Writer's Voices

Having lived six years in Myanmar and twenty-five years abroad gave Shick the knowledge and experience she needed to write in the perspective of her Burmese-American protagonist. “It sort of came to me when I started writing. The very first line I wrote which I didn’t end up keeping was… ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about Burma,’ and I just kind of went with that that I just had this voice in my head of this young woman who couldn’t get Burma out of her mind.” Schick also explains why the names Myanmar and Burma are used interchangeably when referring to the country. “It changed names in 1989. So, Burma was the British name for the country, for the colony. That was derived from, I mean my understanding is, it was derived from the word Bamar, which refers to the largest ethnic group in Myanmar and then the military government decided to change the name. What they said was that they wanted a name which was more inclusive, so they came up with Myanmar… so what you really have is one name which was given by the colonizer and another name which was given by the military regime. So that’s why both names are still used. In the United Nations, it’s Myanmar, but the U.S. Embassy is the U.S. Embassy in Burma. So the official name is Myanmar, but there are still some countries which refer to it as Burma and many people, depending on what generation they belong to, will also refer to it as Burma.” She also added that for those seeking more information, she has a page dedicated to Myanmar on her website. “I list many of the books that I read when I first moved there, and I also list different organizations that you can get involved in and support the resistant movement there now that the military has come back.”

There’s not a flood of books about Myanmar and I hope there will be. But I do also hope that The Golden Land will inspire other people to write their stories from Myanmar and everywhere in the world, and… inspire readers to dig in deeper.

She felt a little bit worse – and a little bit better – than she had when she got here. Maybe that was the true meaning of going home.

For The Least of Us , why did Quinones decide to put a spotlight on both fentanyl and methamphetamine? He explained that never before had anyone seen one source, in this case Mexico, provide one illegal drug nationwide, let alone two. “These drugs were the most potent and powerful and deadly, in the case of fentanyl, that we’d ever, ever seen.” To make matters worse, the drug crises was intensified when Covid-19 hit in early 2020. By that time, both fentanyl and methamphetamine were already widespread and prevalent in the United States. “People in recovery from drug addiction all of a sudden, you know, one of the big things they always tell you in drug treatment is ‘do not isolate’… very dangerous thing to do when you are trying to recover from drug addiction and all of a sudden everybody has to isolate and all the 12-step meetings go from being hands-on and in-person to Zoom and that just doesn’t really work as well and then, of course, a lot of people lose their jobs because a lot of the jobs that were lost were jobs that recovering addicts after years outside of the labor force, they were doing those jobs, working in restaurants, dishwasher, what have you, that kind of thing, so now all of a sudden maybe a lot of those folks are out of work… and what you begin to find is people having very stressful times, everybody is in stress, nobody around to help them through it or talk you through it, and then at the same time when they do end up relapsing, the drugs are not even cocaine and heroin anymore. It’s fentanyl, which is so deadly… and methamphetamine, which is driving people to mental illness very quickly all across the country… and so what you begin to find was all these people going from this extraordinary pandemic, unprecedented pandemic, into another unprecedented situation, which is two drugs, everywhere, pretty much in the United States, and that would be the drug that you would most likely relapse on and so people began dying and that’s why you begin to see these enormous leaps in overdose deaths all across the country. It’s really because, I think, of that and just the spread of these drugs that are so damaging to the human brain.”

…I also wanted to write about stories of people, Americans, in the smallest way possible, just doing what they could to repair and strengthen community, because in that I believed lay the solutions, plural, to what ails us and to me that became even more important than the story about synthetics. It became a book about hope and that’s why I used the word hope in the title. It became about how do we move beyond this…

In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers, our best defense, our only defense, lies in bolstering community. We are only as strong as our most vulnerable.

One commonality that Tougias noticed when interviewing these survivors was that many of them said that while they were going through their ordeal, they felt someone with them, whether they could see this being, spirit, or not, and this presence stayed close by to encourage and uplift them, sometimes telling them what they should do. “Time and time again, that came up. Even Ernest Shackleton, who’s known as one of the greatest survivors ever said in the final days when he had to march over the icebergs, he felt the presence of another being encouraging him, and later he was with the men he talked about that and they said, ‘we felt it too,’ and so a poet took liberty with that and later called it the Third Man Factor. It’s quite common. I’ve had many survivors say, ‘oh a clear voice told me what I should do next…'”

Regarding the subtitle, Lessons From Those Who Have Triumphed Against All Odds , Tougias remarked, “That subtitle is so important to me because I wanted the readers to know that you’re not just going to get these survival stories. You’re going to get some of the lessons, and not what they did physically to make it, not that they walked 100 miles through the desert or that they fixed whatever was broken, but more [to] get into their minds and thought processes and how they fight on.”

I’d like to say, you know, in many situations you think, there’s nothing in my control but in every situation there’s always one thing and that’s… you can control your reaction to the situation you’re in. So you have complete control over that, no matter what anybody else is doing to you or what nature is throwing at you, and boy, that can mean the difference between making it or not…

The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.

Lazaridis’ interest in Antarctica came from her immense fascination with British naval officer and explorer, Robert Falcon Scott, who famously lead his team on a fatal expedition to Antarctica in the early 1900’s. “Because of that, I’ve always had books about Antarctica lying around the house and really my whole life I’ve been, from time to time, picking these books up, looking at them, reading a few passages… it was always in my mind. I was always thinking of Robert Scott and of Antarctica, and Antarctica’s exploration, so some of the details I kind of just knew from decades of reading and looking at photographs and things like that.” She was then able to use that information to write in great detail about the harsh conditions that Edward and James faced while trekking through the Antarctic.

Along with Antarctica, Lazaridis also wanted to incorporate the art of photography in her story. “With these characters, the photography of Antarctic explorations is a big part of the appeal, honestly, if you look at the photographs…they’re beautiful, beautiful images… so that always interested me and I wanted, it came very early on, along with the idea of this novel was the idea that photography would play a role in the ethical question that these men, sort of, bring into their lives… and I wanted Viola to be the one who was involved in that, so I had to make her a photographer and have her in her dark room, developing these images and looking at these things…and so I wanted her to have that experience of looking at these images taking shape and seeing in them something that is not what she expects.”

…[authenticity] is a thing that I’m interested in…when people are authentic to themselves, when they present an authentic identity to the outside world, what is the cost of that, the truth, those kinds of questions…

Not only did Bernick face extreme antisemitism as a child, she also had a very difficult relationship with her mother. As she recalled, “The story, as it was told for many years, was that she was nasty, verbally and physically abusive, narcissistic and nobody that we wanted to have an ongoing relationship with because the truth was, she was all those things.” However, rather than focusing on her mother’s egregious behavior, she chose to put on her journalist hat and find out what caused her mother to be so unemotionally available to the point where she was incapable of nurturing herself or her children. “Once I understood that the story could be larger…[I] started to discover things like… Minneapolis was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the entire country in the 1940’s. How could I not know that, right, as a Jew? What else was going on here that I didn’t know about and how did that affect my mom and my dad and Jews in general in the Twin Cities? So much anti-Semitism and how did this nexus of her being Jewish and female at a time when both Jews and women were not thought very highly of, well, what kind of an effect did this have on her? …it was obvious that her development as a person was intensely affected by both time and place.”

In addition to uncovering truths about her family’s history while writing Departure Stories , Bernick also discovered the impact of memory in storytelling. “Memory is fascinating…It’s actually the case that when I started researching memory, well we change memories, every time we dredge up a memory, we change that memory slightly and then it slips back into our brains and then the next time we bring it up, we change it again…nobody is remembering the original. It’s just, you’re remembering the memory.” Furthermore, she explains that the title, Departure Stories , comes from how we replay those memories. “Because we revise our life story constantly and we are given the opportunity to revise our memories, our stories, the way we, sort of, define who we are, essentially the moments in our lives that we choose to talk about and remember and to tell as stories are a departure from one moment to the next. Each of these is a departure story.”

These stories you’re telling, the truth of them is not these details: summer, winter, snow pants, tag. The truth of these stories is the emotional truth that you’re telling and that’s the key to a memoir.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

While the family structure in the story is similar to her own, Tran points out that Daughters of the New Year is a fictionalized, heightened version of her family and her own personal experiences. To create tension, she included additional characters, added more conflict, and changed what really happened. “What I’d like to say is like, really the truth is that all the characters are really some version of me or some projection of my anxieties or my experiences…If it were a version of my sister, or my sisters, then it would be like that but turned up to a thousand, like increasing the intensity of who those people are.” Additionally, she wanted to change the conventional immigrant experience for her characters. Rather than preserving the traditions from their homeland while integrating into their new country, as many foreigners do, this family becomes fully immersed in American culture. Tran explained, “I wanted the family to be outside of the community…I wanted to do something different. I wanted the reader to ask, ‘What happens when the characters aren’t accepted fully in either,’ right? When they don’t have a place of refuge, and they kind of have to create their own way outside of it. I’m really interested in thinking about in-between spaces and making those in-between spaces really extreme.”

…it kept coming back to me, to these women warriors. These celebrated, mythologized figures who were not only women, but like warriors, right? It’s not just that they were in these traditional, domestic spaces, but that they were fighting, that they were these really strong, active figures, who had agency over their lives so that’s kind of why I was writing about them.

Aside from being Captain Kidd’s wife, Geanacopoulos also delves into Sarah’s history. At the young age of 14, she arrived in New York as Sarah Bradley, with her father and two brothers. Within a year, she was married off to William Cox, one of the wealthiest men in the colony and by the time she was 21, Sarah was twice widowed and had married her third husband, Captain Kidd. While there are no portraits of Sarah, “she was described as lovely and accomplished. She was described as a lady of intelligence and exemplary piety…she was clearly very mature for her age and very attractive.” Geanacopoulos added, “…she had had a great deal of life experience that many of us have never had. She knew what she wanted. She knew a lot about men and marriage and love and lost.”

There was a brotherhood among pirates and mariners. They took care of each other. There was a brotherhood among these men and if a pirate ship captured a merchant ship and the crew said how brutal the merchant captain had been to them, then they didn’t have much mercy for the merchant captain. They were protecting…They empathized with their fellow crew members.

There’s a lot of history out there and you just have to explore and find it, and this is a good way to start.

Initially, Greason’s novel had a different title, one that was taken by someone in her writing community. However, the hurdle turned out to be a blessing in disguise. “I love the title, All the Girls in Town . It’s so much better…I want this book to be a love letter to women, I mean, I wrote it as a love letter to women, right? In a time where women, we really need to be seen and heard and honor our lives, and our bodies, and our choices, and we need to be sisters even if we’re very different, right? We have to overcome our individual differences and unite for something that’s bigger, I feel. So even though that I hope the novel isn’t too message-y, I am writing it for all the girls. So that’s been the best part for me of having this book come out is all the different women who have really been moved by it, and are reaching out to me, talking about how it touched them, and they’re so varied and so that makes me very happy.”

Regarding the influence of literature, Greason remarked, “I, at least, do read things that, I like to read a lot of fiction that introduce me to characters who may not be relatable at first, in worlds that are completely foreign, because that’s what literature does, is that it expands our capacity to care about others, right? Hopefully.”

I feel compelled to share stories this way; I feel compelled. I don’t feel compelled to be an actor anymore. I am a writer. I’ll always write whether or not anyone buys it. I’ll always be in writing groups, I’ll always be reading; I’m a writer. I like to tell stories this way, whether it’s a screenplay, short story, this is how I express myself.

Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.

Still No Word From You also contains a variety of other essays, from literary criticisms to Orner’s observations on life. One of his favorites is a piece about his mom written about the passing of her husband of forty years. He was 94 when he died and while his death wasn’t a shock, his mother was blindsided. “It’s been difficult. So what did she do? She ran for public office…she was 82 when she ran…my stepdad was a politician his whole life…he had a lot of talent, but it was really my mom…She just had a gift for politics and for government, for governing. But it wasn’t until my stepdad died that that kind of opened up for her.”

I write by hand and I have multiple notebooks, and so I’ll write a piece and I’ll rewrite it in another notebook, and I’ll rewrite it in another notebook, and I’ll leave that notebook and I’ll go back to one of the other versions, and [the essay] sort of develops from the rewriting more than anything.

Maybe we read because we seek that word from someone, from anyone.

Leonards learned a great deal from Rosa Parks during those years. One of her takeaways is, “If history is not taught accurately, we can never have freedom and equality. It is so important that at every opportunity those who know about it speak out with love in their heart. Mrs. Parks would tell me things that I didn’t understand until the past few years. People who are hiding behind laws and not paying attention to changing people’s hearts… Now even more than ever, telling history the way it was but also telling history from a perspective of love is even more important. Mrs. Parks went around the world talking to people. It didn’t matter how many people she met with. She tells if people could hear her speak or meet her personally then maybe they wouldn’t live with fear in their heart, which is where hate comes from.”

When something bad happens to you, and you fall to the ground, stand up, reach out, help other people. Helping other people is more important than helping yourself, and by helping other people, you help yourself.

Stand for something or you will fall for anything. Today’s mighty oak is just yesterday’s nut, that held its ground.