I was six years old in 1983 and I was living in Galaţi, Romania. One winter afternoon, I was standing with my father in line at the grocery store, packed between dark, heavy woolen coats. Neon lights buzzed and flickered above our heads. The woman behind the counter wore woolen fingerless gloves and a sleeveless…
Category: Modern History
Our Borders: Radu’s First Escape Attempt (1982)
I first met Radu Codrescu (name changed for privacy reasons) in 2001 in Redmond, Washington, soon after I started my software developer job at Microsoft. Radu also worked for Microsoft, but we didn’t meet there. Some friends introduced us down an aisle at a grocery store. Radu was tall and athletic, a middle-aged man with graying hair…
Fact or Fiction? Part 3 (Dan Brown)
Bringing fiction to life with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code Something marvelous happened in 2003: the plot of a 15-year old novel became reality. In 1988, Umberto Eco published Foucault’s Pendulum, in which three bored editors at a Milan publishing house—Jacopo Belbo, Casaubon, and Diotallevi—come up with the idea of a global conspiracy that would…
Fact or Fiction? Part 2 (Umberto Eco)
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and the rewriting of history Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco is one of my favorite novels. I read it first in high school, in Romanian, and then spent countless hours discussing it with my desk-mate and fellow-bookworm Iuliana. I read the novel again in English during my MFA program at…
Author Interview: Jack Remick on Turning History into Story, Part 2
“I don’t always know where I’ve been when I write.” – Jack Remick Blood is the story of ex-mercenary Hank Mitchell who is in prison for stealing women’s underwear. The real reason for being in jail though is because he wants out of the guerilla wars financed by his brother-in-law’s corporation and waged against indigenous…
Author Interview: Jack Remick on Turning History into Story, Part 1
“It’s really not worthwhile to write if you don’t write a myth.” – Jack Remick Jack Remick is a poet, short story writer, novelist and teacher. More than twenty years ago, he and Robert J. Ray started a writing practice group that still meets every Tuesday and Friday at 2:30 p.m. at Louisa’s Café in Seattle….
No Water, No Story
I learned from Robert J. Ray and Jack Remick that a strong novel requires a contended resource base. Something that everybody wants or needs. In my Late Iron Age story, it’s water. Some have it; some had it and lost it. Everybody needs it. Without it, there’s no story. With it, come civilization and the…
Dancing in Odessa (1941)
“They crumpled and fell into the sea,” my grandfather once told my mother. *** They didn’t have faces until 2006, when I heard Jewish-Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky read from his award-winning book Dancing in Odessa, at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. “my family, the people of Odessa, women with huge breasts, old men naive and…
Our Borders: When History First Changed (1990)
I stood in front of the classroom fidgeting with the ends of my uniform’s cord belt. “I don’t want to learn about Lenin, Comrade,” I told my seventh-grade History teacher.
Argo (2012 CE) and Kadesh (1275 BCE)
…and then, with the fury of Baal in his blood and the glory of Amun upon him, Rameses II went out alone on the battlefield in his two-horse chariot. He alone cut down Hittites by the thousands. He slashed limbs and heads. He hurled dead bodies into the waters of the Orontes until the river…