Tag Archives: writing

Everything feels rather dire right now, from the awful clown show of American politics, to the terror of a burning planet, so I’ve again been finding solace in the natural world. I saw a Scarlet Tanager flitting through the tree canopy the other day, and after hearing its eerie, echoing song at the top of the ridge, I finally caught a glimpse of a Hermit Thrush. We have been eating oyster mushrooms and chanterelles that I foraged in the woods, as well as copious greens from our garden. And sunsets by the pond have been spectacular.

I just handed in the copy edited manuscript of my novel, The Burning Heart of the World, which will be published on April 1, 2025 by Red Hen Press, and can now be pre-ordered from Bookshop.org. A publisher decides how many copies to print in part based on the number of preorders, so ordering the book ahead is a good way to support an author, including yours truly. I have started scheduling events for April in Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit. If you want me to come to a bookstore (or a community center) near you, let me know. I will also be available for in-person and virtual reading group visits.

Also on the literary front, I was disappointed to read a terrible story about much admired and lauded fiction writer Alice Munro, but I loved this interview in Mizna with poet Chase Berggrun.

Last month my elder child Noah’s debut feature film, Summer Solstice, opened for limited runs in New York and Los Angeles. It received a rave review and was a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times review was also excellent. Noah did a number of interviews, among them one in Variety, one in Filmmaker, and another in Film Stage.

As Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza grinds into its tenth month, a small bright spot was the fact that Armenia recognized the Palestinian state. Mary Turfah’s piece Running Amok, about the horrific images Israeli soldiers are posting from Gaza and what they mean about Zionism past and present, was a tough read in the Baffler. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote a bracing piece about The Collapse of Zionism in the New Left Review. Some of my new organizer friends were involved in a Gaza protest during New York City’s Pride parade. I have started working with a new mentee in Gaza through We Are Not Numbers—a collaboration made difficult by the intermittent and poor Internet access Nadera has in Shujaya. I hope to be able to share one of her essays soon.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’re keeping cool.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.

~ Vasily Grossman, LIFE AND FATE

In this bleak time, I find hope in the organizing I have been doing with Jewish Voice for Peace, We Are Not Numbers, Writers Against the War on Gaza, and like-minded friends and comrades. Last week I went to Albany for the Not on Our Dime campaign rally and press conference organized by State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani. I count myself lucky that our family is united in opposition to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and that our circle of friends is filled with people who have been speaking out against the atrocities we are witnessing daily on our smart phones.

I have been so focused on the horror in Gaza that I can only tolerate a few minutes a day of contemplating the dire situation in Armenia, as the Armenian government’s tense negotiations over demarcating “disputed” areas of the border with Azerbaijan have resulted in the handover of some villages, which is causing much internal strife. In the meantime, in ethnically cleansed Artsakh, Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian cultural heritage proceeds apace. And then there is the dubious land deal threatening the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, which occurs at the intersection of things Armenian and Palestinian. 

In March, I wrote a talk for a beleaguered group of dissident grad students at an unnamed university, which according to the students’ accounts has turned into a quasi-totalitarian state.  This essay, in which I avoided certain terms at the request of my hosts who feared repercussions of stating things too baldly in that context, was recently published by The Markaz Review: “A Small Kernel of Human Kindness: Some Notes on Solidarity and Resistance.” 

PalFest posted video of my introduction to the Freedom To Write for Palestine event at Judson Church on May 7. My friend and Armenian tutor Sosy Mishoyan and I did a Western Armenian translation of Mosab Abu Toha’s poem, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.” Two of my mentee Haya Abu Nasser’s powerful poems appeared in The Massachusetts Review at the end of last week. And my spouse James wrote an open letter to Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism in response to said task force’s dangerous conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Beloved Armenian illustrator, artist, and writer Nonny Hogrogian passed away recently, and her obituary in the New York Times gives a sense of her long and storied life, most of it spent with her devoted husband and collaborator David Kherdian, to whom I sent my profound condolences. Nonny’s Caldecott Award picture book One Fine Day is a perennial favorite, and it is my custom to send a copy of that book to friends upon the birth of their first child.

On a brighter note, James and I recently celebrated our 35^th wedding anniversary. The week before that milestone, our daughter Djuna graduated from New York University Law School. The commencement ceremony was interrupted twice by the unfurling Palestinian flags in front of the podium and approximately 100 of the 500 graduates, including Djuna, were wearing keffiyehs. In September she will be starting a fellowship at the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU. And next week our elder child Noah’s debut feature film Summer Solstice will be playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan.

Last week I gave the opening remarks at Freedom to Write for Palestine at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. This memorable gathering of writers was brilliantly curated and produced by Omar Hamilton and Sharif Kouddous of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and it was recorded for posterity. Writers Against the War on Gaza and Amplify Palestinerounded out the organizing team, and everyone’s efforts came together beautifully. Publishers Weekly and New York Magazine did great coverage of the event, placing it in the context of the controversy surrounding PEN America’s terrible response to the genocide in Gaza and the efforts of writers to hold the organization to account.

Here is an excerpt from my introduction:

While PEN America has organized a street rally in support of Ukrainian writers imprisoned and killed by Russia and taken a delegation of Ukrainian writers to meet with Congress, it has yet to organize any public event on behalf of Palestinian writers who have been imprisoned and killed by Israel. PEN International, English PEN, and PEN South Africa called for a ceasefire in Gaza five full months before PEN America did, and PEN America’s call came only after over a thousand writers had signed a letter denouncing the organization for its inaction. PEN America’s priorities so often align with the U.S. government’s own foreign policy goals that one writer quipped, ‘PEN America has been turned into an outpost of the U.S. State Department.’

While the leadership at PEN America is being roundly denounced for its double standards on Israel and Palestine, many of its staff members’ work in this area and on other issues is being stymied and undermined. We would like to give a shout out to PEN America United, the union representing PEN America’s staff, which has been trying to get a fair contract for over eighteen months. PEN’s Chief Executive Officer’s salary was disclosed to be $465,000 in 2022, and in recent contract negotiations management proposed a $48,500 minimum starting salary for staff, well below industry standards and hardly a living wage in New York City. In addition to her annual salary, which has likely increased over the past two years, PEN’s CEO earns an additional undisclosed six-figure yearly sum for serving on Meta’s Oversight Board. As one sign at a PEN America United rally phrased it, “Are fair wages banned too?”

The evening raised over $8,000 for We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led organization in Gaza that trains a new generation of Palestinian writers. At the top of the program, Michelle Alexander read a poem by my friend and WANN mentee Haya Abu Nasser. When WANN alumni Mahmoud Alyazji read a remembrance with an accompanying film about his best friend Mohammed Zaher Hammo, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike with his family, there were audible sounds of weeping in the audience, and I venture to say there was not a dry eye in the house. After musician Huda Asfourplayed a final song to close out the evening, which was by turns inspiring, moving, and galvanizing, we all headed out into the world with firm resolve to continue fighting for Palestinian freedom.

In the meantime, the situation in Gaza has grown increasingly catastrophic as Israel drops bombs on displaced, starving people living in tents, and gives confusing, impossible evacuation orders to families with no place to go. Repression at home continues to be brutal as riot police are summoned to break up peaceful student Gaza solidarity encampments. I have made a chant by the Columbia students a new motto, “Disclose, Divest. We will not stop. We will not rest.”

Nancy Kricorian

I have been distracted, lately cycling between rage and grief, while having difficulty sleeping. Images and stories about Israel’s horrific genocidal campaign in Gaza are the stuff of nightmares. I often think about my Armenian genocide survivor grandmother’s stories about her experiences during The Deportations. They were starving, the dead and dying were all around, and she ended up one among 8,000 orphaned Armenian children in a refugee camp in the Syrian desert on the outskirts of Ras al Ain.
 
I wake up in the middle of the night to check Instagram and WhatsApp to see if my friends in Gaza have posted updates or responded to my messages. I want to know whether they have survived to see another day. One of them has lost thirty pounds because of how little food there is. Another has been displaced four times and is living in a tent.
 
Since 2015, I have been part of the We Are Not Numbers literary mentorship program that pairs established authors with young writers in Gaza. Enas, one of my former mentees, left Gaza for the first time in her life to attend the Palestine Writes conference in September, and was unable to return home—she’s living with an aunt in New Jersey and is worrying around the clock about her family, who are displaced in Gaza with little access to clean water, adequate food, and medicine, and under constant threat of being killed in Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign that has to date murdered over 11,000 children. I helped raise money for Hossam, another mentee, who has a large social media presence and is therefore a particular target, to get across the border with his family, but the list is long and the wait seems interminable. I started with a new mentee, Haya, several weeks ago, and I’m sick with worry about her and Hossam. I recently worked with Haya on this moving piece about what daily life is like for her right now.
 
In addition to this brutal reality, repression on the Columbia and Barnard campuse are entirely bonkers, and my spouse James, who has been teaching at Columbia for over thirty years, is spending hours writing letters to the new “Task Force on Anti-Semitism.” This task force includes no actual experts on the subject—and there are a few of those on the faculty who might have been invited to join. The task force is co-chaired by known Israel boosters, and when James asked them how they define anti-semitism, they replied that they don’t have a definition. They are just getting a sense of the feelings and the vibes on the campus. Meanwhile, two weeks ago several Israeli students used a banned chemical weapon against a protest on the Quad, sending close to a dozen students to the hospital. 
 
On the German cultural scene, it seems that collective guilt about the Holocaust has morphed into a feeling that Germany must stand by Israel no matter how genocidal the Israeli government’s actions are. An artist friend, who lives half-time in Berlin and half-time in Brooklyn, has been sending us weekly updates about the cancellations and other forms of punishment being meted out against writers and artists who call for a ceasefire or advocate for accountability. She told us about her friend the Bosnian-Serbian novelist Lana Bastašić (I read her award-winning novel CATCH THE RABBIT recently and was very impressed) who has been subject to this harsh discipline. This week I saw Lana’s principled and humane statement on Instagram, which was then published on LitHub.
 
It is clear that we need to be fighting on two fronts—and excuse me for using military metaphors, but this really does feel like a struggle for survival. We must redouble our calls for a ceasefire and our efforts to push the Biden Administration to stop arming, funding, and providing diplomatic cover for a genocide in Gaza. On the same day that the International Court of Justice ruled that South Africa had presented a plausible case of genocide against Israel, the U.S. government announced it was “pausing” its support for UNRWA, the largest and most effective aid agency on the ground in Gaza, increasing the threat of more deaths by hunger and disease. You can donate to UNRWA’s life-saving work here. And at the same time that we take action to stop a genocide, we must also push back against the silencing of advocacy for Palestinian freedom. 
 

“Too much of a past, too little ahead, but wait a minute, we always lived day to day, so where’s the difference?”

~ Etel Adnan, Shifting the Silence (2020)

*

Last week my friend Barbara Harris passed away after a long illness, and Gerry, her beloved husband of 67 years, asked me to speak about her activism at the funeral this Monday. Barbara and I met in 2003 through CODEPINK NYC and worked closely together for over 13 years. In 2008, The New York Times ran a profile of Barbara and the campaign she organized working to keep predatory military recruiters from targeting vulnerable high school students. Mel, a former CODEPINK NYC staff member commented, “Barbara was a gift to the anti-war movement and the activist community. Whenever she showed up to a demo, I felt like things were going to be okay. She had so much knowledge and such a calming presence. Cristina and I joked about making Barbara dolls to carry around for reassurance when things got rough.”

And speaking of things getting rough, yesterday Azerbaijan launched a full scale military assault against the people of Artsakh, announcing the planned “evacuation” of the Armenian population. Of course, anyone who was following the news could have seen this coming, but that doesn’t make it any less devastating. The use of the word “evacuation” clearly indicates a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Governments, NGO’s, and human rights groups have issued condemnations, but the shelling and terror continued undeterred. The Azerbaijani Army is known for its torture and beheading of captured Armenian soliders, and even civilians are fair game for their violence and cruelty. The fourth century Amaras Monastery, established by St. Gregory the Illuminator, is now under Azerbaijani control. And if the Azerbaijani government stays true to form, they will say that it’s an “Albanian Christian” monument and sandblast the Armenian inscriptions. It’s heartbreaking and infuriating to watch all this happening in real time on social media while the world does nothing. And Turkey’s ever helpful Erdogan announced at the U.N. General Assembly yesterday that Armenia must open the so-called “Zanzegur Corridor” allowing Azerbaijani passage through the territory of the sovereign Armenian Republic. This morning a “ceasefire” was announced and the Azerbaijani army took full control of the area. I’m dreading what comes next. You can follow what is going on via live updates from EVN Report and you can contact your elected officials using this tool from the Armenian Assembly of America.

Yesterday I also received word from my literary agent that she was closing on the last few open points in the contract for my new novel with Red Hen Press, a small, independent, non-profit publisher based in Pasadena. Red Hen will publish The Burning Heart of the World, a novel about an Armenian family in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, in 2025. This submission process was long and grueling, and I cannot tell you what a relief it is that the book has found a home, and with a press whose values align with so many of mine.

I’m leaving on Friday for a two-week trip called “The Mushrooms and Culture of Greece.” My friend Betsy and I will be traveling to Zagori in northwestern Greece with a group tour led by several radical mycologists. If you follow me on social media, expect to see lots of photos of mushrooms, food-laden tables, mountain villages, and the rocky shore.

Day to day, I try to open my heart to the sweetness of this tough world.

P.S. For your reading pleasure, here’s an interview with our filmmaker progeny. And here’s an article about The Wisdom of Fungi.

Nancy Kricorian

Our Thanksgiving in the country was quiet because our progeny and their partners recently decided that it’s a settler colonial holiday that should be ignored if not actively opposed. In the morning I read about Indigenous responses to Thanksgiving, including a message from Cultural Survival about how to decolonize the day, and our friend Karl Jacoby’s 2008 op-ed on its fascinating and little-known history. The United American Indians of New England have been commemorating Thanksgiving as a national day of mourning in Plymouth, MA since 1970.  I was moved to read this post from Menominee author and organizer Kelly Hayes, who wrote:

This is such a strange day for Native people. Some do the turkey dinner thing. Some grieve. I do not ‘celebrate’ Thanksgiving, but I used to host a meal each year. It was a habit I developed to comfort friends who would have gone home for the holidays, had they been welcome or had the money to travel. It wouldn’t be anything traditional. Movies, alcohol, fry bread, and one year we played laser tag. Then the pandemic happened. This year, it will just be me, my partner, and my young friend Bresha.

In the past, we have invited friends whose families are far away and students from Palestine, Turkey, Australia, and elsewhere to join our Thanksgiving table. Maybe in the future we’ll figure out a way to both decolonize and reclaim the day. I’m open to suggestions!

On Thanksgiving afternoon, James and I went for a walk in the Greenport Conservation Area, which is on the ancestral lands of the Mohican people and has spectacular views of the Hudson River and the Catskills. The next day we cooked a big (turkey-less) meal for our daughter Djuna and her friends.

With Thanksgiving behind us, we shunned Black Friday, forgot about Small Business Saturday, but finally succumbed and bought all our long-distance consumable (think pears from Harry & David and nuts from Fastachi) holiday gifts on Cyber Monday. We flushed out our inboxes at the end of Giving Tuesday, but looming ahead are Hannukah, Christmas, and New Year’s.

I’m hoping that you are sufficiently recovered from Giving Tuesday’s onslaught to read this without shuddering. I’m helping to raise funds for a dear friend and her family who were displaced by the Syrian Civil War and will soon be moving to the United States. She, her husband, and her two sons are starting from scratch, arriving with only two suitcases each, and could use some help setting up their new home. For a $200 donation to their GoFundMe, I’m offering a book club package that includes up to 10 copies of my novel ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS (or one of my other books) shipped to your home and my presence at your book club, in person if it’s in the NYC area and virtually wherever you are. Contact me at nkbookgroup[at]gmail.com for more details.

Nancy Kricorian

New York

As we enter the third year of the pandemic, this winter feels dark and long, and the spring seems far away. As usual, I look for solace in the natural world and also in my continuing study of the Armenian language. Below is a short piece that I wrote about a recent snowy morning. My Western Armenian teacher Sosy Mishoyan corrected my mistakes, but as time goes by I’m making fewer of them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Սփոփանք

Անցեալ գիշեր ձիւն տեղաց, իսկ այս առտուն ճերմակ վերմակը ամբողջ մարգը կը ծածկէ։ Վերարկուս ու կօշիկներս կը հագնիմ եւ գլխարկս ու ձեռնոցներս կը դնեմ։ Շատ պաղ է, բայց` շատ գեղեցիկ։

Լճակին շուրջ կը պտտիմ։ Երկինքին մէջ երկու բազէ կը սաւառնի, իսկ մացառին մէջ պզտիկ թռչուններ սերմ ու հատապտուղ կը փնտռեն։ Յանկարծ ոտքերուս մօտէն դաշտամուկ մը կը վազէ ու կը մտնէ պզտիկ ձիւնէ փապուղիին մէջ։

Ձիւնը նորէն կը սկսի թափիլ։ Աշխարհը ճերմակ եւ լուռ է։

Նենսի Գրիգորեան

Յունուար 2022

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Nancy Kricorian

The Button Bush in our yard adored the torrential rains we had earlier this month and burst into bloom. Many pollinators, including a wide variety of butterflies, were attracted to its spherical blossoms. I watched the American Robins nesting on the front porch produce two sets of babies, from eggs to hatchlings to nestlings to fledglings, and then the mother laid eggs once again. After weeks of frequent parental coming and going with worms being stuffed into bright yellow gapes, when the second group of nestlings finally fledged I felt the pang of the proverbial empty nest.

On New York Primary Election Day in June, while I was in Manhattan helping my daughter Djuna find an apartment before she starts NYU Law School at the end of August, we paused for a snack at Essex Market. As we sat at a café table in the airy mezzanine, mayoral candidate Andrew Yang showed up to work the room, trying to inspire voters and posing for photos with people. Earlier in in the week Yang had made some awful comments about mentally ill and homeless people, and I was never a fan of his political positions even before that. I definitely did not want to interact with him, but nonetheless he came up to our table as I was studiously trying to avoid him. I didn’t even realize he was behind me when Djuna took the photo that was subsequently posted to Twitter by my spouse James. The Tweet went viral.

Here we are in the middle of the summer of 2021 living through the third or fourth wave of a global pandemic, watching and experiencing extreme weather events caused by climate catastrophe, and some of us engaging in raging vaccination and anti-vaccination battles in our communities and in our families. But I hope that in this challenging moment you are basically okay, and that you can find time to observe the fragile beauty around us and to laugh at the sometimes painfully absurd contradictions of our world.

Nancy Kricorian

New York, July 2021

Yesterday when I started drafting this blog post, I ended up spending two hours writing about the December 11th killing of Barnard Freshman Tess Majors in Morningside Park and the subsequent NYPD Security Theater outside my kitchen window. I realized there was nothing edifying, informative, or helpful in what I had written, although it was cathartic for me, and so I put it in the failed drafts folder.

We made it through a turbulent 2019, and we’re now into a new year that started with an illegal and provocative assassination of an Iranian General and, if anxiety and incertitude are a measure of length, this very long year will continue with the longest Presidential election cycle in human history. So herewith is my “listicle” of ways to maintain sanity and equilibrium in 2020, which was composed in part in the middle of the night as I turned in my bed like a rotisserie chicken.

1. ORGANIZE: Housing is a Human Right

Read about #Moms4Housing in Oakland, and how community organizing turned a violent eviction into a big win. This is an inspiring story, and something to build upon.

2. ORGANIZE AGAIN: Why We Need A Green New Deal

Listen to The Dig Podcast Episode “Planet to Win,” a detailed and hopeful discussion about how the Green New Deal might change America for the better.

3. WATCH A GOOD FILM

Go see Kitty Green’s The Assistant, a brilliant and dark film about one day in the life of the junior assistant of an abusive boss. It’s not just about predation—it’s also gimlet-eyed view on capitalist exploitation of young people. The film is poised to become part of a movement to change the culture of Hollywood. Watch the trailer here. Opening in NYC and LA on January 31, theaters and show times may be found here.

4. MAKE COMFORT FOOD

Order a copy of Lavash: The Bread That Launched 1,000 Meals, Plus Salads, Stews, and Other Recipes From Armenia, and cook an Armenian meal for your loved ones. You can read more about the book and try sample recipes here and here.

5. ORGANIZE SOME MORE: #NotMeUS

Read this Jacobin piece about why Bernie Sanders is the candidate who can beat Trump, watch this moving campaign video, and join the #NotMeUs movement.

6. LAUGH

In response to the New York Times’ ridiculous double endorsement of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren for president, read Alexandra Petri’s hilarious takedown, “In a Break From Tradition, I am Endorsing All 12 Democratic Candidates.”

7. LISTEN TO MUSIC

Onnik Dinkjian’s many decades of performing Armenian folk music is covered in this piece from Houshamadyan, and it includes recordings of some of Dinkjian’s most beloved songs.

8. SEEK OUT WISDOM

Listen to Grace Paley read her short story “Traveling”, and read Walter Mosley’s loving remembrance of Toni Morrison. Read also these beautiful poems from Kurdistan.

9.  LEARN SOMETHING NEW

American linguists have recently voted the singular “they” as the word of the decade. And Ivan Coyote’s 2014 piece “Fear and Loathing in Public Bathrooms” helped expand my thinking about the tyranny of the gender binary.

10. LOOK FOR BEAUTY

Last week I went to the Whitney Museum to see Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019. There were a lot of great pieces in the show, but I was absolutely bowled over by Liza Lou’s KITCHEN, a life-sized beaded room filled with furniture, appliances, pots, pans, cereal boxes, and more that took the artist five years to produce. The show is up through January 2021, and a new show of Mexican muralists will be opening at the Whitney in February so you could take in both.

11. GO FOR A WALK IN THE WOODS

I’ve been reading out-of-print books by naturalist and writer Alan Devoe, who lived down the road from our house in the country from the 1930’s to the mid-50’s. In the middle of World War II, which was a time of destruction, violence, and despair on a global scale, Devoe wrote, “It is good, for instance, just to shut off the radio for a while, throw away the newspaper, and go out into the warm darkness of a country night and listen to the frogs.” He also recommended listening to the wrens singing, and said, “They are singing directly into our aboriginal ears, an information that all the pessimists and pedants are mistaken, and the life adventure is a greater and gladder thing than mere learnedness might ever surmise.”

Nancy Kricorian

When I was in college, I studied for one semester with a poet who dispensed counsel the way my grandmother handed out hard candies. This poet told me that if my boyfriend didn’t make me feel like I was the most beautiful woman in the world, he wasn’t doing his job and I should fire him. Another memorable bit of advice was about writing, and left her lisping voice echoing in my head with this mantra, “Respect your process.”

During my student days, I was prolific. I wrote a poem a day in long hand on narrow ruled yellow notepads, and often they sprang fully formed from my head like Athena. I rarely revised, and often didn’t even type them. I would bring them to my professor on the yellow notepads, he would make a few comments, and say, “Just keep writing.” And so I wrote and wrote and wrote. In graduate school I learned about revision, and often took a poem through ten or more drafts before I was satisfied with it and moved on to the next one. This was in the old days when it was possible to keep track of drafts because I typed each one on a sheet of paper using an IBM Selectric Typewriter.

By the time I started working on my first novel, Zabelle, I was writing on a computer. Gone were the yellow lined note pads for the first draft, and gone also was the stuttering and humming electric typewriter. The only way I could think of attempting something so long and unwieldy as a novel was by breaking the task into story chapters. I had the stamina to write one ten-page chapter, and after that was done, I started the next. Once I had a stack of these chapters, I figured out how they fit together and then rewrote them so they made a coherent, if episodic, narrative. Revising a text that was two hundred and seventy pages long was a much more daunting prospect than rewriting a one- or two-page poem. By the time I got through the last chapter, I went back to the beginning and noticed more things that needed fixing, and went over the whole thing once again. Working on a computer, there was a lot of continuous fiddling with bits here and there, so it was harder to keep track of how many drafts I did, but it was probably upwards of three before I even sent it to my agent. With her suggestions, I did another draft before she showed it to the editor. There was another pass with the editor’s notes before the production process started. The copy editor did a thorough once over, and then it was done. This was pretty much how it went with my two subsequent novels, Dreams of Bread and Fire and All the Light There Was.

You would think that the fourth time I approached this kind of project, I’d march ahead with assurance. But no, when I started writing my latest novel, I felt as though I were at the bottom of an enormous mountain peering up at a peak that was enshrouded in clouds. How would I ever manage to get to the top? I’m a slow writer—in part because I do a massive amount of research before I start writing, and because other aspects of my life (my family’s needs and challenges, my geriatric dogs, my work as an organizer, as well as the distractions of our calamitous political moment) often crowd out my writing. I can’t write for more than two hours a day. I used to be able to produce two pages in two hours, but now I eke out one page a day.

At one point over a year ago, I said to my spouse in despair, “How am I ever going to get this thing done?” He answered, “If you write one page a day, you’ll eventually finish it.” In other words, “Respect your process.” And much to my surprise, at the end of October I printed out a completed rough draft of this novel about an Armenian family in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. It opens with this same family in New York on 9/11, and ends with a folk tale about a girl who talks with birds. It’s rough, and it needs a lot of work. But it’s done, and my first and most trusted reader, the aforementioned spouse, confirmed that the structure is sound—this was my biggest worry. 

I took a hiatus from the novel so that I could come back to it with fresh eyes. While on this break, I wrote a talk that I delivered on a panel at Columbia on November 20, which was published last week by the Armenian Weekly. Also in November, Egg & Spoon Theatre Collective staged an off-off-Broadway adaptation of Zabelle. My novel All the Light There Was recently appeared in Turkish translation from Aras in Istanbul, which had previously published Dreams of Bread and Fire. And three weeks ago I saw the cover of the Arabic translation of Zabelle, which will be published in February 2020 by Fawasel Books in Syria.

And now it’s time to get back to work.

Nancy Kricorian