at OxyArts with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Joanne Nucho, Ara Oshagan

Wednesday, April 2 at the Glendale Public Library in conversation with Shahe Mankerian

Thursday, April 3 at Red Hen Press in Pasadena with poets Lory Bedikian and Arthur Kayzakian

Monday, April 7 at Columbia University in conversation with Marianne Hirsch

Wednesday, April 9 at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn in conversation with Raffi Khatchadourian

Tuesday, April 15 at NAASR in Belmont in conversation with Nanore Barsoumian

Thursday, April 17 at Porter Square Books in Cambridge in conversation with Lisa Gulesserian

Sunday, April 27 in the Detroit area for the local Armenian community

It’s December now and we have a winter to get through, but April and the book launch are on the horizon.

When I was growing up, each year in December, our small Armenian Evangelical Church would put on a Christmas pageant featuring a manger scene, complete with the requisite holy family, three kings, some shepherds, and an array of angels. We sang carols from a small white booklet with red-cheeked choir boys on the cover, and among my favorites were “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” probably because of the dirgeful key, and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” Just now when I was thinking of the chorus of that second song, I misremembered it as “tidings of comfort and light,” when it is actually “comfort and joy.”

Joy seems a bit too ambitious for this holiday season as the horsemen of the apocalypse, many more than four of them, are galloping towards us. I’ve lately stopped asking people, “How are you?” which is too fraught a question in these troubled times, and instead have been saying, “It’s so good to see you.” And there is nothing better right now than gathering in the real world with friends, family, and comrades. We need each other now more than ever.

Wishing you comfort and light,

Nancy K

THIS MONTH’S RECOMMENDATIONS

READ

The latest issue of Wasafiri Magazine, entitled Armenia(n)s—Elevation is now available for purchase. My essay “His Driving Life,” about my late father and his relationship to motor vehicles, is available for free download to the first 50 readers. If you miss the chance for the free version, let me know and I will send you the PDF.

A powerful essay about life in Shujaiya in Northern Gaza entitled The Mirror by Nadera Mushtha, one of my We Are Not Numbers mentees. (Nadera’s GoFundMe is here.)

“The Bullet,” a poem by Sahar Rabah, translated from the Arabic by Ammiel Alcalay. Sahar was accepted into the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers/Newark, but she has had to defer her admission because she is unable to leave Gaza. The crossings are closed to all but a handful of severely injured people who have been allowed to evacuate for medical care abroad.

LISTEN

For the London Review of Books podcast, Adam Shatz interviewed Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a pediatric plastic and reconstructive surgeon, and journalist Muhammad Shehada about Gaza’s past, present, and future.

The Intercept’s Briefing “Syria: What Comes Next?” is an excellent and informative interview with Syrian journalist Rami Jarrah.

WATCH

Indiewire’s 17 Best First Films of 2024 includes our progeny Noah’s Summer Solstice, which is described as a “sun-dappled and warmly directed buddy comedy.” If you haven’t yet seen it, the film is currently streaming on several platforms.

Still from Summer Solstice

Nancy Kricorian

December 16, 2024

Refuge

After the dismal, if predictable, election results, I am trying not to get sucked into the vortex of constant doom scrolling. The incoming administration’s motto seems to be “A fox in every henhouse,” and they want us shocked and incapacitated. The fascist clown car is coming for us all, with immigrants at the top of the list for unspeakable cruelty. We’re going to be running around putting out fires on every corner, and it really has an end of empire vibe. Perhaps the scariest prospect is their plan for an extractavist carnival when we have such a short time to turn climate catastrophe around. Everyone I know is thinking about how best to organize for resistance—I keep hearing Mariam Kaba’s advice: “Choose your lane, find your people.” I will continue working on Palestine and immigrant justice, lanes where I have connections, some knowledge, and a few skills.

I am still mentoring three young writers in and from Gaza—two are still in Gaza (one in the north where starvation is rampant and ethnic cleansing is underway, and one in central Gaza where regular missile attacks and food scarcity hold sway) and the third escaped to Malaysia. Each morning, I check my messages to make sure they and their families have survived the night. Their suffering is immense, but the bravery and ingenuity with which they face each day are remarkable. My mentee Nadera Mushtha wrote an eloquent piece about giving English lessons in her home to young students whose schools had been destroyed.

The situation in Lebanon is also heartbreaking where my friends in Beirut are being terrorized by drones, planes, and missiles. Israel continues using its Gaza playbook—targeting hospitals, medics, and civilian apartment buildings, while pulverizing entire villages in the south. There is talk of a ceasefire deal, something that is being reported as a planned gift from one depraved authoritarian to another.

While immediate and medium-term prospects are bleak, we must find ways to keep ourselves sane and ready for action. I have shifted away from spending time on Musk’s increasingly hostile X/Twitter, which has been losing prominent users, to more hospitable Bluesky, which now has over 20 million users and has seen traffic increase by 500% since the election. You can find me on Bluesky here. You will also find me walking in Central Park and on country roads, looking for birds and mushrooms.

We need to gather in the real world with like-minded people and build the power of our groups and institutions to protect ourselves and others. We will need to defend public libraries, public schools, universities, Social Security, immigrants, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, Palestine, and the planet. Choose your lane, find your people. Friends and comrades are and will be our refuge.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

Life Stories

Greetings, dear friends. In this most horrific of times as we continue to watch a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, I’m sending you a quick note about two upcoming events. Both are benefits for organizations providing medical care and psychosocial support to Palestinian children.

On Saturday, November 9^th from 3-5 p.m. on Zoom, I will be offering a workshop entitled Life Stories that is part of Workshops for Gaza, which organizes online classes and workshops on a variety of topics to raise money for Palestinians who are trying to survive the ongoing genocide of their people and the destruction of their homeland.

LIFE STORIES: In this workshop with novelist Nancy Kricorian, participants will use family stories and oral history as a point of departure for writing fiction and narrative nonfiction. Participants will read short prose pieces by authors such as Grace Paley, Jayne Anne Phillips, and William Saroyan, then work on a series of in-class writing exercises to be shared and discussed.

I have selected the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund as the recipient of monies from my workshop. In 2017 when I was on a research trip to Beirut, I met Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who is a close friend of a friend. As I listened to his stories at a café in Hamrah, I was impressed by the work he did with children who had been injured in war zones. When the genocide started in Gaza I was amazed and awed to see him in news reports from the besieged hospitals in the Strip.

You can sign up for the workshop here. You may donate to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund here.

Also on November 9th, I will be participating in a reading entitled Translators Against Genocide from 6-8 p.m. at The People’s Forum in Manhattan. I’m a bit of a cuckoo’s egg as a novelist in this lineup of literary translators, including my friends Susan Bernofsky, Nick Glastonbury, and Kira Joseffson. The event is part of the Writers for Palestine series and will be a benefit for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

I’ll write a longer message soon. In the meantime, please read Arundhati Roy’s brilliant PEN Pinter Prize acceptance speech. And as poet Eileen Myles tells us, do everything you can to stop the U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza and mass murder in Lebanon.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

October 15, 2024

No Business As Usual

On the first day of classes at Columbia yesterday, some students poured red paint over the Alma Mater statue in the Quad as an opening salvo. My photo of the bloodied statue, a symbol that there would be no business as usual on the campus as the U.S. sponsored assault on Gaza continued, went viral on X.

I am in touch almost daily with my mentees in and from Gaza, so I hear their firsthand accounts of what they and their families are living. You can read their work: Sahar Rabah has two poems in The Markaz Review, and We Are Not Numbers posted Nadera Mushtha’s essay about the destruction of her family’s olive grove.

As this genocide grinds into its twelfth month, my young friends sound increasingly despairing. The driving rain over the weekend flooded tents, destroying people’s belongings and raising the specter of waterborne diseases. Every week someone loses another family friend, a cousin, or a former professor to an Israeli bombing attack in a civilian area. As another young person I know put it, “There are no humanitarian areas in Gaza; every corner is soaked in blood.”

In addition to my work with We Are Not Numbers, I have been volunteering with the Gaza Scholarship Initiative for Displaced Students, which is helping to find spots in U.S. and European institution of higher learning for undergraduate and graduate students whose universities have been destroyed. Some of these students, the ones who managed to exit Gaza before the Rafah crossing was wrecked and sealed, are already on U.S. campuses. Some of them are still trapped in Gaza, their universities having deferred their admissions to the Spring semester. Sahar is one of these students; she should be at Rutgers in the MFA Program in Creative Writing right now, and the hope is that she will be able to get to Cairo as soon as the border opens so she can fly to the U.S. in December for a January start in Newark.

When will the genocide stop? When will the border open? And how can we speak of Gaza without mentioning the horrors currently going on in the West Bank, as Israeli politicians threaten to turn it into a “mini-Gaza”?

I heard a former Israeli hostage negotiator named Gershon Baskin on Democracy Now this morning talking about how to come to a deal to end the carnage in Gaza, and he said, “…it will take extreme American pressure on Netanyahu to make a deal. And the Americans have the pressure, if they were to choose to use it.”

Vice-President and presidential contender Kamala Harris claimed that she was heartbroken over the scale of the suffering in Gaza; she claimed that the Biden Administration has been working around the clock for months to get a ceasefire deal. As Palestinian-American poet, novelist, and psychologist Hala Alyan put it in her recent New York Times Op-Ed,

I appreciate Ms. Harris’s broken heart. What I’d appreciate more is a direct naming of who is killing and starving Palestinians, acts that are neither inevitable nor without a perpetrator. I’d appreciate the upholding of international law through sanctions and an arms embargo.

Tell the Biden Administration and Congress to Stop Arming Israel.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

P.S.

Red Hen Press, which is celebrating its 30^th Anniversary this year and will be publishing my new novel in April 2025, received a great writeup in Publishers Weekly.

I wanted to share this brilliant and moving piece, entitled “Gloves On,” by Anne Carson about “the black doorway” and living with Parkinson’s Disease.

September 4, 2024

Red Efts and Other Wonders

It’s unsettling to carry on with daily rituals and activities while Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza rages on. Each morning, I check to see what horror unfolded while I was asleep, looking for mentions of the areas where my mentees and their families are sheltering. Each day I communicate with Haya, Sahar, and Nadera about their various writing and educational projects. I continue my involvement with Writers Against the War on Gaza, and use my social media platforms to amplify the reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank. None of it feels like enough. To keep myself from an unending cycle of despair, anxiety, and rage, I have been spending time in the woods and the meadow as a kind of walking meditation.

The other morning after a night of pouring rain, I went for a walk on the trails behind our house. There were so many Red Efts on the path, that I had to watch my feet so I wouldn’t step on them. I started counting them as I walked, and quickly reached two dozen. I have been fascinated with these creatures since I was in sixth grade and a boy in our class brought in a terrarium with three that he was keeping as pets.

I think of the Red Eft as the teenager form of the Eastern Newt, which is a type of salamander that lives in this region. When they first hatch in the vernal pond, they are aquatic larvae or tadpoles that breathe underwater. In their next phase, they become Red Efts, which are orange with two rows of red dots circled in black down their backs. At this point, they are terrestrial and breathe air. After two to three years, they change again to their final adult aquatic form, when their coloration shifts to a dull olive green back with a yellow belly. But they still have the black-rimmed spots. An Eastern Newt can live in the wild for up to eight or ten years but have been recorded to live to fifteen.

I’ve also been watching the Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds at the feeder outside my study window. They fly circuits around the yard, sipping nectar from flowers and the feeder.

The only hummingbirds found in the northeastern United States, they are very territorial, and there are lots of buzzy altercations. The adult male has the eponymous iridescent red throat, and its tail feathers are pointed and dark. The adult female and juvenile male and female have white throats and white tips on the outer tail feathers.

Recently, I have also seen twin White-Tailed Deer fawns grazing in the meadow behind the house, their mother always within a few yards. Several years ago, Djuna and I were walking in the woods when we wandered off the trail and discovered a days-old fawn sleeping in a hollow under a fallen tree. Luckily, I had learned that it was fine for a fawn to be left alone for up to twelve hours at a time while its mother foraged for food. In fact, it was safer for a newborn like this to stay on its own because it blended into the forest and hadn’t yet developed an odor that would attract predators. When White-Tailed Deer fawns are born, they have white spots on their sides. These spots disappear when they are between three to six months old and grow in their winter coats. In our area, the spots are generally gone by October.

It’s been raining all week, and the other day during a blustery downpour, I looked out the bedroom window to see two dozen House Finches perched under the eaves of our front porch. That made me wonder what all the other birds were doing in the foul weather brought to our region by Hurricane Debbie. Birds that nest in cavities, such as Chickadees, can take shelter there. Birds that roost on branches, such as Blue Jays, perch on a thick branch next to the tree’s trunk during a storm.

What’s the difference between a frog and a toad? Frogs have smooth, damp skin and toads have dry, bumpy skin. Frogs have longer legs made for jumping and swimming. Toads tend to have shorter legs. Frogs tend to live near a body of water because they need to keep their skin moist, but toads can be found in the forest. Tree frogs need to be near water, but they aren’t great swimmers.

How can you tell the difference between a butterfly and a moth? Butterflies have smooth, club-like antennae and moths have feathered or branched antennae with no rounded club shape at the end. We generally think of butterflies as having large, brightly colored wings, but Skippers are a group of small, chunky butterflies, and several species are drab gray or brown.

And now on a few other topics…

My friends at the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA) posted about the upcoming publication of my novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD. If you pre-order the book through this link, IALA receives a small portion of the proceeds.

For Tempest Magazine, our daughter Djuna wrote a clear-eyed and disturbing piece about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to generate “kill lists” in Gaza.

My new We Are Not Numbers Mentee (WANN) Nadera wrote a poem called “The Child and the Olive Tree.” My former WANN mentee Hossam managed to evacuate to Cairo a few months ago, but he and his siblings are now in need of financial support because they can’t get work permits in Egypt.

Thanks for reading. Ceasefire now.

Nancy Kricorian

August 10, 2024

Sunsets and Other Diversions

Everything feels rather dire right now, from the awful clown show of American politics, to the terror of a burning planet, so I’ve again been finding solace in the natural world. I saw a Scarlet Tanager flitting through the tree canopy the other day, and after hearing its eerie, echoing song at the top of the ridge, I finally caught a glimpse of a Hermit Thrush. We have been eating oyster mushrooms and chanterelles that I foraged in the woods, as well as copious greens from our garden. And sunsets by the pond have been spectacular.

I just handed in the copy edited manuscript of my novel, The Burning Heart of the World, which will be published on April 1, 2025 by Red Hen Press, and can now be pre-ordered from Bookshop.org. A publisher decides how many copies to print in part based on the number of preorders, so ordering the book ahead is a good way to support an author, including yours truly. I have started scheduling events for April in Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit. If you want me to come to a bookstore (or a community center) near you, let me know. I will also be available for in-person and virtual reading group visits.

Also on the literary front, I was disappointed to read a terrible story about much admired and lauded fiction writer Alice Munro, but I loved this interview in Mizna with poet Chase Berggrun.

Last month my elder child Noah’s debut feature film, Summer Solstice, opened for limited runs in New York and Los Angeles. It received a rave review and was a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times review was also excellent. Noah did a number of interviews, among them one in Variety, one in Filmmaker, and another in Film Stage.

As Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza grinds into its tenth month, a small bright spot was the fact that Armenia recognized the Palestinian state. Mary Turfah’s piece Running Amok, about the horrific images Israeli soldiers are posting from Gaza and what they mean about Zionism past and present, was a tough read in the Baffler. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote a bracing piece about The Collapse of Zionism in the New Left Review. Some of my new organizer friends were involved in a Gaza protest during New York City’s Pride parade. I have started working with a new mentee in Gaza through We Are Not Numbers—a collaboration made difficult by the intermittent and poor Internet access Nadera has in Shujaya. I hope to be able to share one of her essays soon.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’re keeping cool.

July 10, 2024

Human Kindness

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.

~ Vasily Grossman, LIFE AND FATE

In this bleak time, I find hope in the organizing I have been doing with Jewish Voice for Peace, We Are Not Numbers, Writers Against the War on Gaza, and like-minded friends and comrades. Last week I went to Albany for the Not on Our Dime campaign rally and press conference organized by State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani. I count myself lucky that our family is united in opposition to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and that our circle of friends is filled with people who have been speaking out against the atrocities we are witnessing daily on our smart phones.

I have been so focused on the horror in Gaza that I can only tolerate a few minutes a day of contemplating the dire situation in Armenia, as the Armenian government’s tense negotiations over demarcating “disputed” areas of the border with Azerbaijan have resulted in the handover of some villages, which is causing much internal strife. In the meantime, in ethnically cleansed Artsakh, Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian cultural heritage proceeds apace. And then there is the dubious land deal threatening the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, which occurs at the intersection of things Armenian and Palestinian.

In March, I wrote a talk for a beleaguered group of dissident grad students at an unnamed university, which according to the students’ accounts has turned into a quasi-totalitarian state. This essay, in which I avoided certain terms at the request of my hosts who feared repercussions of stating things too baldly in that context, was recently published by The Markaz Review: “A Small Kernel of Human Kindness: Some Notes on Solidarity and Resistance.”

PalFest posted video of my introduction to the Freedom To Write for Palestine event at Judson Church on May 7. My friend and Armenian tutor Sosy Mishoyan and I did a Western Armenian translation of Mosab Abu Toha’s poem, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.” Two of my mentee Haya Abu Nasser’s powerful poems appeared in The Massachusetts Review at the end of last week. And my spouse James wrote an open letter to Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism in response to said task force’s dangerous conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Beloved Armenian illustrator, artist, and writer Nonny Hogrogian passed away recently, and her obituary in the New York Times gives a sense of her long and storied life, most of it spent with her devoted husband and collaborator David Kherdian, to whom I sent my profound condolences. Nonny’s Caldecott Award picture book One Fine Day is a perennial favorite, and it is my custom to send a copy of that book to friends upon the birth of their first child.

On a brighter note, James and I recently celebrated our 35^th wedding anniversary. The week before that milestone, our daughter Djuna graduated from New York University Law School. The commencement ceremony was interrupted twice by the unfurling Palestinian flags in front of the podium and approximately 100 of the 500 graduates, including Djuna, were wearing keffiyehs. In September she will be starting a fellowship at the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU. And next week our elder child Noah’s debut feature film Summer Solstice will be playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan.

June 6, 2024

Freedom to Write for Palestine

Last week I gave the opening remarks at Freedom to Write for Palestine at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. This memorable gathering of writers was brilliantly curated and produced by Omar Hamilton and Sharif Kouddous of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and it was recorded for posterity. Writers Against the War on Gaza and Amplify Palestinerounded out the organizing team, and everyone’s efforts came together beautifully. Publishers Weekly and New York Magazine did great coverage of the event, placing it in the context of the controversy surrounding PEN America’s terrible response to the genocide in Gaza and the efforts of writers to hold the organization to account.

Here is an excerpt from my introduction:

While PEN America has organized a street rally in support of Ukrainian writers imprisoned and killed by Russia and taken a delegation of Ukrainian writers to meet with Congress, it has yet to organize any public event on behalf of Palestinian writers who have been imprisoned and killed by Israel. PEN International, English PEN, and PEN South Africa called for a ceasefire in Gaza five full months before PEN America did, and PEN America’s call came only after over a thousand writers had signed a letter denouncing the organization for its inaction. PEN America’s priorities so often align with the U.S. government’s own foreign policy goals that one writer quipped, ‘PEN America has been turned into an outpost of the U.S. State Department.’

While the leadership at PEN America is being roundly denounced for its double standards on Israel and Palestine, many of its staff members’ work in this area and on other issues is being stymied and undermined. We would like to give a shout out to PEN America United, the union representing PEN America’s staff, which has been trying to get a fair contract for over eighteen months. PEN’s Chief Executive Officer’s salary was disclosed to be $465,000 in 2022, and in recent contract negotiations management proposed a $48,500 minimum starting salary for staff, well below industry standards and hardly a living wage in New York City. In addition to her annual salary, which has likely increased over the past two years, PEN’s CEO earns an additional undisclosed six-figure yearly sum for serving on Meta’s Oversight Board. As one sign at a PEN America United rally phrased it, “Are fair wages banned too?”

The evening raised over $8,000 for We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led organization in Gaza that trains a new generation of Palestinian writers. At the top of the program, Michelle Alexander read a poem by my friend and WANN mentee Haya Abu Nasser. When WANN alumni Mahmoud Alyazji read a remembrance with an accompanying film about his best friend Mohammed Zaher Hammo, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike with his family, there were audible sounds of weeping in the audience, and I venture to say there was not a dry eye in the house. After musician Huda Asfourplayed a final song to close out the evening, which was by turns inspiring, moving, and galvanizing, we all headed out into the world with firm resolve to continue fighting for Palestinian freedom.

In the meantime, the situation in Gaza has grown increasingly catastrophic as Israel drops bombs on displaced, starving people living in tents, and gives confusing, impossible evacuation orders to families with no place to go. Repression at home continues to be brutal as riot police are summoned to break up peaceful student Gaza solidarity encampments. I have made a chant by the Columbia students a new motto, “Disclose, Divest. We will not stop. We will not rest.”

Nancy Kricorian

May 12, 2024

novels

The Burning Heart of the World

All the Light There Was

Dreams of Bread and Fire

Zabelle

now

Tenacity

New Year, Old Stories

Comfort and Light

Refuge

Life Stories

No Business As Usual

Red Efts and Other Wonders

Sunsets and Other Diversions

Human Kindness

Freedom to Write for Palestine