Julija Sukys's Blog

Publishers Weekly Gives Epistolophilia a Starred Review

Of the publishing industry’s four major trade magazines (the other three include Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal), Adelle Waldman writes at Slate that “Publishers Weekly, or PW, is the biggie—it plays Coke to Kirkus' Pepsi.” A “'starred’ review in PW still increases a book’s chance of getting media coverage and showing up in your neighborhood bookstore." These also determine which books Amazon promotes."

A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality.

Imagine my pleasure when I came across a starred review of my book, Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė.


Julija Šukys is the author of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012) and of Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). You can find out more about her at julijasukys.com.

On Chronology and Necessary Abandonment: Working with Letters and Diaries in Creative Nonfiction

The first review of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė appeared a few days ago. And even though this isn't my first book or review, it's still a wild ride to have strangers reading my work.

In her review of the book, Claire Posner points to a major challenge that I faced writing this book: chronology.

Perhaps reflecting the uneven records that Šimaitė left behind, Epistolophilia's chapters are grouped by subject matter rather than in chronological order.

She's right: rather than telling Šimaitė's story from beginning to end in a clean and linear fashion, I attacked the librarian's life by topic, and attempted to answer the questions that the process of piecing her story together raised for me.

This book, as many of you know by now, was a struggle to write. The archival materials I was working with (letters and diaries) resisted my efforts to tame them. I simultaneously had too much and too little to work with. Only after a long internal battle and after putting aside some of my ideas about how this book should look did Epistolophilia finally come together.

The funny thing is that despite its being such a major obstacle, I'd pretty much forgotten about the issue of chronology and how much pain it had caused me, until I read the ForeWord review.

So what did I learn from writing Šimaitė's life? For one: we don't actually live our lives chronologically. Two: we certainly don't record them that way. Rather, we move continually back and forth between the past and present, reinterpreting, forgetting, remembering, inventing, telling ourselves our own histories, then (in the best cases) turning around and recounting those histories to our children, our loved ones, and our readers.

So, when I was recently asked by a fellow writer how she should tackle a large collection of letters in her possession, I had to stop and think. The obvious advice is to organize and read the letters and diaries chronologically (if they come from different archives, be sure to devise a system to identify the source of each letter before mixing documents up -- I used coloured star stickers). Then, the second most obvious piece of advice would perhaps be to abandon chronology altogether.

The difficulty lies in the fact that you've got to make order from chaos to start. But then you may realize that the order has created a new kind of chaos. Do not confuse mere chronology with structure. Chronology may be a start, but it may not be a solution. It may even be a problem.

I suspect that each body of correspondence or life writing demands its own structure when being reworked for a book. This is great, because it means that there are no rules. (The bad news is that there are no rules.) You have to pay close attention to your material and tease out its meaning. With luck, once you have meaning, structure should follow. By this I mean that once you see a story emerging from a pile of documents, chances are you can also see how to tell it.

The best I can offer for now, in terms of a method, is this:

1) Organize your materials chronologically.
2) Read them chronologically
3) Track the story they tell. (Find their meaning)
4) Abandon chronology if necessary. (Build a structure)
5) Tell the story as the material demands.

I'd love to hear from others working with letters and diaries. How have you coped with an embarrassment of riches that resists structure? How do you organize your material and tame it? What is your relationship to chronology and the material traces of lives lived?

Share your thoughts and experiences. Perhaps we can learn from one another.


Julija Šukys is the author of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012) and of Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). You can find out more about her at http://julijasukys.com.

This post is part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on SheWrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.

Epistolophilia: A Few Thoughts on the Occasion of a Book's Birth

The day before yesterday I received a note from my publisher saying that copies of my book had arrived in the warehouse, and that I could begin announcing its publication. Though my official date of publication is March 1, 2012, the baby’s come early. It’s a strange and great feeling to know that my book is now ready for readers.

The process of writing and shepherding Epistolophilia through the production process has been long and sometimes difficult. The germ of the book began sprouting some twelve years ago when I first came across a collection of letters archived in Vilnius. Their author, a woman named Ona Šimaitė, had saved the lives of hundreds of Vilna Ghetto children and adults, and then had been arrested, tortured, and deported by the Gestapo.

The title of my book, Epistolophilia, means “a love of letters,” “an affection for letter-writing,” or “a letter-writing sickness,” and it refers to Šimaitė’s life-long dedication to her correspondence. She wrote on average 60 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.

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.

Now that the book is officially out, I should perhaps celebrate. But I’ve been here before, and I know that this is simply another beginning. Just as a manuscript has to be tended and cared for, so does a newly published book. And switching from an introspective and solitary way of being (that writing necessitates) to a bold, confident, and even crassly self-promoting one (that a newly published book requires) can be hard. Really hard.

Writers have fragile egos and are easily wounded. I’m no exception.

Just yesterday I sent out an email announcement to friends, acquaintances and colleagues telling them of the book’s publication. I received many kind and celebratory responses. Some people reported buying the book, others had suggestions for reading venues, and even requests for interviews. But among the sixty or seventy congratulatory emails, there was a terse one, asking to be removed from my “mailing list.” It was from a woman I’ve known for a couple of years, and someone who I genuinely thought might be interested in at least knowing about the book. I was stung. I felt stupid. I obsessed for an hour or so. But then I shook it off and moved on.

The last time around, with the publication of my first book, I did virtually no publicity to support it. I was pregnant and my newborn son beat my book by about three weeks. By the time the second “baby” (the book) arrived, I had my hands full. That said, I’m not sure I understood the importance of promotion back then, and may not have proceeded differently under alternate circumstances.

But this time, I’ve vowed not to abandon my book to its own devices just when it needs me most. I’ve vowed to be brave, bold, and even crassly self-promoting when necessary. And I won’t let the odd terse email get me down. I owe at least that much to Ona Šimaitė.

So, in the spirit of supporting and nurturing my new baby, please note that you can buy the book here. Enter the code 6AS12 to receive a 20% discount. Of course, you can also purchase it through your local bookstore or preferred online retailer.

If you enjoy Epistolophilia, I hope you’ll spread the word.

This post was originally published at http://julijasukys.com as part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on http://www.shewrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.

Julija Šukys is the author of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012) and of Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). You can find out more about her at http://julijasukys.com.

How I Write: A Portrait of the Book-in-Progress

I haven’t written much here on the blog lately. In part, this is because I’ve been working surprisingly well. I’m making swift progress, and the energy I pour into my new book (#3) leaves little for writing here. Writing resources, it seems, are finite.

Undertaking the writing of a book is daunting. It’s a tough new road every time. I’m not sure how other writers do it, but I thought I’d share how it works for me.

Here’s a quick portrait of my book-in-progress:

Stage 1

Last spring I bit the bullet and assembled everything I’d written for my new Siberian book that tells the story of my grandmother’s 17-year exile to a Soviet collective farm. In the autumn of 2010, I put myself on strict writing regime of producing a minimum of 500 words per day for the new book (often it was like pulling teeth; though some days I wrote between 1500 and 2000). That regime lasted until this past spring, when I took a step back, compiled what I’d written, and found that I had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 manuscript pages.

Unsurprisingly, it was a mess. I started to group the snippets, stories, and images according to theme. I edited as I went, and wrote more where it felt natural and obvious. Whereas I’d produced most of my 500+per-day words on the keyboard, I undertook this process of compiling and editing on hardcopy and by hand. Finally, once I had something resembling a first draft, I put the whole thing away for a few months while I copyedited book #2 and packed up the house for our sabbatical year in Malta.

Stage 2

It was only en route to Malta that I pulled out that newly unholy mess and proceeded to order it digitally and enter the changes I’d made by hand into my electronic files. At this point, my family and I were halfway across the Atlantic (we travelled to Europe by ship, which is perhaps, I hope, a story for another time). My hand luggage was a kilo (almost exactly the weight of my MS) overweight for the flight that would take us from England to our new home, so I had to lose the hard copy. I ended up spending a few afternoons in the ship’s library and thus produced a new electronic Version 2.0 of the thing. The kilo of paper went into the ship’s recycling bin.

Stage 3

Our arrival in Malta delayed the next stage by a couple of months again. Kindergarten didn’t start until October, and with my husband in Switzerland on research, I was single-parenting a four-year-old for the month of September. I put work out of my mind, and my son and I spent a glorious month on Gozo’s beaches, until he went to school and I set to work on my newly arrived book proofs. Only once those got of my desk did I turn my attention back the new MS.

Perhaps that month of sun and son loosened my mind and gave me some distance. I suspect so. In any case, when I returned to writing, I did so with ferocity and resolve.

I’ve taken Version 2.0 apart again, and am slowly putting it back together, weaving my story with my grandmother’s. I’m playing with voice and tense, working on chronology, and searching for form. In our “CNF Conversations” interview, Myrna Kostash talked about the paramount importance of form in creative nonfiction, and I’m realizing, once again, how true this is.

For now, I’m resisting the urge to read too much, which I think can be an avoidance tactic for me (as long as I’m reading, I’m not writing). Also, I’m trying to keep this book light, without the heaviness of an obvious scholarly apparatus or discourse, my Achilles’ heel.

So far so good. We’ll see how it goes. In a few weeks (days?), I’ll be able to go back through my newly annotated and re-ordered kilo of paper and come up with a clean Version 3.0 that, in theory, should be one step closer to the finished product.

So that’s how I write.

Tell me about your book-creation process. How do you work?

Originally posted at julijasukys.com

A Call for Beauty in E-books

A few weeks ago, I finished editing the proofs of my new book Epistolophilia. It was a great feeling to see the book typeset, designed, and looking official (and beautiful). This, in combination with some back and forth about cover design a month or so ago has got me thinking about how books look. And whether or not, as e-books gain traction, we may be hearing the death knell of book designing as a profession.

Read more here.

CNF Conversations: An Interview with Beth Kaplan

Please come by to read my new author interview with Beth Kaplan. Her book (Finding the Jewish Shakespeare) about her great-grandfather, the NYC-based Yiddish playwright, is both memoir and biography.
http://julijasukys.com

CNF Conversations: An Interview with Myrna Kostash

Please come visit the blog to read my interview with writer Myrna Kostash about her book Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.

We talk about her pursuit of Saint Demetrius, her return to the Eastern Orthodox Church, feminism, nonfiction, and what it means to write on the margins. Click here.
If you have a new book of creative nonfiction you'd like to chat about, please feel free to contact me through my blog at julijasukys.com.

CNF Conversations: An Interview with Susan Olding

Please come visit my blog to read my interview with author Susan Olding about her book, Pathologies: A Life in Essays. It's part of a new feature I call "CNF Conversations." We talk about the ethics and
challenges of writing about loved ones, mothering and writing, adoption, the essay as literary form...and so on.

Olding is talented, accomplished and insightful.
And (if I do say so myself) it's a great conversation. You can read it here : http://julijasukys.com/ (there's also a

The next conversation will feature Myrna Kostash. We'll be chatting about her new book, Prodigal Daughter.

Call for Submissions: "CNF Conversations"

I'm looking to start a new section on my blog called "CNF Conversations." (CNF stands for Creative Nonfiction).

I'd like to do post shortish interviews with authors of recently published works of creative nonfiction: biographies, autobiographies, memoir, collections of essays, mixed genre and whatever else, as long as it's nonfiction of some sort.

Above all, I'm looking for fine writing.

To get a better idea of the sorts of texts that might fit the bill, check out my blog.

If you are a writer of nonfiction and have a recent book about which you'd like me to consider chatting with me (by email), please contact me through my blog as well: http://julijasukys.com/.

Writing in a Time of Pestilence and Pain: A Few Thoughts in Anticipation of American Thanksgiving

La varicelle, as it’s called around these parts, or chicken pox to us English speakers. Our doctor confirmed it this morning. Despite my son’s vaccine against it, the virus has taken hold, though perhaps not as firmly as it might have otherwise.

As I write, my red-spotted boy colours beside me with his new markers, picked up at the pharmacy with his prescription. There’s nothing like sickness to make you appreciate your good health and the time you have to work under more normal circumstances. The coughing and sneezing of the past few weeks have been a good reminder to me that, when the body fails, a life of the mind is hard to sustain.

If I want my mind to function, I have to honour my body.

I’ve always had a bad back, and if I write for too long without taking the time to go to my yoga classes, it isn’t long before the pain takes over and saps all my attention. I learned this the hard way some ten years ago, when I sat at my desk from dawn till dusk, seven days a week, five weeks in a row, to finish my dissertation. By the end of it, I could barely walk. Poor me.

But recently, I’ve been trying to think about my back pain differently. I’ve started thinking of it as a gift.

I inherited my bad back from my father, who in turn got it from his mother. And when I speak to my cousins and aunts, we are all surprised hear that we have the same issue. Back pain binds us together in the present, but it also gives us a link to the past – to the grandmother who connects us all, and who inevitably had a whole different relationship to pain.

The fact is that my back pain is but a shadow of what my grandmother went through. Whereas I have the luxury of taking a break and heading to yoga class when I feel my muscles acting up, my grandmother had no such choice. Whereas I have the time to think about this pain, to manage it, and to turn it into a text if I can find the right words, my grandmother had to grit her teeth and keep going.

There were calves to feed, cows to milk, logs to chop, and there was no rest for her aching back. On the farm where she worked (for nothing), in a place she had been exiled to against her will, back pain would have meant something very different to her: pure suffering and an external manifestation of what must have been happening inside her.

This coming weekend (as long as the pox allow – our doctor is hopeful), my son and I will travel to meet with my cousins, their children, and my aunt. Darius, who travelled with me to Siberia to find my grandmother’s village, will come up from San Francisco to meet us on his holiday weekend, and has planned a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner for the occasion.

As I raise my glass to toast the harvest and the gathering of my grandmother’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren for the purpose of hearing stories about and looking at pictures of the place she was exiled, I will remember my small annoyances. And I will be thankful for the pox and the pain.

Because my trials are so small, I know I am blessed. In this troublesome back of mine, I will always carry of piece of my grandmother.