Norilana Books

Inspiration has little to do with it. Basically a writer has strong opinions and has something to say, to communicate to the world (and sometimes amuse the world in the process). If you like interpreting what you see around you, analyzing and describing and explaining to yourself, reasoning out loud, and then making others better understand; if you want them to see things your unique way, you usually become a writer of some kind. If you like words, language (English or any other), if you find beauty in the sound of speech, then you might end up writing. But most of all—if you secretly think of life as a story imbued with patterns and meaning, and if you like to wonder and dream and imagine “what if” possible alternate endings and adventures; if you like to put yourself into someone else’s shoes, then you will end telling different variations of this story to yourself and others. Oh, and of course you will have to write your story down. Because you won’t be able to rest otherwise. Some think of it as logorrhea (fun word), but you know it’s just passion that needs to be expressed. Every new book is your passion compressed into words.

I was abandoned by urban elves on the doorstep of an apartment in Moscow, Russia, a mad changeling child wrapped in a blanket of leaves and dandelion.

Seriously, I was born in 1966, in the former USSR, the child of penniless intelligentsia parents. My schoolteacher mother had taught me to read early and introduced me to fairy tales of all lands and cultures, and to ancient Greek mythology. I was a six-year-old girl obsessed with the Homeric epics, knew passages by heart, wanted to change my name to "Athena," carved functional bows and spears out of wooden sticks in the back yard of the apartment complex and pretended to be an Amazon.

I was also a very sickly child, and spent most of my time out of school bedridden, and reading tons of books that my mother would bring me from the library. I read the classics, children's fantasies and fairy stories, novels of magic and ancient history -- all in Russian, of course. When we left the USSR, I was just finishing up 3rd grade, and had just begun to study English, my second language, at the same time as I was assimilating by osmosis my other native language, Armenian (later in school in the US, I studied Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and German).

We immigrated to Beirut, Lebanon and lived as refugees during the very beginning of the Lebanese civil war, then lived in Greece, and finally were admitted to the United States in 1976, the Bicentennial year. During my time as a refugee, I did not attend school since I did not know enough Arabic and was illiterate in Armenian (those were the only schools available), and instead my mother made me read an old borrowed children's encyclopedia in English for over a year, in lieu of formal schooling. Thus, I never finished 3rd grade and did not attend 4th grade.

I feel like my head is a cauldron of different cultures, East and West, all made familiar and comfortable -- so much so that I cannot imagine not knowing a little bit about everything all around the world. Linguistically I seem to have an innate ability to understand roots of words from many languages I have never formally studied, and to correctly infer meanings. Culturally it all mixes together into an acceptance of many possibilities, an open-ended permanent state of wonder.

And all that "wonder thinking" had to have an outlet. I started to write some time in Lebanon, still in Russian, and then switched over into English in the USA.