now

ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS in the window at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, June 2013

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

1956 Wheat Penny

“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

Juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk

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.

Conversation in a Denver rail yard

 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.

PEN World Voices Festival

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

The Kodjababian Family, Mersin, Cilicia, Ottoman Empire, circa 1910

On April 24th, 1915, several hundred Armenian community leaders, writers and intellectuals in Constantinople were rounded up and deported, launching what would become a mass slaughter and exile of the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Each year on April 24th, Armenians around the world commemorate what has variously been called the Great Crime, the Deportations, the Massacres, and the Genocide. The poem below was inspired by stories that my grandmother told me of her experiences during the Deportations and in the years immediately following.

ARMENIA

For Mariam Kodjababian Kricorian

I. Syria

This is what I remember:
I would make fine stitches
in scraps of cloth and my father
would look up from his work
and praise my tiny row of seeds.
I loved to sit among the buttons
and bolts of cloth and hear the rock
of the pedal and sewing machine.

One winter morning when the snow
drifts stood as high as my head,
my father swung me to his shoulders
and carried me two miles to school
past the white mountains of cedar.

I don’t know why it happened.
A notice nailed to the wall
in my eighth year and we gathered
few belongings, and all our people
marched and stumbled toward Syria.

My mother fell by the road,
and we left her there.
The great dark birds followed us.
The soldiers were dogs, and we became
less than nothing in the desert.

My father died, and my small sisters
grew thinner to their deaths.
There was me and my brother Sarkis,
and the black tent flapping in the sand.

II. Cyprus

There were twenty beds to make,
double back the stiff cuff of sheet
over the rough blanket, the cotton cover,
and baste it all together twenty times.

Then the long boards of the floors,
quick dance of the broom, splash
of the pail and the mop and thirty
stairs from the top
to the bottom of the inn.

My uncle’s wife had me earn my keep.
My brother was made an apprentice
to the drunken tailor in the next village,
where straight seams happened in the morning
and not much in the afternoon.

He arrived late one night at the inn,
a tall narrow man in American suits.
His stare made my hands tremble
and the milk pitcher smash to the floor
when I served his meal.
He tucked notes in my apron pocket
when he passed me in the hall.
I tore them up unopened.
I was sixteen and he twice my age.

My uncle asked, Mariam, will you go
with this man to America?

We left Cyprus one week later
on a ship as big as our village.
My name was made Mary, my age eighteen.
I never saw my brother again.

III. Egypt

Our wedding picture was taken
in Cairo. My husband’s cousin
helped me with the row
of small buttons down the back
of the ivory satin gown; she loaned me
gold earrings and a bracelet.
I sat in a chair and my feet
in their pale shoes barely
grazed the floor.
Leo stood beside me,
a hand on my shoulder,
staring straight into the eye
of the machine and the man
under the black cloth behind it.
With the flash of light
I saw the fierce sun of the desert,
and felt the fear rise up,
great wings beating against my ribs.
I saw Sarkis waving from the pier.
I thought of letting my long hair down,
and nothing else.

Nancy Kricorian

This poem was originally published in WITNESS in its Spring 1988 Issue.

To the memory of the 112 inhabitants of this building, among them 40 small children, who were deported and who died in German camps in 1942

I visited Paris for the first time when I was a twenty-year-old college student. I can close my eyes and remember what the unfamiliar city looked like to me during this initial encounter—the orderliness of the public gardens with their gravel walkways, wooden benches and round-seated metal chairs; the relative smallness of the automobiles; and the historic monuments gleaming under floodlights at night.

Coming from the United States—the New World— the enormous weight of history Paris carried was a visceral shock, especially the buildings: Medieval cloisters, Gothic cathedrals, seventeenth century catacombs, Revolutionary and Napoleonic monuments, and elegant 19th-century apartment blocks. But I was fascinated even more by the traces left behind by the Second World War. Rather than buildings and monuments, the trauma of the war and the Nazi Occupation remains present in mundane, unexpected, and easy-to-overlook markers scattered throughout the city.

There were seats on the metro reserved for the war wounded. The first time I saw these signs, the French term mutilés de guerre, which had originated to refer to wounded veterans from the First World War, stunned me in its graphicness. I was always expecting to see men with empty sleeves or wooden legs sitting in the designated seats. All around the city, I noticed marble plaques on walls commemorating groups and individuals who had struggled and suffered during the Occupation, ranging from Jewish children who had been deported to blind people who had participated in the Resistance, and young men who had died fighting on the streets liberating Paris in August 1944.

During the ten years I spent researching and writing my novel ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, I realized that the manner in which Paris memorialized Les Années Noires (The Dark Years) was in many ways akin to how it had experienced the war. The city was spared the horrific bombing that devastated London and Berlin. But loss and fear were interwoven into every corner of the city; I realized that my biggest task as a writer was to convey the immediate if mostly commonplace presence of that constant looming terror, even as daily life went on.

Several salient factors about how most Parisians had lived the war came through in everything I learned. It was a dark time both literally and figuratively. There were black outs and black out curtains limiting sight and vision. Political repression backed up by deportation and systemic violence, censorship, self-censorship, and denunciations by neighbors all resulted in a feeling of moral darkness and isolation. In addition to this pervasive gloom, people were hungry. The Germans used France as their breadbasket during the war, taking vast quantities of French agricultural products such as wheat, butter, cheese, and wine, leaving the French to subsist on root vegetables that had formerly been cattle fodder. Parisian grimly joked about the German doryphores (potato bugs) who had made off with all their potatoes. A third factor that came up in all the accounts was how cold people were during the bitter winters of the Occupation. With the German war machine siphoning off oil, gas and coal, there was not much left for heating Parisian apartments and schools.

When I was writing the novel, it was as though every day I left my home in Manhattan and spent a few hours with my characters in their Belleville apartment. I heard the sounds of the concierge’s bucket and mop on the landing. I smelled the dreaded rutabagas cooking in the kitchen. And I shivered with Maral, my narrator and main character, as she bundled into several sweaters before crawling into her glacial bed.

This was the Paris that I traveled to on a daily basis for almost ten years—not the romantic city of my student days, nor the place where on family holiday I took my children to play on the brightly colored climbing structures in the Jardin des Tuileries. It was a somber city, a city of shadows and privation, but also a place where people of conscience worked hard to keep a small light of dignity burning in an inhumane time. Now that I have finished the book, I understand that the Paris of 70 years ago has yet to truly vanish: its ghost-like presence gently marks the city landscape. And now, on my next visit to Paris, I have Maral, her friends, and her family, to walk with me as guides to that almost-hidden past.

Nancy Kricorian
April 2013
New York City

This piece originally appeared on the American Library of Paris blog in advance of a book presentation scheduled there on May 15, 2013

With former schoolmates at the Saint James Armenian Cultural Center in Watertown

I’m just back from the Boston leg of my book tour where I did presentations at the Saint James Armenian Cultural Center in Watertown and the Brookline Booksmith. Former schoolmates of mine organized the Saint James event, and the afternoon was a warm homecoming for my novel and me. The Brookline Booksmith, which has now hosted me for each of my books, also provided an enthusiastic welcome. Just before boarding the train back to New York City I taped a cable TV show called “The Literati Scene with Smoki Bacon and Dick Concannon.” My touring is two-thirds of the way finished—next up are Spotty Dog Books in Hudson, New York and the American Library in Paris, followed by the AGBU Centers in Montreal and Toronto.

A month after the official publication date, I’m taking pause to consider where things are with my book and with the state of publishing in general. The other day I told my mother that I have been feeling as though I’m selling Girl Scout Cookies door to door. My mother said, “You never liked doing that, did you?” (As a matter of fact, I quit Girl Scouts in part because I hated doing that.) This morning when I wrote to my agent that it seems as though I’m engaged in house-to-house urban combat, she replied, “I feel like that most days.” (For a funny video portrait of the promotional life of the writer check out Book Launch 2.0)

An essay by writer Deborah Copaken Kogan entitled “My So Called ‘Post-Feminist’ Life in Arts and Letters” was posted on The Nation web site earlier this week offering a sharp and dismal look at sexism in the publishing and reviewing worlds. She discussed how important a review in The New York Times is to the fate of a book, and her own frustration about the esteemed publication’s silence on her work. She decided to take action by “composing a carefully worded private e-mail to the editor of The New York Times Book Review, alerting him to his neglect of all four of my published books. He responds graciously with two sentences in which he promises to share this information with his colleagues. Eight months later the novel remains unreviewed.”

My first two novels were not reviewed in The New York Times, and until last month the only mention my work had garnered from them was in an article about the Palestine Festival of Literature by the then Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner. ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS did receive a brief review in the “Newly Released Books” column a few weeks ago. I didn’t send it out at the time because I was smarting from a comment embedded in the paragraph. But the mention was important to the publisher and for my novel in part because it provided a laudatory quotation from “the newspaper of record” to be used on the paperback edition.

To be fair, many good books receive few reviews because of the sheer volume of newly released titles and the diminished number of review pages. But it is instructive to look at comparative analyses about who does the reviewing and who gets reviewed. The VIDA Women in Literary Arts 2012 Count released on 4 March 2013 showed the unbalanced way that women and men are represented in mainstream literary magazines and book reviews. Roxanne Gay at The Rumpus did a breakdown by ethnicity of writers reviewed by The New York Times, amply displaying that women are not alone in this struggle. But as bad as things are for women writers and writers of color, it could be worse—look at the film industry.

Ending on a more positive note, I’m sharing a recent interview about ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS and what I’m now calling, thanks to a suggestion from my editor, my ARMENIAN DIASPORA QUARTET. You can read it on News.Am in English, Armenian or Russian.

Nancy Kricorian

Making Cheoreg (Easter Sunday 2013)

Saturday afternoons my sister and I climbed the stairs to our grandmother’s second-floor apartment in the two-family house we shared with her in Watertown, Massachusetts. Sometimes we helped her make macaroni and cheese for lunch, and others we assisted her in preparing elaborate Armenian foods, such as trays full of manti, tiny meat dumplings that would later float in soup, or stuffed grape leaves, which we called cigars. But my favorite was making cheoreg, a sweet roll that was traditionally served at Easter and that my grandmother kept on hand for when her friends stopped by for coffee.

My grandmother prepared the dough before we arrived, so we missed the mixing and the two-hour rise in the unlit oven. She called us, either by phone or by shouting into the broom closet that was just above ours, when the dough was ready to be worked. The minute we entered the kitchen we could smell it—the yeast, the butter, and the aromatic mahlab, made from dried cherry seeds. We sat at the kitchen table, and she handed us each an egg-sized piece of dough that was buttery and fluffy and practically alive. We rolled it out either on the table or between our palms until it was about eight inches long. Then we twisted it into a snail-shaped knot that we set on a baking sheet. Once all the sheets were full my grandmother covered them with a towel for the dough to rise again.

While we waited for the dough and for the oven to heat to the correct temperature, there were a number of amusing activities from which to choose. We played “Button, button, who’s got the button?” with a button on a round of yarn. We pulled pieces of satin from my grandmother’s dresser drawer and wrapped dolls in them. We took my grandmother’s large cookie tin of buttons and spilled them on the bed to sort them. Or the three of us lay on her bed while she told stories from the Bible or the Old Country, both of them exotic, far-off places.

Once the rolls had risen, it was time to brush beaten egg over them and sprinkle them with sesame and black nigella seeds. While they baked, my grandmother’s entire apartment was suffused with that distinctive cheoreg aroma—butter, flour, egg, sugar, yeast and mahlab. When they were done, my grandmother used a spatula to move them from baking tray to cooling rack. Then it was time to sample them still warm from the oven, served with a slice of cheese and some strawberry jam. That was truly heaven.

Nancy Kricorian

With the AIWA San Francisco Chapter at Book Passage in the Ferry Building

I know it sounds a little corny, but I am thrilled that Suzanne Toren has recorded the audio book for ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS. Suzanne and I spent several hours on the phone going over the Armenian names and phrases in all three of my novels—audio versions of ZABELLE and DREAMS OF BREAD AND FIRE will be available soon—and I was awed by her ability to repeat things back with perfect pronunciation.

ZABELLE and ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS are downloadable as ebooks, and I recently signed a rider to my Grove/Atlantic contract for DREAMS so that ebook will soon be online as well. I feel grateful that all three of my novels will be available in all three formats—a book to hold in your hand, an electronic version to read on your device, and an audio version for your listening pleasure.

This week I did two radio interviews, one with the inimitable Leonard Lopate on WNYC and the other with the Armenian Radio Hour of New Jersey. More radio and even TV interviews are on the horizon. I will share when they are available.

I’m posting a favorite photo from the California leg of the ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS tour. I’m standing with some members of the Armenian International Women’s Association San Francisco Chapter at Book Passage in the Ferry Building. Their outpouring of warmth and enthusiasm made the evening one of the highlights of the trip.