now

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

When I was growing up, my mother, sister and I spent many an afternoon doing craft projects out of magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle. My mother also took a cake decorating class, and then shared her knowledge with me. (These skills were much appreciated when my own daughters were in grade school where I was known for Barbie birthday cakes and basketball cupcakes.) Remembering those afternoons, I pulled this poem from the archive.

*

The Artist as the Queen of Peas

It started with the cakes. I bought
tips, a tiny brush to clean them,
small jars of color, and the crisp
paper that twisted into sacks.
I practiced roses, leaves, festoons,
and the scrawl of “Happy Birthday.”
The first cake, a globe-shaped devil’s
food, was a hit at the missionary
conference. I iced it blue, and
smoothed on the continents in green,
sticking tiny flags into the countries
they represented. But it was sad
to see the cake disappear by the
forkful and the plate of crumbs.
I took photos of the others:
a heart-shaped cake for Valentine’s,
a chocolate sea bass for Father’s Day
(with maraschino cherry eyes),
the pineapple-layer turkey for my
vegetarian sister at Thanksgiving.

In the Christmas issue of Women’s
Day, I saw a gingerbread carousel:
there were reindeer instead of ponies.
Of course, you couldn’t eat it
because the icing dried rock hard,
but it looked lovely in the center
of the table, and could be stored
for future use. The next project
was a pasta Christmas tree: macaroni,
shells and bows glued to Styrofoam
and sprayed gold. After the apple-
head dolls, oranges imbedded with
cloves in the closets, star cookies
shellacked and hanging in
constellations, I wanted
something more, something grander.
For weeks I wondered how to create
food that would last, until, pushing
a cart down the grocery aisle, I rolled
past a pyramid of cans. It was easy
after that: I made self-portraits
with cans and jars of vegetables,
fruit and legumes, huge sculptures
of tin, glass and bright labels.
Now every major museum in the country
has a “Self-Portrait with Cling Peaches,”
or “The Artist as the Queen of Peas.”
They’re launching a major retrospective,
accompanied by a short film of my
lecture on “Culinary Art.” And I
owe it all to my mother, who taught
me everything I know about food.

Nancy Kricorian

Originally published in MISSISSIPPI REVIEW, Spring 1991

I’ve been thinking of Leo Hamalian lately. Perhaps it’s because the tenth anniversary of his passing is approaching. Or maybe it’s because as the launch of my third novel nears, I’m remembering my earliest professional publications. Leo was a distinguished and prolific writer, educator and editor. He served as the editor of ARARAT Literary Quarterly from 1972 until 2003. In 2001, I was invited to join a roster of speakers, including Peter Balakian, Diana Der Hovanessian and Peter Sourian, at a celebration of Leo’s career. Below are the words I offered at the time.

~

This is the scene. As I was driving my father’s car up Lincoln Street in Watertown, I, Nancy Kricorian, waved hello to a little neighborhood boy and somehow ran into a parked car. The parked car, it turned out, belonged to Paul Moushigian, who had graduated high school two years ahead of me. When the police officer got out of his cruiser to fill out the accident report he and Paul shook hands. They knew each other. The cop’s name was Eddie Bakarian. It turned out that Eddie Bakarian had gone to high school with my father, Eddie Kricorian. It was an Armenian thing. We’d be able to work it out.

What you might ask, does this anecdote have to do with Leo Hamalian? There is a circuitous connection. Because I grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts in the Armenian community, I had learned from my father that when you needed anything—a fixture installed, a TV repaired, a summer job—you should contact an Armenian. Now, there were instances that this didn’t work out quite the way one hoped. There was the shady Armenian house painter that disappeared with all the money when only half the house had been painted, for example. But to counter this were dozens of happy stories, like the one involving the gracious Paul Moushigian and helpful Eddie Bakarian.

This is where we get to Leo Hamalian. When I was in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia, I decided to start sending my poems to literary magazines. That was the way you launched a literary career as a poet. Following my father’s dictum, the first place I sent my poems was ARARAT Literary Quarterly. I thought, surely, the Armenian journal would take my somewhat Armenian-themed work.

What I didn’t think to know was that the Armenian-American editor at the Armenian-American journal had a calling and devotion much greater than simply being nice to people with –ian at the end of their names. His calling was to continue and to nurture the highest traditions of Armenian-American literature and culture, and his devotion was to the writers who came to him, often, as I did, little knowing what a huge impact his spirit and intelligence would have on us. He didn’t just publish Armenian-American writers; he grew them. For me, he did so many kind deeds that I am embarrassed to list them. But rather than get all sentimental, I’ll read from two other writers of my generation who have their own saccharine things to say about Leo.

This from Michael Zadoorian, whose fabulous novel SECOND HAND was published to critical acclaim by W.W. Norton: “Leo Hamalian was one of the first people to believe in me as a fiction writer. Even when he had to reject stories that I submitted to ARARAT, Leo always had something kind to say. The fact that Leo treated me like a professional writer helped me to believe it myself.”

And this from Chris Bohjalian, the best-selling author of such excellent novels as the Oprah-anointed MIDWIVES: “One thing I will cherish about Leo is his monumental generosity. There are few human beings on this planet not related to me by marriage or blood who are as relentlessly supportive and encouraging of my work as a writer—and in fact of so very, very many writers.”

Thank you, Leo, from me and from all the other writers whose talents you have cherished and nurtured not because we were neighborhood kids or vaguely your cousins, but because of your commitment to something greater—the collective work you inspired in us all.

Nancy Kricorian

Speech from A Festive Tribute to Leo Hamalian Upon His 30th Anniversary as Editor of ARARAT Literary Quarterly (Sunday, October 28, 2001)

In a used bookstore in Manhattan many years ago, I found a copy of Maria A. West’s 1875 memoir The Romance of Missions: Inside Views of Life and Labor in the Land of Ararat. Maria West was a New England missionary who had gone to the Ottoman Empire to convert the Armenians from their national church to her brand of Protestantism. On page 22 of this book, I came across a reference to an Armenian custom that I had never heard of before. West explained, “When the sons marry, they bring their wives home, and the mother-in-law generally rules them with a rod of iron. They are not allowed to speak in her presence till she grants permission, which is sometimes delayed for many years! In some cases, the mother-in-law dies before lifting the heavy yoke of imposed silence.”

My friend Patricia Constantinian-Voskeridjian did her master’s thesis in anthropology and Armenian Studies at Columbia on the topic of this practice, known as moonch genal (to stay or to stand mute). In some families, the mother-in-law granted permission within weeks or days, and in others, the bride labored in silence for many years. In some regions, the silence was accompanied by a mouth wrap that covered the bottom half of the young woman’s face as an outward indication of her bound speech. In some villages, it was the birth of a son that would win the bride—for the daughter-in-law was called a bride for long after she was married—the right to address her in-laws.

I was fascinated by this old world practice, which had long been in disuse when my French-Canadian mother came to live in her Armenian mother-in-law’s house. But my mother told me a story about how, not long after she and my father had married, my mother had offered her mother-in-law a bit of housekeeping advice. My grandmother had replied indignantly, “What? Should the baby bird now teach the mother bird to fly?” In that response I could hear the echoes of this old country custom. Some months later, I wrote a poem in the voice of a silenced bride.

*

The Bride Has Lost Her Tongue

There sits her mother-in-law, and, according to our custom, she cannot speak in her presence.

~  The Romance of Missions, or Life and Labor in the Land of Ararat (1875)

The day I left my mother’s house
I said, “Break my bowl and
throw it in the garden. Forget
the sound of my voice.”

At night when my husband sleeps,
I whisper words I have wanted
To say during the day into the
wooden box I keep by the bed.

Under the carved roses of its lid
are insults for my mother-in-law,
the aproned witch who keeps me
in silence. When she told me

to fetch some wood, I said nothing.
I said nothing when she commanded
that I comb out her hair. Then
the words began to seep through

the house like the smell of
a dead thing behind the wall.
She says, “Shut the door,” and
I hear, “Shut it yourself, you

braying ass,” as I set the latch.
When I shake out the blankets,
insults and hair balls cloud the air.
The broom mutters my curses.

With a son, I will earn my
speech. Someday his wife
like a servant will serve me—
in sweet, melodious silence.

Nancy Kricorian

originally published in RAFT, 1996