now

A few days ago, a reader sent me a photo of ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS on the morning it arrived at his apartment in Honolulu one day after the official publication date. It reminded me of photos my friend Chris Bohjalian has posted to his Facebook author page that fans from around the country send him of his novels in the places where they are being read: back yards, living rooms, beachfronts, and boat decks. It also gave me a strange sensation to think that the characters I had lived with for so long were now in other people’s homes.

This past summer when a young Armenian radio interviewer I spoke with in Beirut suggested that producing a book was akin to birthing a child, I blurted out, “Actually I have given birth to two children and published two books, and that comparison has always seemed like something someone who has never experienced childbirth would say.”

She seemed taken aback, and I wish I had given a more generous response. After some thought, and during this time when my third novel is newly arrived in bookstores, I realize that I could have suggested that for me the experience is more akin to sending a child off to kindergarten for the first time. You have devoted years to grooming this child to go out into the world among his or her peers and into the care of others. It’s a little scary—will your kid get along with the other kids? Will the teacher like her? If she uses a curse word or slaps another kid, will everyone think you are a terrible parent? Your child is not you, but in some ways she is a reflection of your parenting and therefore an extension of you. I am not my book, but I devised the plot, wrote the sentences, and animated the characters. And now it is time for them to go play—nicely, but not TOO nicely, I hope!

Nancy Kricorian

In the old days, publishers sent out bound galleys or proofs to a limited number of reviewers, journalists, film and translation scouts, and booksellers in the hopes of drumming up early interest in an upcoming title. Now there is Net Galley, a platform where a publisher can upload an electronic version of the galleys that provides early access to reviewers, bloggers, journalists, librarians, booksellers, educators and other “readers of influence.”

From what I can tell, people who have accessed ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS through Net Galley include members of the Amazon Vines reviewers program and a wide array of bloggers, some of whom posted ratings on Goodreads.

So far I have come across reviews from a young woman in Indonesia, on a blog called “A Sweet Spot Home” that features posts about entertaining along with book reviews, and on a blog called “BooksNFreshAir.” I have no idea how many people these advance reviews reach and how much they help the launch of a title, but my editor said, “They can’t hurt.”

What does it mean that there are now thousands of people weighing in on a book through blogs, customer comments, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads and dozens of other platforms? Neil Gabler had an interesting piece in The Guardian a few years ago called “Everyone’s a critic now” that examines the effects of online community commentary on reviewing. He sums up his argument thus: “The point is that authority has migrated from critics to ordinary folks, and there is nothing—not collusion or singleness of purpose or torrents of publicity—that the traditional critics can do about it. They have seen their monopoly usurped by what amounts to a vast technological word-of-mouth of hundreds of millions of people.”

March 12 is the official publication date of ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, and the early reviews will soon be joined by those from mainstream outlets along with a cacophony of amateur reviews and customer comments. Bring on the vibrant, noisy, democratic conversation.

Nancy Kricorian

“Death is a great project, of all experiences it is perhaps the most interesting of all. We shall see what remains and what will be. Life has been beautiful, with awful moments and admirable ones. Death shall perhaps be even more beautiful, who knows!” ~ Stéphane Hessel

Stéphane Hessel (1917-2013) died in his sleep last week at the age of 95.  He was a member of the French Resistance, a Buchenwald survivor, a co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a diplomat, and the author of TIME FOR OUTRAGE (Indignez-Vous!), a pamphlet that sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and was credited as the inspiration for the Ingidnados Movement, which was a precursor of Occupy. Hessel’s motto, “To resist is to create, and to create is to resist,” became a rallying cry for young people the world over.

It was in his capacity as a juror and the honorary president of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine that I met Stéphane Hessel in London in November 2010. The first time I saw him, I didn’t know anything about him beyond the brief biography in the program, but he spoke the most elegant French I had ever heard, and his charm, grace, and intelligence suffused the auditorium with warmth and humanity as he talked.

When I came back to New York, I sought out his books and learned more about his extraordinary life. His parents were the models for the characters in Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim. He was a hero of the French Resistance, and survived execution at Buchenwald only because a doctor in the camp switched his identity with that of another French prisoner who had died. Hessel entertained himself and others in the camp by reciting the hundreds of poems that he had memorized in French, German and English. (Hessel edited a collection of these poems entitled O ma mémoire: la poésie, ma nécessité that was published in 2006.) He spent a lifetime devoted to causes that embodied his respect for international law and the dignity of each individual. Towards the end of his life, his vocal support for Palestinian human rights resulted in some ugly attacks against his character, but he was not swayed.

I saw Hessel again when he was in New York in October 2012 for the New York session of the Russell Tribunal. He was as inspiring as ever, although a little more frail, having difficulty at times navigating the steps up to the dais where the jurors sat. I noticed as he spoke that most of the people in the room were completely smitten by him. It occurred to me that he had the charisma one expects in movie stars and politicians. What an amazing thing that he had devoted his magnetic personality not to accruing wealth or power, but to the great humanitarian causes of our age.

Nancy Kricorian

As part of the promotional drive for my new novel, I have set up a mailing list called NK Book Group, and have been sending out updates on the launch of the book, including reviews, tour information, and other details from the writing and selling life. Below is the missive that went out last week. If you are interested in joining the mailing list, send your request to nkbookgroup[at]gmail.com

Dear Friends,

I knew that bookselling had been transformed in the ten years since my second novel was published, but didn’t have a grasp of the details until the past few weeks as the publication of ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS nears. I’m getting a closer look at the work the marketing and publicity staff at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are doing on my behalf. I’m also finding myself being tasked with things I’ve never done before, such as writing pieces on spec to be pitched to newspapers and online magazines, and running a book give-away contest.

This week Shelf Awareness, which produces newsletters for librarians, booksellers, bloggers and hardcore readers, sent out a Dear Reader letter that I composed (see above). I must admit that my marketing maven husband helped edit the letter; I had little idea of how to pitch my book in 75-85 words. He said, “I put in love, because I knew you wouldn’t allow romance.” The pitch included information about how to enter a contest to win one of five copies that my publisher is giving away.

The email entries from librarians and book bloggers started coming in. Many of them had Maral in the subject line, as instructed, and then simply a name and address. Most of them had the feel of someone who sent the message the way people enter jingle contests or buy lottery tickets, with little expectation of winning. But some of them were oddly moving, as people described why they were interested in receiving a copy of the book. My favorite was from a high school librarian who wrote, “I would love to have ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS on the shelf for our students.”

I found out from the marketing person at HMH that the contest has two more rounds, as Shelf Awareness will be featuring the book in two different upcoming newsletters. So I’m expecting another influx of messages, and we won’t be announcing winners until April 8^th.

That’s it for this week, dear Readers. Stay tuned for upcoming chapters in the Annals of Self-Promotion!

Nancy Kricorian

The photo above is an outtake from Gran Fury’s 1988 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” campaign. It was shown as part of a video loop at a Gran Fury retrospective exhibition last year. Seeing our young faces from before we were married reminded me of this poem I wrote for James around the same time that the photo was taken.

Letter to James

This morning after you left
I slept until the phone rang,
and I let it ring. Then
the woman upstairs threw water
down the fire escape, which set
the pigeons off. I was hoping
a few of them got clean.
Sleep again, and dreams that
our house was besieged by starving
cats. I set bowls outside both
doors, filled with heavy cream.
My mother hung over the house
like a great bat, that kind
of shadow, that kind of fear.
But when finally I couldn’t sleep
any more, I had some cereal like
we do each morning, and thought
it sounded funny, one bowl and one
spoon. Some mornings the spoon
against your teeth bugs me, but
living with someone is like that.

Nancy Kricorian

originally published in The Mississippi Review, Spring 1991

The Armenian Church holiday of Diyardendarach, Derendez, or Candlemas Day, was originally a pagan fire and sun festival. As with many pagan holidays, the Armenian Christian Church found it more efficacious to adapt the fire festival rather than to suppress it. It was Christianized as a celebration of the Eve of the Great Lent that is observed on February 14^th, 40 days after Armenian Christmas and coinciding with Valentine’s Day. In Armenia bonfires are built on the eve of February 13 or the early hours of February 14. These fires are made in churchyards and backyards where people gather to watch the flames. As the flames die down newlyweds from the previous year, holding hands to strengthen their union, leap across the fire. In earlier periods, the ritual entailed circling the fire three times. Once the couples have had their turn, children and other adults jump over the embers. In the 19^th century, the ashes were strewn over fields to promote fertility, harkening to pagan times when this festival was also a celebration of the coming spring and a new season of growing. After the fire ceremony, there is music, dancing, eating and drinking. On the morning of February 14^th, a Divine Liturgy is offered in Armenian churches, followed by the blessing of newlyweds.

Nancy Kricorian

Armenia is a landlocked country in the Caucasus that you can find on a contemporary map. For my grandmother, Armenia was the “old country,” and more specifically the town of Mersin, Cilicia in the Ottoman Empire. This poem from 1994 is about my imaginary homeland, written before I had ever visited Yerevan. And the photo above is from a trip I made to Armenia in 2007.

My Armenia

Armenia is a country where someone is always crying.
Women punch in and out on the clock, grieving in shifts.
1895, 1915, 1921, the thirties, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1994…
White handkerchiefs flutter in their careworn hands.

The Armenian orphans have oversized heads and eyes
the color of bitter chocolate. They don’t complain about
the harshest winter. They are grateful for the same dull food.
In their faded uniforms, they sing off-key for visitors.

Cher, who was born Cherilyn Sarkisian, traveled to
Armenia where she wore a scarf and kept the tattoos covered.
She visited the orphans, and brought them Barbie dolls.
She said she would star in Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

I want to direct a bio-pic of Commander Avo, Cher’s
distant cousin, who died a “freedom fighter” in Karabagh.
How did Monte Melkonian of Visalia, California come to
join the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia?

The camera, the handkerchief, the rifle, the massacres,
Monte dead in Artsakh, a shrapnel wound to the head.
Plum blossoms, apricots, we will make a picnic under
the trees, fresh bread, madzoon, cheese, garden greens.

Children will race through the grass, and when the sun goes
down the field will be lit by the moon and a thousand fireflies.
The men drink raki , and sing: A person dies only once, but
fortunate is the one who dies for the freedom of his people.

Are there fireflies in Armenia? Do the women edge their
handkerchiefs with lace? Armenia is a country in my body,
the right side only because I’m half-Armenian. I choose it —
my imaginary homeland, my handkerchief, my name.

Nancy Kricorian

Originally published in The Antioch Review, Spring 1995

In November 2003 when I went to Paris to do research for my third novel, I interviewed a number of elderly Armenian who had lived through the Occupation. One of them was Nazareth Peshdikian, a Genocide survivor who was born in Zeitoun in 1909. Orphaned in 1915, he wandered from Aleppo to Baghdad to Jerusalem before immigrating to France when he was twenty-five years old. In Paris, he had worked as a shoemaker and a cobbler. He was also an amateur actor in the Armenian theater. He told me that he had performed in plays and theatricals with the Aznavourians (the family of Charles Aznavour).

The interview was conducted in French, although he frequently slipped into Armenian.  At age 93, his memory was a little foggy and when he forgot a name he was looking for, it stopped him in his narrative. Nazareth brought out his photo album, as well as an array of identity and membership cards. He told me he was “a Marxist and a humanist,” and a proud member of the Armenian Hunchakian Social Democratic Party. During the war his resistance work entailed delivering clandestine letters and putting anti-Nazi tracts in mailboxes.

In 1943, he said, the American had bombed the 15^th Arrondissement of Paris where he was living. His home was destroyed. His rabbit hutch was upended, but the rabbits survived. His first wife was wounded and transported to the hospital where she died. He repeated in French and Armenian several times, almost in wonder all those decades later, “Les lapins, nabasdagnereh…the rabbits lived, but my wife died.”

Nancy Kricorian

*

For those who can read French, here is an interview with Nazareth Peshdikian (1909-2007) that was published in 2002. It includes a detailed account of his experiences during the Genocide.

The weather turned frigid in New York City this week. On my early morning walk, the spectacular Harlem sunrise viewed from Morningside Heights, which usually merits an appreciative pause, was little consolation as the dogs and I braced ourselves against the icy wind and rushed home. I pulled this poem from the archive in honor of  winter.

VERSES ABOUT WINTER

I.

My sister and I listen at our parents’ door
to the radio announcer lists schools by town
alphabetically: Action, Andover, Arlington…
We’re waiting for Watertown. The snow falls
deeper, bowing the tall pine, burying
the swing set in the back yard.
The shovel’s scrape against the sidewalk
is sweet, and breath wets the wool scarf
over my mouth as I lift and throw
carving a path from our door.

II.

The thin boy who loans me his sweater
says he loves me. He is the first man
I love. I would follow him up
a peak of ice with rope, crampons
and ax; instead a storm drives us
to a country inn where he signs
the register, I imagine, Mr. and Mrs.
Smith. His hands draw warmth into
my aching fingers. His hands are
strong, and I want to trust them.

III.

I search for you on the back roads
of Hooksett, Penacook, Contoocook.
Headlights cut swaths of bright
falling snow. I share the road
with no one and trust nothing I see.
You appear like the ghost of an angel
as I round each bend: not the
wide-winged angel you taught me
to make in the snow, but bearing
the face of a lost child.

IV.

I want you strong and young again,
in summer hitting a home run
the boys chase into the woods.
“Trouble with the ticker,” you say
as we slow our pace for you
to adjust your muffler. I would
unfold the fist of pain,
stroke open palm and fingers,
and smooth the lines from the
forehead so like my own.

V.

As I walk under trees lining the street,
they bend towards me like the curve
of ribs, bone white and luminous.
Even trash is made holy in the snow’s
ample arms. A woman walking a dog
in a plaid coat passes me on the corner.
I want to slide my boots into the prints
she cuts through the snow. I would
follow her down to the frozen river
and into another life.

VI.

I wish I could write this while you
sleep nearby, dreaming of things
you don’t remember. Hundreds of miles
from here you walk, shoulders hunched
against the cold. You are wishing me
beside you; I curse the empty bed and
the hours before your return. I would
take winter for a lover, that chill heart
slowing mine. What I know of love is
at once sweet and bitter with distance.

Nancy Kricorian

originally published in RAFT: A Journal of Armenian Poetry and Criticism, 1996

We hear that for many writers, the characters they create “come alive” during the writing process. But in what ways is that phrase more than a simple metaphor? And how is a writer supposed to manage the expanded household as it begins to fill up with progeny spilling over from the pages of a work in progress?

My third novel, All the Light There Was, which is set in the Armenian community of Paris during the Nazi Occupation, took ten years to research and write. In part I needed a decade because I had a great deal of research to do, but it was primarily due to the fact that I was juggling a few other jobs-running a household, raising two daughters (and it turns out that dealing with kids between the ages of eight to eighteen takes more space in your head than was necessary from zero to eight) and working for a women’s peace group trying to stop multiple U.S.-funded wars and occupations.

In order to recreate the atmosphere of the working class neighborhood of Belleville during the period the French refer to as Les Années Noires (The Dark Years), I read voluminously from histories, journals, collections of letters, and novels penned during and immediately after the war years. I went to Paris to tour the lycée that my narrator and protagonist Maral Pegorian had attended, and to interview octogenarian and nonagenarian Parisian Armenians who had lived through the war.

Through the research, several salient material details were impressed upon me again and again: during the Occupation ordinary people were hungry most of the time, during the four winters under Nazi rule Paris apartments were generally without heat, and Parisians were often in the dark both literally and metaphorically. Germany used France as its wartime breadbasket, making off with the lion’s share of French butter, milk, wheat, vegetables, fruit and meat. Food was rationed and even with ration tickets in hand shoppers were often unable to procure their due. Rutabagas and turnips, which had been used before the war as cattle fodder, were now a staple of French cuisine. The Germans also requisitioned French coal and other fuel, leaving Paris apartments unheated in winter. Nighttime blackouts meant the streets were dark and curfews often kept people in their homes after nightfall.

Once the bulk of the research was done, I disciplined myself to write two hours a day, five days a week, aiming for two pages a day. This schedule was mostly successful, except when one of the kids stayed home sick from school, or there was an emergency street demonstration.

While I was writing, I traveled back in time and across the ocean to Occupied Paris. I could not only hear the voices of my characters, but I could also feel the cold air seeping in the cracks around the window frames, and smell the dreaded rutabagas cooking in the kitchen. I fretted with Maral over her lack of bath soap, and shared the frustration of her cobbler father about his inability to get leather. But it wasn’t until the day that my husband asked me why we had seven jars of mustard in the pantry that I realized how deep this shared experience had gone.

It was true—there were seven jars of mustard in the pantry, and six jars of jam, along with more canned goods than we could eat in a winter. Without being conscious of what I was doing, I had stockpiled the foodstuffs that Maral’s family lacked in Paris in 1942. I had always thought of myself as spending hours living in the Pegorians’ world; what I hadn’t realized was that the characters had moved into my apartment. They were haunting our pantry, showing up in conversation through the Armenian proverbs I cadged from Maral’s father, and occupying my thoughts when I was supposed to be helping with the science fair poster. Once I became conscious of their presence as part of the family, I was better able to balance their demands with those of my real world children.

Ten years on, once the novel was completed, the manuscript handed over to my editor and the rest of the publishing team, the characters started to recede, and I missed them. But I’m glad too that they are soon heading out into the world and into the homes of my readers.

Now I’ve begun work on my next novel. It’s about an Armenian family in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. I’m excited, but a little anxious, about what life will be like with them in the house.

Nancy Kricorian