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Below is a recent interview I did with Pubslush, a “global, crowdfunded publishing platform for aspiring authors and trendsetting readers.”

1. How and when did you decide to become a writer?

I started writing poetry when I was in the first grade, and have never stopped writing. I earned an MFA in Poetry from Columbia’s Writing Division, and soon afterwards starting working on fiction. My first novel ZABELE, a fictionalized account of my grandmother’s life as an Armenian Genocide survivor and immigrant bride, was published in 1998. My second one, DREAMS OF BREAD AND FIRE, which was also set in the Armenian-American community, was released in 2003. My third novel, ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, has just appeared from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

2. What is the most important piece of advice you can give to aspiring female authors?

1. Be disciplined about your writing. Try to set a schedule and keep to it. If your day gets hectic and you have only a half hour to write, use it.

2. Find a reader you trust who can give you feedback. This might be a mentor, or a friend or a partner. Sometimes the best way to find this kind of reader is by taking a class or a workshop. Half the work of writing is editing, and at least one other trusted voice is invaluable in that process.

3. What is the role of social media in your publishing process? Who are your greatest fans, what are their demographics, and what social media platform do you find most useful in communicating with them?

I have been on a steep learning curve in the past few years with regards to social media so I’m unable to fully answer the question about demographics. Because of my years as a grassroots peace activist, my connections in the Armenian community, and my network of literary friends, my impression is that my fans are evenly divided among those groupings. I would have to say that my favorite platform is Twitter, where I think I have become a good curator of news and information about politics, literary culture and things Armenian. About six months ago I set up an author page on Facebook and launched an author website in anticipation of the publication of my new novel. Initially I was worried that the self-imposed schedule of a weekly blog post for my site was going to feel onerous, but it’s actually been fun.

4. If you had to describe yourself in three words only, what would they be?

Three words: energetic, empathic and determined.

5. If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would that be and why?

I have always wanted to visit Adana and Mersin, cities in Turkey where my grandparents were born. Because of the sad history of how they left those places—my grandfather after anti-Armenian massacres in 1909 and my grandmother after the 1915 Genocide—I have not yet made the pilgrimage. I’m hoping to do so in the next few years.

6. What can we look forward to seeing from you in the future? Do you have any exciting plans or projects coming up?

My new novel ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, which is about an Armenian family in Paris during the Nazi occupation, has just been published. I am currently researching my fourth novel, which will focus on an Armenian family that emigrates from Beirut to New York City during the Lebanese Civil War. This will be the final volume in what I’ve started to call THE ARMENIAN DIASPORA QUARTET.

Nancy Kricorian

“Find a penny, pick it up. All day long, you’ll have good luck.” 

 ~ American proverb

A long time ago my mother told me a story about her brother, my Uncle Gene, who when I was growing up worked as a superintendent in a luxury building in Manhattan. The story went like this:

The night that Gene’s wife June was in the hospital in Concord, New Hampshire giving birth to their first child, my uncle wandered the streets and along the railroad tracks looking for bottles. At the time, each bottle could be turned in for a penny deposit. My uncle stayed up all night collecting bottles and by morning he turned them in, being given in return a lump sum of money. He went to a florist and bought a bouquet of roses that he brought to the hospital for his wife in celebration of their newborn son.

I always thought this a most romantic tale, imagining the devotion of my fierce and dark-haired uncle for his beautiful young wife. But the story also reminded me of the hardscrabble early life of my mother and her sixteen siblings, and impressed upon me the value of a penny.

For some reason this story also translated into a superstition about pennies that developed into a complicated set of behaviors. Walking over a penny lying on the sidewalk implied the wastefulness and arrogance of the wealthy, and it would bring down the ire of God, who hated above all pride and vanity. So if I saw a penny on the sidewalk, even a nasty penny in a dirty gutter, I had to pick it up. To me retrieving the penny was no guarantee of good luck, as promised in the American proverb, but it was the only way to stave off calamity. On the other hand, if I dropped a penny, I reasoned that I should leave it where it had fallen so someone else might pocket a bit of good fortune. I’m not sure why the penny was only a way to prevent misfortune for myself and for another person it was a potential boon, but that’s the way it was.

Funny that I should put that all in the past tense, as though I had outgrown a childish superstition, because to this day when I see a penny, on the floor of a taxi or in the middle of a busy street, I am compelled to pick it up. Both Uncle Gene and Aunt June have passed away, but that story stays with me the way a beloved old movie might—I can see Gene lugging a heavy sack of bottles through darkened streets, and I can imagine June’s face in the morning when he presents her with a dozen hard-won red roses.

Nancy Kricorian

Today on our early dog walk on Morningside Drive, I heard the cries of juvenile red-tailed hawks, then spotted two of them in a young tree in the Cathedral Close. They kept up their racket until mama hawk swooped down from the Cathedral tower with breakfast.

 A friend sent me an old photo taken one summer when my college boyfriend and I traveled from Boston to Seattle using all manner of transport, including hopping a freight train from Denver to Salt Lake City. The photo was taken by my boyfriend and pictured me and his best friend, who drove us to the Denver rail yard. About an hour later the two of us hopped the “jackrabbit,” what the watchman had called the next fast train out. I used this adventure in my second novel, DREAMS OF BREAD AND FIRE. Below is an excerpt from that section of the book.

Ani and Asa crept alongside the train until they located an open boxcar door and clambered in. The yard lights cast a parallelogram of brightness on the grimy wooden floor. They found several large sheets of heavy cardboard and pulled them to one end of the car. As they were settling into their corner two figures climbed in.

Hello, people, said a tall lean man. He was wearing soiled jeans and a denim work shirt rolled to the elbows. Don’t mind if we share the accommodations, do you?

No problem at all, Asa responded. He stood and pulled Ani to her feet.

This here is Ray, the taller one said, pointing to his short sidekick, and I’m Wiley. Ray bobbed his head while Wiley extended his hand.

Asa shook Wiley’s hand. I’m Asa. This is Ani.

Wiley’s face cracked into a smile that cried out for a dentist. I haven’t seen a girl riding the rails in a good long time.

As the train rattled out of the yard, the men set up in the opposite end of the car while Asa and Ani retreated to theirs. The train picked up speed, dashing along the tracks.

Ani whispered, Did you catch the naked woman tattooed on Wiley’s arm? I think there’s something the matter with the short one. He looks like an ax murderer.

Will you please calm down? Asa whispered back.

Great. We’re in a boxcar with a couple of deranged derelicts and he tells me to calm down. What are you some kind of dahngahlakh?

Asa said, I’m not going to let anything happen to you.

Thanks, Superman, Ani said.

Ani drew her knees up and closed her eyes. She pretended to relax, but actually she was envisioning Asa wrestling Wiley to the floor while Ray chased her around with a knife.

After a while, Asa and Ani moved to the boxcar door and saw a tunnel through the mountains looming ahead.

A lineman standing near the track waved frantically and shouted at them, Get inside! Cover your faces.

As they entered the tunnel, Asa and Ani lay on the floor with sweaters over their noses and mouths. Wiley and Ray pulled their shirts over their faces as well. It seemed like a long time that they were hurtling through the dark with thick, acrid air around them.

Asa drew her close with his free arm. Ani lay in his embrace, sure that their dead bodies would be discovered in the car when it arrived in Salt Lake. Her mother had begged Ani to take the bus. She claimed she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep until Ani called from Seattle. Her family would weep over Ani’s open casket. The Kersamians would forever curse the name of Asa Willard for leading Ani to an early demise. That ruled out joint burial in the family plot in the Ridgelawn Cemetery.

Finally, light and clean air flowed into the boxcar.

The four of them moved to the door frame, where the clustered lights of small mountain towns passed by. Soon there were only isolated houses and then they were in the craggy wilds of the Colorado Rockies. The moon cast a creamy carpet of light over the angular peaks.

Wiley said, Me and Ray broke out of a work camp near Lubbock a few days ago.

What were you in for? Asa asked.

Picked up for vagrancy. Sent us out to the farm. Barbed wire all around. The foreman had a whip and kept at us from dawn till dusk.

To Ani it sounded like something out of a fifties chain-gang movie.

I didn’t think that kind of thing was legal anymore, Ani said to Wiley.

Wiley laughed. Honey, you wouldn’t believe the things that are legal in Texas.

Nancy Kricorian

NOTES: Dreams of Bread and Fire was published by Grove Press in 2003. Danhgahlakh means blockhead. Photo courtesy of John Ackerly.

This past weekend I attended “All That’s Left to You: Palestinian Writers in Conversation”, a panel that was part of this year’s PEN World Voices Festival. For three years Sarah Schulman, Arte East and I—at first separately and then together—had worked to make this historic panel a reality. Jakab Orsos, the new director of the Festival, was an enthusiastic promoter of the event, and it was thanks to support from the Lannan Foundation and the Open Society Foundations that the Palestinian writers were able to come to New York to participate in the premiere North American literary gathering.

As PEN noted in its own description of the event, “For the first time in the Festival’s history PEN brings together a panel of leading Palestinian writers to take their place in the global literary community. From Palestine and from the diaspora, they will share their work, experiences, and visions, revealing how a literature is both imagined and created under occupation, siege and exile.” The title for the panel, suggested by one of the writers, “All That’s Left to You,” is taken from the title of a novella by Ghassan Khanafani, a revered Palestinian journalist and fiction writer who was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972.

The panelists were Adania Shibli, who teaches at Birzeit University in Ramallah, Najwan Darwish, who divides his time between Haifa and Jerusalem, and Randa Jarrar, who lives and teaches in Fresno, California. Their conversation was moderated by the esteemed Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury. The Tishman Auditorium at The New School was full—there were approximately five hundred people in attendance—and the afternoon was a triumph. Each of the writers read for 7-10 minutes: Randa chose a beautiful and poignant short fiction set in Gaza called “The Story of My Building’; Adania read a hilarious and biting excerpt from her essay “On East-West Dialogue”; Najwan read three stunning poems in Arabic, with the English translations projected on a screen behind him (see an exemplary poem here). Then the writers answered two questions about identity and exile posed by Elias Khoury, before taking questions from the audience.

The event was historic for a number of reasons. It was the first time that PEN had hosted a panel made up solely of Palestinian writers. Each of the writers represented a different segment of Palestinian society—one from the Diaspora, one a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and one who resides in the Occupied West Bank. It was the first time I have ever heard Palestinian writers speak in a mainstream literary venue in New York City the unvarnished truth about the misery of occupation, the humiliations they are put through by the Israeli government when traveling in and out of Israel and Palestine (read about Randa’s saga here), and the catastrophic ongoing loss and fragmentation experienced by the Palestinian people since 1948. The audience’s enthusiastic applause at the close of the session made me feel that we had inched a little closer to justice.

Nancy Kricorian