now

I wrote this piece in 2005 during my tenure as the New York City coordinator of CODEPINK Women for Peace, and presented it as a talk at a number of panels and conferences. It posted to the CODEPINK web site soon thereafter, and a version of it was subsequently published in Women’s Studies Quarterly in the Spring of 2006. (This is a slightly updated version from 2007.)

CODEPINK Women for Peace is a grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the war in Iraq, stop new wars, and redirect our resources into healthcare, education and other life-affirming activities. CODEPINK was founded in November 2002 as a women’s peace vigil outside the White House. The name CODEPINK was chosen as a response to the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded advisory system.  The government says Code Yellow for High Risk of Terrorist Attack and we say CODEPINK for Peace. In the past four years CODEPINK has grown to a national organization with over 100 local chapters.

CODEPINK employs a variety of tools and techniques for working towards positive social change, but we are known for our use of direct action and street theater.

First to define the terms:

Direct action is a political tactic of confrontation and sometimes-illegal disruption intended to attract and arouse public awareness and action. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 was an example of direct action that was successful in ending seating segregation on the public buses.

Street theater, sometimes called Guerilla Theater, involves the acting out of a social issue in a public space—that could be in a park, on the street or in a subway car. It is a form of direct action. There are a number of street theater groups here in New York, among them CODEPINK, the Billionaires for Bush, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. The Reverend Billy, for example, has performed exorcisms of cash registers in Starbucks stores to show his dislike of the corporate take-over of American life. After an exorcism in Los Angeles Starbucks obtained a restraining order against the Reverend Billy so he is not allowed within 250 yards of any Starbucks in the state of California.

Civil disobedience, which is another form of direct action, involves the nonviolent act of breaking the law to call attention to a particular law or set of laws that some people think are immoral or questionable. An example of civil disobedience from the Civil Rights Movement was the “sit-in” campaign by African-American students in the south. The students would sit at Whites Only lunch counters, trying to show that it was wrong to have a law enforcing that kind of segregated seating. They would remain in their seats, in effect breaking the law, until the police were called in to drag them out.

CODEPINK has used direct action on numerous occasions to make our opposition to the war in Iraq known—during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 2004, during press conferences in Baghdad, outside Armed Forces Recruiting Centers here in Manhattan and during recent fundraisers for New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton, who was a consistent supporter of the war even as she criticized the way it was being managed.

Starting in late 2005 CODEPINK bird-dogged Hillary at her appearances in New York,; held vigils outside her Manhattan office; and showed up inside and outside of her speeches and fundraisers in cities around the country, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Our LISTEN HILLARY campaign has had an impact on the Senator’s rhetoric on the war as well as her recent votes against war funding in the Senate.

CODEPINK women have been popping up all over the place with our pro-peace message—and you’ll often see us on the evening news.

Why direct action?

You know the old expression, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease?” Using direct action is a way of being a very squeaky wheel.

Huge media conglomerates control most of the information we see and hear about the world. Corporate-owned television outlets show us for the most part the version of reality that the current government wants us to know. For example, the Bush administration doesn’t want us to see the dead bodies of Iraqi women and children who are killed in U.S. military campaigns. They don’t want us to see the bodies of dead U.S. servicemen. These kinds of images are part of what turned public opinion against the Vietnam War and if we actually saw the devastation being caused with our tax dollars—and billions of our tax dollars—we might have something to say about it. By controlling the images we see they hope they can control our perceptions of and often feelings about the war in Iraq.

Direct action and street theater are ways to try to break through this control and have our anti-war message covered by the mainstream media. We believe that direct action works. A recent study on environmental activism by sociologist Jon Agnone showed that chaining yourself to a bulldozer is more likely to influence environmental policy than lobbying on Capitol Hill. And beyond having a direct influence on legislation, we believe that our street actions have an impact in our communities. It’s about educating people. It’s about making an alternative version of reality visible on the streets and on the news. We’re angry about what’s going on; we’re standing up for our beliefs and principles, and we’re strengthening our movement and ourselves by working together. And often we’re also having a great time.

Nancy Kricorian

Published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Spring 2006

It’s September, and the summer hiatus from peddling books has come to a close. I’m about to start doing public events (see schedule here) and some private gigs (a book club meeting in NYC and a political science seminar at Vassar, for example). I’m especially looking forward to an evening at the Robbins Library in Arlington, Mass. on October 3^rd. Librarian Jenny Arch wrote a lovely blog post about the upcoming event. If you want to invite me to a public or private venue near you (and me) or to a Skype chat convenient for all, let me know. You are also invited to join my 9/25 online book chat via Togather and Spreecast. You can also check out an interview I did last month with Book Case TV (starts at 15:23 and runs to 21:17).

In August there were a number of articles about the state of literary fiction that I thought might be of interest: a funny piece in Flavorwire about why bestselling novelist Jonathan Franzen annoys so many people; a piece in Salon discussing the dubious distinctions between “Chick Lit” and “Literary Fiction” by women; and a related piece from the Fashion & Style Section of the New York Times in which the author of this summer’s hot debut novel waxes eloquent on life in the literary borough of Brooklyn. If you’re still confused about how to separate literary fiction from genre fiction (chick lit, historical fiction, mysteries, etc.), you can read this piece, which probably won’t clear things up. And finally, in yesterday’s New York Times Style section, in honor of New York Fashion Week, there was an article entitled “The Rising Value of Land in Book Titles” about a hot trend in book publishing this fall. As Oscar Wilde said, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

Nancy Kricorian

 From the archive, a poem originally published in THE GRAHAM HOUSE REVIEW in Spring 1988.

My Father Said That’s the Devil’s Work

What I passed the Underwood Devilled Ham factory
on our street, he pointed his pitchfork at me.

Satan’s fingers grazed my heels as I stormed
up the cellar stairs, his steamy breath behind.

He was down the bathtub drain ready to wrap
his weedy arms around my legs. I wedged the plug

into the gateway to Hell. He crouched at the foot
of my bed, and I slept pressed into the headboard

away from his flickering tongue. He whispered
swear words into my ear while I dreamed.

Years later, I finally met him in Paris.
He smoked Greek cigarettes called Santé.

In a hotel room in the Marais, he pulled me
to the floor. We kept the shutters closed all week.

Nancy Kricorian

When I was in college, I studied with a poet and short story writer who gave me an instruction that still echoes in my head: “Respect your process.” But my “process” has always been a changing one. When I was a young poet, I wrote a poem by hand, then typed it, made corrections on the typed copy, rewrote it long hand, then typed it again. This process was often repeated up to twenty times.

After graduate school, when I started writing fiction, the technology had changed. I was no longer working on my Olivetti Lettera 100 portable typewriter, nor on the IBM Selectric machines I had access to in my administrative assistant jobs on campus. I was now using a computer, which made the drafting process at once easier and yet harder to keep track of.

The idea of writing a novel was daunting so I thought of it as producing interconnected short stories. Going from writing a one- to two-page poem to a ten- to twelve-page short story was tough, but it didn’t seem impossible, and my first novel Zabelle grew out of this endeavor. Having done it once, the thought of a second novel seemed manageable. My first two books required some research, but they were based in family and personal history so the worlds I described were not so difficult for me to imagine and create.

With my third novel, I was no longer writing about family experience, and it took place in a foreign country and in a time before I was born, so the research process was long and extensive, although fully engrossing. I set out to learn everything I could about Paris during the Nazi Occupation, and as much as possible about the Armenian community in France. Slowly, as I read my way through over one hundred books and talked with dozens of people, my characters’ world became a place I went to in my head each day as I wrote. It was as vivid as the world that I myself inhabited. But after ten years living with the Pegorian family in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood, All The Light There Was went to the copy editor and it was time to move on to my next novel, which would tell the story of Armenians in Lebanon during the Civil War.

Last summer I visited Beirut for the first time. I had read a tall stack of books including novels, histories and guidebooks in preparation, but my process works best with immersion and so I went. Knowing no one in Lebanon, I was armed with a list of the names and contact information of friends of friends. They were mostly Armenians, and they without exception welcomed me as though I were a long-lost cousin. I stayed in Dbayah for the first few days to be close to a friend’s sister, and then moved to a hotel near Hamra for the rest of the visit. I spent five afternoons wandering around the streets of Bourj Hammoud with a new friend who had lived his whole life there and who introduced me to shopkeepers, actors, musicians, jewelers, bankers, and array of other local people. Another new friend took me on a walking tour of the East Beirut neighborhoods of Sanayeh, Zokak el Blat, and Watwat. An acquaintance drove me to Ashrafieh for an hour just so I could have sense where the Armenian churches were in that quarter, and what the houses looked like. I took photos and made copious notes.

Since that trip, I have continued researching, and I have started informally interviewing people about their experiences. As I read novels set in Beirut during the Civil War—such as Rawi Hage’s DeNiro’s Game, Ghada Samman’s Beirut Nightmares, Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows, and Mischa Hiller’s Sabra Zoo—I feel as though I am visiting a familiar landscape. Beirut is slowly becoming a place I go to in my head. I have begun sketching out my characters and choosing names for them. The plot is slowly emerging. As I’m working on my fourth novel, I recognize that my current process will require some additional months of research, more thinking, and internal building. But when I hear the voice of Vera Serinossian for the first time, I’ll know it’s time to start writing.

Nancy Kricorian

In Time Magazine Lev Grossman covered the literary drama of the summer: J.K. Rowling was revealed to be the author of a mystery novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Calling, penned under the name of James Galbraith. The book, which was published in April, had sold approximately 1000 copies in the U.K. and the U.S. before the story broke. Predictably enough, once it was known that Rowling was the author, the book shot to the top of bestseller lists. As Grossman put it, “If nothing else. l’affaire Galbraith is an object lesson in how hard it is to get attention for even a well-received first book. Its slim sales notwithstanding, the reviews of The Cuckoo’s Calling had been almost universally good. The book was widely ignored by the mainstream critics, but the trade magazines, which cover most new releases, loved it.” Once the J.K. Rowling “brand” was made known, sales skyrocketed, and there was some suspicion about the timing of the reveal, but then the law firm that represents her apologized for being the source of the inadvertent leak.

This week there was also a funny piece on Book Riot by Jennifer Miller, a first-time novelist who decided to try to break the world record for the most book club visits by an author in one month. The gimmick got her a fair amount of media coverage, but also drew the attention of another writer who claimed to hold a record for book club visits that would be hard for Miller to beat.

Speaking of book clubs, I’ve accepted an invitation from the Carleton College New York City Alumni Book Group to join a September discussion of ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS. I am also trying out a new online platform called Togather that allows writers to connect with readers and reading groups by setting up real-world events and online meetings. I have scheduled a book discussion to be held on September 25^th at 7:30 p.m. via Spreecast, another new online service that allows for group video chats. If you are interested in joining the September 25th discussion of my book, you can register here. If you are in a book club that would like to read ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, let me know. If it’s within reasonable commuting distance from New York City, I may be able to visit in person, or we can set up an online event.

When I was in Paris in May, my friend Virginia Pattie Kerovpyan invited me to join her on the Peniche Anako for a jazz concert one evening. The Peniche Anako is a canal barge docked on the West Bank of the La Villette Basin in the 19^th arrondissement. The Basin, which is the largest artificial lake in Paris, was filled with water in December 1808 and is part of the 130-kilometer (80.7 mile) Parisian Canal Network that is operated by the municipality. Canal barges have access to about 22 kilometers of the network.

Peniche Anako opened its doors in the fall of 2008 under the direction of Patrick Bernard, an ethnologist whose work focused on the oral traditions of indigenous peoples. In January of 2009, the barge was purchased by the Armenian Red Cross Association (in French le Comité de secours de la Croix Rouge Arménienne, C.S.R.A.), which is an organization founded in the 1920’s by doctors, lawyers and other professionals to provide aid to Armenian Genocide survivors and refugees. In purchasing the boat, the C.S.R.A. intended to continue with multicultural programming, while creating a space where Armenian culture could also be showcased.

Virginia Pattie Kerovpyan took over as Director of Creative Programming starting in 2010, and a close-knit circle of friends and family keeps the project running. When I visited the boat on my recent trip to Paris, her husband Aram was working behind the bar, a friend was collecting tickets at the door, her son was handling the soundboard, and her daughter’s boyfriend was the chef for the evening. The excellent jazz trio concert that night, billed as “Anne Pacéo a Carte Blanche,” was performed by the aforementioned Anne Pacéo on percussion, along with Maxime Bender on bass and Olivier Lutz on saxophone. The space is not large—the bar area can comfortably accommodate around 20 people, and the performance space has a capacity of 100—which adds to the intimacy and warmth of the atmosphere.

In addition to the musical performances, ranging from classical, to folk, to jazz, Kerovpyan also schedules visits by artists and storytellers, as well as film screenings, lectures, and dramatic readings. Each month the programming is focused on a different theme: for example this past spring March was devoted to the cultures of Spain and Portugal; in April the theme was Solidarity Encounters and France; The Near East and the Fertile Crescent were the focus in May; and World Diasporas in June. Annually the month of October is dedicated to Armenian culture, with a broad array of events featuring Armenian musicians, artists, photographers and lecturers. Local school children have twice been invited onto the barge for activities—once for an Armenian calligraphy workshop, and the second time for a lesson in Armenian song and dance.

Kerovpyan says, “The Peniche is a space where we aim to provide a warm welcome to all people. We also hope that Armenians from around the world who are passing through Paris will think of this as a home away from home.”

La Peniche Anako (http://penicheanako.info)

Bassin de la Villette

Across from 61, quai de la Seine

75019 PARIS 
Métro: Riquet, Stalingrad ou Jaurès

This piece originally appeared via The Armenian Weekly.

Nancy Kricorian

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.