{"id":3309,"date":"2012-06-03T13:05:05","date_gmt":"2012-06-03T17:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=3309"},"modified":"2012-06-03T16:19:40","modified_gmt":"2012-06-03T20:19:40","slug":"author-interview-in-foreword-reviews-this-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=3309","title":{"rendered":"Author Interview in Foreword Reviews this Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s an interview I did with ForeWord Reviews, <\/em>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)<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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

Julija \u0160ukys<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Photo by Genevieve Goyette<\/p>\n

This week we feature Julija \u0160ukys, author of <\/strong>Epistolophilia<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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978-0-8032-3632-5 \/ University of Nebraska Press \/ Biography \/ Softcover \/ $24.95 \/ 240pp<\/p>\n

When did you start reading as a child?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019d arrived in Ottawa, I\u2019d figured out how to transfer the skills I\u2019d learned in one language to another, and could read my brother\u2019s English-language books.<\/p>\n

What were your favorite books when you were a child?<\/strong><\/p>\n

E. B. White\u2019s Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/em> and Roald Dahl\u2019s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory<\/em> come immediately to mind. These are books that I read and reread.<\/p>\n

What have you been reading, and what are you reading now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I recently finished Mira Bartok\u2019s memoir The Memory Palace<\/em>, which I found really extraordinary. I\u2019m now reading Nicholas Rinaldi\u2019s novel The Jukebox Queen of Malta<\/em>, 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\u2019s sister island, so I\u2019m trying to learn more about this weird and wonderful place before we head home to Montreal.<\/p>\n

Who are your top five authors?<\/strong><\/p>\n

WG Sebald<\/strong>: To me, his books are a model of the possibilities of nonfiction. They\u2019re smart, poetic, restrained, and melancholy.<\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf<\/strong>: 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\u2019t anticipated.<\/p>\n

Marcel Proust<\/strong>: I read In Search of Lost Time<\/em> as a graduate student, and the experience marked me profoundly. This is a book that doesn\u2019t simply examine memory, but enacts and leads its reader through a process of forgetting and remembering.<\/p>\n

Assia Djebar<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n

Louise DeSalvo<\/strong>: I discovered De Salvo\u2019s 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\u2019s a model not only in her writing, but in the way she mentors and engages with other writers.<\/p>\n

What book changed your life?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are two. Virginia Woolf\u2019s A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/em> and her collection Women and Writing<\/em>, especially the essay \u201cProfessions for Women.\u201d I read these at the age of thirty-six when my son was approaching his second birthday. My work on Epistolophilia<\/em> 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\u2019d had a baby, my life as a woman had finally begun, and I could stop pretending to be a writer).<\/p>\n

I remember feeling stunned by how relevant Woolf\u2019s words remained more than eighty years after she\u2019d written them. What changed my life was her prescription (in \u201cProfessions for Women\u201d) to kill the Angel in the House. Before reading this, I\u2019d already begun the process of killing my own Angel, but Woolf solidified my resolve. There\u2019s no doubt that she is in part responsible for the fact that I finished Epistolophilia<\/em> and that I continue to write.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What was it that brought you to writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always wanted to be a writer. It\u2019s the only thing I\u2019ve ever really wanted to be.<\/p>\n

Did anyone inspire you to write?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mrs. Nabieszko, my first-grade teacher, was the first person to notice what I was doing and to make me feel like it was important. The very first \u201cbook\u201d I produced was a poetry collection (written entirely without vowels) that I created at my desk over recess on a rainy day. When my teacher came by to ask what I was doing, and I told her that I was writing poems, she took the bits of paper I\u2019d been scribbling on and bound them into a book using a piece of wallpaper sample (it was yellow, black, and shiny silver). We then visited other teachers to show them my book.<\/p>\n

Though the desire to write was already present, Mrs. Nabieszko fed the small flame that she saw in me. She was an extraordinary teacher.<\/p>\n

How do you write? Do you have a daily routine? What’s good, bad, and ugly about the process?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First of all, a confession: I\u2019m a very slow writer. In terms of real writing, I max out at about 1,200 words a day; I\u2019m satisfied with 500, if they\u2019re good. I write five days a week, and when I\u2019m not writing, I\u2019m reading, editing (sometimes for money), reviewing books, essays, blogging, translating, or applying for grants, fellowships, and residencies. I do my best writing in the morning, and if I allow myself to get distracted too severely before noon, the day is shot. As for my process and project planning, it all depends on what stage I\u2019m at.<\/p>\n

Beginnings (ca. 100 manuscript pages)<\/strong>: At the very start of a project, I try simply to write. I don\u2019t worry about quality, but just let ideas flow uncensored. I gather questions, comparisons, and avenues to explore in the future. Each day I sit down and try to fulfil a quota (minimum 500 words), even if it\u2019s garbage. At this stage, I\u2019m always buried in books and research, and the writing is about finding a footing on new terrain. Beginnings are light and fun and full of hope. At every stage of writing, I keep a list of what needs to be written next.<\/p>\n

Middles (ca. 100-300 manuscript pages)<\/strong>: This is where it gets hard. I\u2019ve had my fun, and now it\u2019s time to figure out a theme, structure, and direction for the book. I need to gather all the nonsense I\u2019ve put down on paper and sort out the good from the bad. It\u2019s very easy to get lost or stalled or overwhelmed at this point, since I\u2019ve produced enough that there\u2019s no turning back, yet not so much that there\u2019s an end in sight.<\/p>\n

One tactic that worked for me while I was writing Epistolophilia<\/em> was to chop up my manuscript into small pieces of three to ten pages, and limit myself to one idea per piece. Dealing with a single idea at a time allowed me to see what didn\u2019t fit, and to experiment with the text by removing or radically rearranging entire sections. In the end, Epistolophilia<\/em> was made of thirty-two small chapters that I bundled into nine parts. This process worked so well last time that I\u2019m trying it again.<\/p>\n

Endings (300+ manuscript pages)<\/strong>: This is where I stick to a schedule. It\u2019s time to nail the text down, and write the hard sections that I\u2019ve been putting off. I set deadlines, write them out on a calendar, and stick to them. Accountability is key at this stage, even if it\u2019s manufactured. For me, it\u2019s enough to announce my schedule on Facebook to feel like I have to stick to it or face public humiliation (never mind that it\u2019s a mind-game\u2014the key is to find a game that yields results).<\/p>\n

What did you have to unlearn, un-believe about yourself to find your truth as a writer? What had to go?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although my graduate training provided a whole arsenal of research and analytical skills, it also saddled me with some baggage. I had to unlearn some of the theory-speak that I\u2019d acquired over the course of completing a PhD. I had to learn how to write in scenes, and to let go of the belief that writing in the first-person voice was necessarily narcissistic or undisciplined.<\/p>\n

Is finishing harder than starting? Is there a part of you that doesn\u2019t want to let go?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Finishing is a huge relief and a source of joy for me. Because the production process (i.e. copyediting, proofreading, and printing) is so long, and because I always have overlapping projects, I haven\u2019t found it hard to let go. By the time one book comes out, I\u2019m well into the next project.<\/p>\n

Do you have any particular story to tell concerning the writing of this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The germ of Epistolophilia<\/em> began sprouting some twelve years ago when I first came across a collection of letters archived in Vilnius, Lithuania. Their author, a woman named Ona \u0160imait\u0117, had saved the lives of hundreds of Vilna Ghetto children and adults, and then had been arrested, tortured, and deported by the Gestapo.<\/p>\n

The title means \u201ca love of letters,\u201d \u201can affection for letter-writing,\u201d or \u201ca letter-writing sickness,\u201d and it refers to \u0160imait\u0117\u2019s lifelong dedication to her correspondence. She wrote on average sixty letters per month (therefore between 35,000 and 50,000 letters over her adult life), and not always with joy. The letters weighed on her. She often resented them and blamed the time-consuming correspondence for her inability to complete the memoir that many of her friends and colleagues were after her to write.<\/p>\n

But to me her letters were utterly compelling. From the fragments I read in that first archive twelve years ago, I could tell I loved this woman, and I wanted to know more. Eventually, I raised enough money through grants and fellowships to collect the rest of her life-writing corpus, scattered as it was to archives in Israel, America, and other Lithuanian institutions. In the end, I suppose, I developed my own case of epistolophilia.<\/p>\n

What advice have you received concerning writing? What advice would you offer young writers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would say that writing is not supposed to be easy. If it feels hard, that\u2019s because it is. It takes discipline, endurance, and faith. Books get written one step at a time. Great writing doesn\u2019t necessarily come in moments of inspiration. More important is the cultivation of productive habits: Sit down at your desk and stay there. Work. Revise. Repeat.<\/p>\n

How did you find the publisher for this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The University of Nebraska Press is a major publisher of creative nonfiction. After they published my first book, Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout<\/em>, my editor, Heather Lundine, (who has since left the press) communicated that she would be interested in seeing anything else I was working on. As I wrote Epistolophilia<\/em>, we kept in touch. She read pieces of the book along the way, and offered insight when I had questions or worries. It\u2019s rare, I think, to get that kind of support at a university press. And there\u2019s no greater gift to a writer than the championing of her work.<\/p>\n

What are you working on at the moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing a book based on the letters that my paternal grandmother sent her children from her exile in Siberia. In 1941, she was deported alone from her home in Lithuania to a settlement in the Tomsk region where she worked on a collective farm for seventeen years. Her children and husband (all of whom were away on the night the Red Army soldiers came) fled to the West and ended up in Canada. My grandmother and her kids were reunited after twenty-four years of separation. So, it\u2019s a story about the wounds of exile, about writing as a way of maintaining family ties, and about love, anger, and forgiveness.<\/p>\n

Do you have a favorite line from a book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure I have a favorite, since different ideas resonate differently at various moments. Right now, though, I like this:<\/p>\n

\u201cYet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.\u201d \u2014Virginia Woolf, A Room of One\u2019s Own.<\/em><\/p>\n

[Originally published by ForeWord Reviews<\/em>]<\/p>\n

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