now

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

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.

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.

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

I have been meaning to write about Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment since last week, and if I had written this last weekend, the tenor would be very different. Two nights ago, the encampment was destroyed by the New York Police Department, and the students barricaded in Hamilton Hall were arrested along with others in the encampment and outside the university gates. At the same time, hundreds of students were also brutalized and arrested at City College twenty blocks north. But for almost two weeks, the encampment on the Columbia Quad was a beautiful space of community and learning where Palestinian freedom was the focus. And students at Columbia started a movement that has to date spread to over 150 campuses around the country, and their principled actions were seen and appreciated by Palestinians in Gaza and around the globe. My Palestinian friend Haya, who escaped Gaza and is now in exile in Malaysia, wrote: These students are so strong and so great; I swear they’re teaching a generation how to fight for freedom. They are talking about Columbia University’s protests everywhere on Arabic website and my friends’ Facebook pages.

When the students took over Hamilton Hall in the early hours on Tuesday and renamed it Hind’s Hall, after a six-year old Palestinian girl whose desperate and doomed calls for help were heard round the world, I could only think back to the 1985 blockade of Hamilton that I was part of (and my post on X/Twitter about this went viral). I wasn’t one of the organizers, but when my friends and I heard what had happened we immediately ran to the newly named Mandela Hall and were there in shifts for the next three weeks. In 1968 the students had barricaded themselves IN the same building, but we were outside with the exterior doors padlocked. In the daytime there was a festival atmosphere, and at night it was mostly calm, although I remember at least one night when we were afraid the NYPD was going to come in to clear us—it turned out to be mostly a scare tactic. There was a lot of surveillance by Columbia security–which seems quaint now. Back then it was men with cameras. Now they have surveillance drones buzzing overhead and have deployed new—not always reliable—facial recognition technology. And Columbia’s president in 1985, Michael Sovern, came out to speak with us, unlike the current president, Baroness (yes, she is a literal Baroness) Manouche Shafik. I remember singing a version of a freedom song, “Sovern can you hear us, we shall not be moved, like a tree that’s planted by the water, we shall not be moved.” And we all despised him because he represented everything oppressive about the institution. But in retrospect, compared to the Baroness, he seems downright cuddly.

My spouse teaches at Columbia, and we live near the campus. James has been speaking out repeatedly and strongly about the misuse of accusations of antisemitism to smear and undermine the student movement, hurling all his Jewishness against the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. It was so awful two nights ago when hundreds and hundreds of cops streamed into the Quad and the surrounding blocks. Our entire neighborhood was a closed military zone. And I heard they were using tear gas, but apparently not. “No tear gas was used, but flash-bang devices designed to distract were used as police moved in, the NYPD spokesperson said.” Flash bang devices. So sad that the beautiful encampment was cleared, and all those students were arrested and that there will be cops on the campus until May 17, at the request of Manouche Shafik.

What transpired on Tuesday night was much scarier and uglier than what we faced in 1985. The current students are principled and brave in the face of this unconscionable level of violence and repression. On the night of April 24, I went to the encampment for a teach-in on the Armenian Genocide led by the students of Columbia Armenians for Palestine. They talked beautifully and movingly about the 1915 Genocide, the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, and the connections between those tragedies and what is unfolding in Gaza right now, as a trapped civilian population is being bombed, starved, and immiserated. While they spoke in turn, they held up three flags—Armenia, Artsakh, and Assyria. Their solidarity was authentic, intelligent, and inspiring.

These students are watching a genocide stream in real time on their smart phones, and they are seeing the bankruptcy of all our institutions: political, academic, and cultural. They keep insisting that all eyes should be on Gaza, not on them. Gaza is their Vietnam. And the Baroness who runs Columbia—along with billionaire trustees and cartoon villain politicians egging her on—has radicalized a generation. 

Nancy Kricorian

P.S. If you are in NYC, please join us next Tuesday, May 7 at 7 p.m. for FREEDOM TO WRITE FOR PALESTINE at Judson Church. Roster of writers and tickets available here. I’ll soon send an update on the Authors for Change at PEN America Campaign.