Welcome to my newsletter

A behind-the-scenes view of a word-ish life

On an adventure…

As many, but not all, of you know, I blew up my life a few years ago. In the fall of 2017, I left Los Angeles, California, on a sabbatical from my university, to teach American literature at a university in Iasi, Romania, on a Fulbright grant for a year. Reconnecting with my roots helped me decide to make a radical change. In 2019, I moved to Bucharest and left academia for a life of writing, translating, and dialogue.

At first, the decision seemed a little crazy, but everything started falling slowly into place. What I lost in security, I gained in freedom and joy.

My newsletter

Last year I finally launched my website. While I value it for its professional appearance, I decided starting a newsletter would give a better sense of my journey, this work in progress. For now the plan is to write updates with links to poems I’ve published, translations I’ve done, and advances I’ve made in my dialogue work, along with the context of my life. The goal is to write 3-4 short newsletters a year (this introductory and end-of-the-year newsletter will be a bit longer than most).

In the future I may decide to create new subscription projects here based on interest (a weekly close reading of a poem? a monthly translation of a Romanian writer? reviews of the most interesting places to visit in Bucharest? collective dialogue prompts?) but for now I think it’s a good home for personal updates.

Writing

When I began publishing my work a couple years ago, I learned that two things, not directly related to writing, are essential to literary life: overcoming fear of rejection, and patience. In 2021, I submitted my poems to 80 magazines and contests. Three of them got accepted, all in places I love, but waiting for them to appear was hard.

My poem “Sheer” appeared in the RHINO 2022 print issue (#46). My physical copy took awhile to reach me in Bucharest but it was lovely to have it in my hands along with the work of many other poets I admire. Here’s a photo of my poem, which I kind of love because the paper of the physical copy is somewhat sheer itself and it’s as if the words themselves were backlit. The entire issue can be purchased here.

My poem “A Country of My Mother” was published in The Shore poetry magazine. The quick turn around here (it got accepted the day after I submitted it and was published the next month) was a special gift because it had originally been accepted last year by a cool new magazine that ending up folding. I had made the difficult decision to withdraw the piece from what was to be their final issue because I wasn’t sure if it would still be accessible to readers afterwards.

“It’s Time” was a semi-finalist in Boston Review’s 2021 annual poetry contest and was slated to be published this year. I don’t enter many contests because of the often expensive entry fees but this one was waived for poets outside the U.S. Besides that kind detail, they managed to publish it before the end of the year despite a change in editors, and I even received a small honorarium.

Translation

Speaking of waiting, the biggest news of the year is the publication (finally!) of my first full-length novel translation, The Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca, published with Seven Stories Press. I had translated the nearly 500 page novel in 4 months in 2020, edited it with the press in the fall of 2021, given input on the formatting this summer, and it was finally released this fall, first in the UK and then in the U.S. On November 10th, we had a book launch at the beautiful Carturesti Verona bookstore in Bucharest.

We’ve received excellent reviews of the book in Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Los Angeles Review of Books and I’m grateful to the reviewers.

I’ve already completed the translation of a second novel by Liliana Corobca, Kinderland, for Seven Stories Press. It tells the story, through the eyes of a precocious 12-year-old girl, of children in villages in Moldova whose parents have gone to work abroad and left them behind. The process of editing the manuscript should begin soon.

Another project I was especially fond of was getting commissioned to translate an excerpt of Raluca Nagy’s novel Teo from 16 to 18, which was Romania’s nomination for the 2022 European Union Prize for Literature. The novel is very experimental and cosmopolitan, with lots of word play, and a feminist message. It’s the kind of book that teaches you how to read it as you keep going and creates its own world. For taste, part of my excerpt can be found towards the bottom of this page by clicking on the yellow “Excerpt-Translation” tab.

For fun, I translated poems by Moldovan poet Veronica Ștefăneț and they were published in Columbia Journal and Circumference Magazine. I love so many things about her poetry, not least the recurring motif of travel of all kinds, including back and forth between Moldova and Romania.

Another personal translation project this year was one that was especially meaningful to me. My grandfather, Simion Cure, had been a Romanian Baptist pastor as well as a writer of religious poetry, and had been imprisoned for his faith during the totalitarian communist regime. Decades later, a poem he wrote was set to music by composer Nicolae Moldoveanu (who had also been imprisoned in the same years) and the song became a popular Christmas carol in their religious communities. I translated the lyrics into English and it was sung by the choir of the Anglican Church of the Resurrection in Bucharest. Listen to it here and read more about the process in this guest blog post.

A final bit of news is that I was selected as a participant in this year’s FILIT (International Festival of Literature and Translation in Iași) translator workshop alongside translators of Romanian literature from a total of 13 countries. My project was a sample from a children’s book by surrealist poet Gellu Naum about the travels of a singing penguin named Apolodor. Hopefully more on that in future newsletters…

Dialogue

This year also brought major news in the realm of dialogue. Thanks to its forward-thinking director, Joachim Umlauf, I had a wonderful collaboration with the Goethe Institut in Bucharest. I designed a series of three collective dialogues on cultural questions of international significance called “The Power of Thinking Together: Artists in Collective Dialogue” and held them over the course of the year.

For the participants and the audiences, it was a great introduction to collective dialogue, the methodology of dialogue I developed that begins with a question and mobilizes participants to come to the deepest possible collective understanding of it, forming their version of a working conclusion (as well as a sense of community).

I felt extremely fortunate that through this experience I got to meet figures from the world of art, culture, activism, and more, and benefit from their insights alongside them and the audiences.

The series kicked off with the question “What is censorship - really?” and brought together internationally renowned artist Dan Perjovschi, novelist Liliana Corobca, member of the Romanian National Anti-discrimination Council, Catalina Olteanu, the president of Active Watch (a watchdog organization for journalistic freedom), Liana Ganea, and HBO Europe creative producer Ioanina Pavel.

The second event gathered visual artists from different countries (Germany—Kristin Wenzel, Romania—Ioana Stanca, Nona Șerbănescu, and Beti Vervega, and Ukraine—Dasha Chechushkova) of different generations to answer the question “What kind of discrimination do women artists (still) face?”

The final event of the year was a more intimate collective dialogue on the question “What is the responsibility of writers to their audience?” which allowed a significant moment of local audience participation as I continue to experiment with forms. It was a special joy to get to dialogue with my fellow writers Magda Cârneci, Cătălina Stanislav, and Radu Vancu.

A word of thanks

If you’ve read this far, I’m extremely grateful for your interest in my work. Please feel free to leave me a comment or a question and I’d love to respond.

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