Epistolophilia Long-Listed for Charles Taylor Award in Literary Non-Fiction

As I posted on Facebook, I will admit that my hands shook for a while after learning the news that my book, Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė has been long-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize in Literary Non-Fiction. It’s an enormous honour.

THE CHARLES TAYLOR PRIZE commemorates Charles Taylor’s pursuit of excellence in the field of literary non-fiction. The prize will be awarded to the author whose book best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception. The prize consists of $25,000 for the winner and $2,000 for each of the runners up as well as promotional support to help all shortlisted books stand out in the national media, bookstores, and libraries. Authors whose books have been shortlisted for the prize will be brought to Toronto for the awards ceremony. The winner will be invited to read at the International Festival of Authors, held in October at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.

You can find the entire long-list here.

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Epistolophilia Shortlisted for Mavis Gallant Award in Nonfiction

I keep wanting to sit down and write a thoughtful post for the blog, and then something happens that I realize I should share: a reading, a review, and so on.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. I’m thrilled.

So here’s this week’s announcement: my book has been shortlisted for a literary prize.

The shortlist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Mavis Gallant Prize in Nonfiction is very short indeed. It comprises 3 books.

Yours truly:

and two others:

  • Taras Grescoe, Straphanger
  • William Marsden, Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change

Grescoe and Marsden are both seasoned and award-winning writers, so I’m particularly honoured to be in their company. The winner will be announced on November 20th, at the Quebec Writers’ Federation Gala.

It should be lots of fun, and I’m thinking of getting a new frock for the occasion! I’ll keep you posted and share some photos of the event.

There is a whole slew of prizes that will be handed out on the 20th. You can read about all the nominees here.

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Reading, Westmount Library, Montreal: October 10, 2012

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New Review in Lithuanian-Canadian Weekly

Thanks to Ramunė Jonaitienė for this review in Tėviškės Žiburiai, the Lithuanian-Canadian weekly newspaper. Among the phrases I’m really grateful for is her description of my tone as “calm.”

Ačiū, TŽ.

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On Writing About Terrible Things

WARSAW GHETTO, POLAND ---JEWISH GHETTO POLICE ARM BAND EARLY 1940's by woody1778a

A friend wrote me that she’d bought the Kindle version of Epistolophilia. She commented:

“Really easy to read writing and I love the conversational style you use, although such a heavy topic. I find I have to read in doses. How did you keep from getting swallowed by sorrow while doing all the work and writing?”

She’s not the first person to tell me she’s had to read the book in small chunks to keep from getting overwhelmed by the terrible events it describes. Nor is she the first person to wonder about how I survive researching and writing about the painful eras I work on. It’s not an easy question to answer.

I’ve been thinking about my father’s death in relation to this question, and the process by which I was able to start talking and writing about the pain and sorrow associated with that loss. My father’s now been gone for twenty-one years, but it’s only been eleven years since I’ve been able to talk about him without drowning in sorrow. I’m only just beginning to be able to write about him, but doing so gives me perspective and helps me understand my own past in ways that would have been impossible otherwise. It also helps to feel that in writing about him, I’m creating something for him.

Something similar was in play with Epistolophilia. I’ve been researching the Vilna Ghetto for some fifteen years, and I worked on Epistolophilia for eight. Although there were days when the facts overwhelmed me, time and writing saved me from drowning. I worked very slowly, bit by bit, breaking the story down (not unlike some of my readers, interestingly) to very small pieces (3 pages at a time; 1 idea at a time). That helped. But the sense that I was writing the book as a gift for Ona Šimaitė was probably the most powerful impetus to keep going.

I must admit I’ve wondered what it says about me that I only write about murders, civil war, genocide, terror, and mass deportation. A psychoanalyst would, no doubt, have a field day. But I believe that someone must speak for the dead. Someone must tell the stories they couldn’t and can’t. And someone must try and remember a few souls threatened by oblivion.

That’s what I try to do.

[Photo: Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Police Armband by woody1778a]

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Epistolophilia in the Montreal Review of Books

Šukys’s great respect for her subject inspires respect for her own book. “When I read [the letters]” Šukys writes, “I feel as though she is speaking to me directly…” And that’s also how readers of Epistolophilia feel, as though Šukys is personally telling us the story of this incredible, and incredibly important, woman over a cup of tea.

— “The Portait of a Lady,” by Mélanie Grondin, Montreal Review of Books

You can read the whole review here.

Thanks, Montreal Review of Books!

[Photo: trekkyandy]

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And the Whirlwind Begins to Slow…

It’s been an amazing few weeks: there have been fantastic reviews of my book Epistolophilia appearing from coast to coast. I’ve been out to British Columbia, where I gave my first real public reading at the beautiful Vancouver Public Library, and we launched the book with a splash on June 7, 2012 in Montreal. It was wonderful to see so many familiar and unfamiliar faces. Thanks to all for coming.

As the weather heats up, the literary scene begins to slow. This summer I’ll be doing more intimate events, and plan to use the break to integrate virtual book club visits (via skype) into my author program. Check back for a reading guide and book club instructions soon.

But today, Sebastian and I are headed outside to tend our neglected garden. Supporting a new book takes a lot of time and effort, and the poor plants have suffered. With a bit of sweat and toil, though, we should be able to get it back in shape.

Next week, my big boy starts day camp, and I’ll return to my desk in earnest.

[Photo: Sebastian Gurd]

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Montreal Book Launch: June 7, 2012 (5:00-7:00 pm)

Book Launch for Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė by Julija Šukys

Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore

June 7, 2012. 5:00-7:00 pm

2220 McGill College Avenue,
 Montreal, QC H3A3P9

Come one, come all! There will be jazz, nibbles and wine!

Please join Montreal writer Julija Šukys for the launch of her new book Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė. Šimaitė (1894-1970) carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters and scores of diaries. Epistolophilia beckons back to life this quiet and worldly heroine, a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem’s honoured Righteous Among the Nations) and yet so little known.

Praise for Epistolophilia:

“Sukys draws liberally from thousands of pages of correspondence and numerous diaries to create a portrait of a deeply thoughtful woman trying to make sense of history and her own life by putting it all to paper. Also of Lithuanian descent, Sukys’s own meditations on the power of letters and writing make this a powerful testament to the confluence of history and individual lives and passions.”—Publishers Weekly

Epistolophilia is not a typical biography, and Šimaitė was not a typical World War II hero. For readers looking for an unconventional account of the World War II and post-war eras, as well as those interested in women’s life writing,Epistolophilia is a nuanced and compelling work.”—ForeWord Reviews

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Author Interview in Foreword Reviews this Week

Here’s an interview I did with ForeWord Reviews, a great publication that focuses on books published by independent presses. You can access the original here (scroll down to the bottom of the page):

Conversational interviews with great writers who have earned a review in ForeWord Reviews. Our editorial mission is to continuously increase attention to the versatile achievements of independent publishers and their authors for our readership.

Julija Šukys

Photo by Genevieve Goyette

This week we feature Julija Šukys, author of Epistolophilia.

978-0-8032-3632-5 / University of Nebraska Press / Biography / Softcover / $24.95 / 240pp

When did you start reading as a child?

I learned to read in Lithuanian Saturday school (Lithuanian was the language my family spoke at home). I must have been around five when, during a long car trip from Toronto to Ottawa to visit my maternal grandparents, I started deciphering billboards. By the time we’d arrived in Ottawa, I’d figured out how to transfer the skills I’d learned in one language to another, and could read my brother’s English-language books.

What were your favorite books when you were a child?

E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory come immediately to mind. These are books that I read and reread.

What have you been reading, and what are you reading now?

I recently finished Mira Bartok’s memoir The Memory Palace, which I found really extraordinary. I’m now reading Nicholas Rinaldi’s novel The Jukebox Queen of Malta, which was recommended by the writer Louise DeSalvo. My husband, son, and I are nearing the end of an eight-month sabbatical on the island of Gozo, Malta’s sister island, so I’m trying to learn more about this weird and wonderful place before we head home to Montreal.

Who are your top five authors?

WG Sebald: To me, his books are a model of the possibilities of nonfiction. They’re smart, poetic, restrained, and melancholy.

Virginia Woolf: I (re)discovered her late in life, soon after the birth of my son, when I was really struggling to find a way back to my writing. She spoke to me in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

Marcel Proust: I read In Search of Lost Time as a graduate student, and the experience marked me profoundly. This is a book that doesn’t simply examine memory, but enacts and leads its reader through a process of forgetting and remembering.

Assia Djebar: I wrote my doctoral dissertation, in part, on Assia Djebar, an Algerian author who writes in French. Her writing about women warriors, invisible women, and the internal lives of women has strongly influenced me. Djebar, in a sense, gave me permission to do the kind of work I do now, writing unknown female life stories.

Louise DeSalvo: I discovered De Salvo’s work after the birth of my son when I was looking for models of women who were both mothers and writers. DeSalvo is a memoirist who mines her life relentlessly and seemingly fearlessly. She’s a model not only in her writing, but in the way she mentors and engages with other writers.

What book changed your life?

There are two. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and her collection Women and Writing, especially the essay “Professions for Women.” I read these at the age of thirty-six when my son was approaching his second birthday. My work on Epistolophilia had stalled, and I was exhausted. I was trying to create conditions that would make writing possible again, but I was struggling with some of the messages the outside world was sending me (that, for example, it was selfish of me to put my son in daycare so that I could write; or now that I’d had a baby, my life as a woman had finally begun, and I could stop pretending to be a writer).

I remember feeling stunned by how relevant Woolf’s words remained more than eighty years after she’d written them. What changed my life was her prescription (in “Professions for Women”) to kill the Angel in the House. Before reading this, I’d already begun the process of killing my own Angel, but Woolf solidified my resolve. There’s no doubt that she is in part responsible for the fact that I finished Epistolophilia and that I continue to write.

Continue reading “Author Interview in Foreword Reviews this Week”

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Author Reading: Vancouver, May 29th

Julija Sukys: Writing the Life of Ona Simaite, Vilna Ghetto Rescuer

Vancouver Public Library
Free Event

Tuesday, May 29, 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Peter Kaye Room, Lower Level
Central Library, 350 W. Georgia St.

Please join Montreal writer Julija Šukys for a reading and discussion of her new book Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė. Šimaitė (1894-1970) carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters and scores of diaries. Epistolophilia beckons back to life this quiet and worldly heroine, a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem’s honoured Righteous Among the Nations) and yet so little known.

For more information on Library events, visit http://www.vpl.ca

[Photo: Geneviève Goyette]

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