Richard Jeffrey Newman, a poet, the host of the Jackson Heights Poetry Festival, and my neighbor, has generously invited me to Blog Hop: an internet, chain mail, q-and-a dance. I’m going to answer a series of questions about my book-in-progress and at the end I’ll list a few truly interesting, talented authors that I think you should check out. Thanks for stopping by from Richard’s blog, and thanks for investigating my friends! And thanks, Richard, for inviting me.
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Q: What is the working title of your book?
A: The Fear of Large and Small Nations
Q: Where did the idea come from for the book?
A: I was keeping a blog during the year that I lived in Armenia on a Fulbright, where I was intending to interview artists, activists, feminists and queer people to find out how social change was progressing after the Soviet collapse. After a few interviews, I realized I needed a translator and interpreter to work with me in most cases, and such a formal interview format wasn’t conducive to learning deeply about people’s lives. I thought that I would have to live in Armenia for a few years to really learn the language and build trust with people over time in order to do the project. I soon realized the blog was more like the kind of work that I had hoped to do: understanding the place through simply living and relating to people. As I became romantically involved with someone, however, I realized there were some topics that I couldn’t immediately publish, so I started writing unpublished blog posts that I told myself I would save for the book.
Q: What genre does your book fall under?
A: It’s composed of blog posts, journal entries, memoir, and meta-writing, among other texts, so I am calling it nonfiction.
Q: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
A: I can’t think of any short, middle-aged, prominent-nosed, salt-and-peppered actresses to play me. Maybe a younger Olympia Dukakis. (The sad thing is that I can’t think of any contemporary actresses with gray hair who aren’t actually elderly. Gray hair on actresses is now anathema in Hollywood.) For the romantic lead its easier: Gael García Bernal. These two examples just give an idea of type; I would choose unknown actors in Armenia and the diaspora.
Q: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A: I’m cheating with a semi-colon:
“The Fear of Large and Small Nations” is about the relationship between an older Armenian American bisexual woman and a younger iconoclastic Armenian man, scrutinized by their traditional families, progressive friends, and the Department of Homeland Security; their story serves as a metaphor for the complex contradictions between political ideals and personal liberation, in countries both large and small, powerful and vulnerable.
Q: Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
A: I’ll try to get an agent and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll submit to independent presses that I admire. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll self-publish. I would like to reach a diverse audience; even though the publishing industry is rapidly changing, I still think the best way to reach readers is to get published on a press with a respected name and marketing ability. Maybe I’ll change my mind, though, by the time I finish the manuscript in the next year or so.
Q: How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
A: Not counting the year that I wrote the blog from 2006-07, I started the manuscript in October 2009 and completed it in the late fall of 2011.
Q: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
A: Cleopatra’s Wedding Present by Robert Tewdr Moss, which is a great book to read now, about a gay British man’s experiences in Syria. Stories I Stole, by Wendell Steavenson, on her years living in Georgia post Soviet Union. Cafe Europa, by Slavenka Draculic, about Eastern Europe, also following the collapse of Communism. The Romanian by Bruce Benderson, which is also centered on a love interest, a Romanian hustler he met in Hungary, also after the fall of Communism. All are both personal and political books: you discover the personality and life of the writer as they describe what they observe about a particular land and culture.
Q: Who or What inspired you to write this book?
A: I was inspired by Shushan Avagyan and Lara Aharonian. Shushan is a translator, publisher and a writer, and Lara is a writer and an activist who founded the Women’s Resource Center in Armenia. They are both outspoken and independent women who have made an incredible difference in Armenia – for women, for artists and writers, for everybody. At the same time that I was writing the blog, I was writing a book with them. We called it “In the (Un)Space”: we felt that the space we made among each other was the one place where we could truly be ourselves, and we wrote to each other about our lives. My portion was called “The Experiment”; the idea that going to Armenia was an experiment in feeling, experiencing and documenting how it changed me as a second generation Armenian American far removed from her homeland – and how I could possibly make a difference with my writing – has always stayed with me as I’ve been writing “The Fear of Large and Small Nations”.
Q: What else about your book might piqué the reader’s interest?
A: It’s a love story and an anti-love story woven together across borders: the different cultures influence the dynamics of the couple. One narrative thread describes a relationship progressing in Armenia, and the other describes the relationship falling apart in America. And yet the whole thing is about accepting oneself despite the land you live on.
Here are the writers whose work you should check out next: