Swallows Nest Castle, Crimea, Ukraine, Summer 2000
I realized today that more and more people are clicking on my blog post “How To Write A Writer’s Artist Statement,” and I think it might be because, with the world falling apart on the brink of possible nuclear war, writers are desperate to figure out their place in this, and writing’s place in all this.
So I want to share something I wrote for my newsletter community last week. More private and vulnerable than my usual post, but the situation calls for it.
“...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when...”
One of the first words I was taught when I spent the summer in Simferopol, Ukraine was harasho. It means "good," and when I was there, my seventeen-year-old self had cause to use it often.
The people of Ukraine are harasho.
My friends above - Sasha and Dima (who I had a terrible crush on, naturally) - were harasho. I have to say "were" because I do not know if they are still alive. Dima was a journalist.
It was the summer before my senior year in high school and I was an au pair for an American missionary family. It was an incredible opportunity: I wasn't a tourist - I got to be part of a community of passionate locals (we'll set religion aside for a moment, okay?), who opened their hearts and homes to me right away. It felt, for a summer, like I was Ukrainian myself.
Every morning, the babushka with the bread cart would rap on our metal gate and I'd go out and exchange a few coins for a fresh loaf of dark, rich bread.
At the market, we'd buy sour cream in little jars that came straight from a farm. The local lady at the bodega (I don not know the word in Ukrainian or Russian for this!) got to know the American girl with the sweet tooth quite well.
Big plates of chopped tomatoes and cucumbers - a little salt - on the table at every meal.
Tatar restaurants where we sat on the floor and ate rich stews.
Below is the cassette album cover of some of my dearest friends from my time there. I called them "The Garcovi Family Singers" because they were a family band that easily brought The Sound of Music's von Trapps to mind.
Shura (far left) and Jenia (with her hand in the air), and their dear father, Sergei (bottom right), who shyly gave me a bouquet of flowers at the goodbye dinner for me at their home.
We bonded over Slap Jack - an easy game when language is a barrier.
We laughed. Hugged a lot. And I learned it was normal for girls who were friends to hold hands.
I saw my first shooting star in a town now occupied by Russian forces.
I stood in St. Andrews church, the most famous church in Kyiv, and listened in awe while monks filled the silent halls with Gregorian chanting.
I don't have the words to tell you in real time what the past weeks have been like in my body, except to say that there is a constant fluttering of panic. I've spent years drenched in the deep work of mindfulness, but for all my understanding and acceptance of impermanence, this is beyond my pay grade.
Everything you're seeing on TV - these people and their courage - it's how they have always been, and will continue to be.
I want to share an excerpt of my work-in-progress with you, a scene I wrote nearly a year before this current iteration of the war began. When I was writing about Ukraine back then, I didn't know what we'd all be witnessing from far away in 2022, and I'm glad I was able to put these words down before this memory could be infiltrated by Russian troops.
My book is adult fiction about two best friends who are war correspondents under siege. My main character, Dasha, grew up in the Ukraine with her missionary family. I based the following scene on an experience I had that summer in 2000, in the deepest metro station in the world, where Ukrainians are now sheltering from bombs.
I want you to see an example of how your life might flow into your own work, in ways you never could have imagined.
My teen self thought I was going to be a Christian missionary, but I've turned into a Buddhist feminist author who enjoys four-letter-words, whisky, and tarot. And yet that summer remains precious to me: the nesting doll given to me by the family I lived with sits on my mantle, and the carved cedar box I bought from a vendor at the Swallows Nest castle has a place of honor in my bedroom.
I frequently miss the black sand of Yalta, the Black Sea pushing against my thighs as I stumble over pebbles to go deeper into the water. I long for rich white cheese on black bread, little bags of pelmeni you can buy from the ladies on the side of the road. For a long time I was the only American I knew that said "keev" and not "kee-ev." Some of the first CDs I ever bought were boot-leg copies sold in Ukrainian subways, a veritable underground flea market.
That summer shaped my curiosity, my openness, and made my slavic heart sing. Of course it was going to end up in a book someday.
I also want to show you how important it is to let a moment enter you.
To be mindful enough to slow down and look up. I didn't need to be mindful then - I was a kid and no one I knew had a cell phone yet. I was wide awake. The camera I had was a disposable one, with limited film. There was no cellphone camera to watch the moment through. Nowhere to post about it - social media didn't exist yet.
It was so easy to let the moment burrow inside me forever, a memory I have returned to over the past twenty years again and again.
Of course it made it on the page.
Finally, I wanted to address the Pablo Neruda quote above, to show how poetry, how words and story, don't find you - YOU find them. You go out there, you stay curious, you keep your eyes open. It's not as mysterious as he makes it sound.
I confess I feel weird contradicting Pablo Neruda, but writing is not an ephemeral sprite the deigns to visit you if she's in town. Our work has its mysteries, its spiritual components, but I don't think Neruda is giving himself credit for all the ways he's trained himself as a poet to see, to be be open, attentive, curious, and sensitive. He found the words because he was looking.
Upending this idea of process being little more than a wish and a prayer is why I’ve spent the past decade exploring my process and that of other writers. I know that, for me, part of my process is to go out in the world and keep my eyes open, to look for where the hurt is. The bittersweet. What confuses me. What makes me proud to be human. And then to hold it inside until it’s ready to come out on the page.
.
.
.
Now, me sharing a snippet of my WIP is pretty vulnerable - this is a scene that is in a book that is not even finished or sold yet. This moment might not even end up in the novel, but I needed to write it to understand why someone might go to conflict zones to tell the stories of strangers.
Sharing like this is not a thing I do. Ever.
But I wanted you to meet this beautiful Ukrainian human I encountered. To see the place I love without the bombs and Molotov cocktails.
Quick setup: My protagonist, Dasha, is recalling how she came to photography. She is a combat photojournalist. I gave her my memories and she added her own.
Photo Credit: stock image, subway in Kyiv
Excerpt from first draft of A Correspondence
by Heather Demetrios Fehst, all rights reserved
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It took me a long time to realize that I could say something with my camera. I wasn’t great with words, not for years and years, so you can imagine my relief when I realized that it was possible to communicate without using a single one.
When you’re a missionaries’ kid, you’re perpetually on the outside. I used to think that language is the number one barrier to real connection with others, and it was true for me then. But after years of forging relationships with people around the world where no one spoke my language, I know differently now. I’ve spent entire evenings with women in the Middle East and North Africa, connecting over tea and babies and other shared delights without ever understanding a word they said.
I’ve ridden on the backs of motorbikes in shared ecstasy over a blazing sunset with drivers who spoke in smiles and laughter. And I’ve run for my life with men who would never be able to pronounce my name, but could scream in my language just fine. This was real connection, more true and lasting to me than any Brooklyn dinner party or failed first date.
But as a kid, I didn’t want to connect. I’d been conscripted into the Lord’s service, an unwilling member of a band of Americans who passed out tracts in languages we were only decently proficient in. (My father once attempted to talk about Bonhoeffer with a young Russian Orthodox priest and it didn’t go well). I resented my outsiderness and my parents. I wanted to be in Boston, with my grandma and Mike’s cannolis and Feline’s Basement. I wanted to be “normal,” which I thought was a thing that actually existed, but now know differently.
I was just five when my parents moved us from Moscow to plant a church in Simferopol, a large city in the Crimean peninsula, later annexed by Russia. This was long before most people in the US knew there was a place called the Crimea to begin with.
I had a bewildering relationship to the city and my place in it. Even as a young child, I wanted to hate it, but it kept creeping into the cracks in my heart, the kind of light that’s more beautiful because of the shadows surrounding it. My favorite kind of light to shoot.
I thrilled over buying little jars of fresh sour cream at the markets from babushkas with faded kerchiefs wrapped around their heads, riding the rickety trolleys past faded peach plaster buildings adorned in the crumbling old world glory of post-soviet Europe, greeting the bread lady who banged on our metal gate with a stick each morning—I’d hand over a few kopeks in exchange for that quintessentially slavic bread, rich and dark, which I’d smother in fresh butter or a spoonful of the precious Jif peanut butter my grandma would send a few times a year.
I enjoyed speaking Russian and Ukrainian and found I was quite good at it. There were trips to the Black Sea, where we’d sunbathe on the black sands of Yalta. Eating special dinners out in one of Simferopol’s many Tatar restaurants, where we’d sit at low tables and gorge on meat pies and fried fish. I worked hard to elicit those genuine smiles from a population schooled in never taking off the armor of Soviet gruffness—good training, as it turns out, for my work as a photographer.
My tutors were kind and I eventually made friends—Ukrainian kids whose parents went to our church. We bonded over marathons of Slap Jack, my American hands slapping against their Ukrainian ones as we tried to increase our individual piles of cards. We watched movies my grandma sent from America and, as we all slipped over the edge from childhood into adolescence, we traded the bootleg CDs you could buy in the subway station for the equivalent of an American dollar—music was another way to connect, I’d find, without speaking the same language.
Around the time my chest began to fill out and the awkward lines of my body soften into an approximation of what it is today, I fell into a hormone-induced love with the man my parents had employed as their fixer in the region—Dima was a local journalist, a decade older than me and the object of my adoration and fascination. In a way, my unrequited love for Dima is what led to the actual love of my life: photography.
When people ask me why or how I became a photographer, I tell them about the old violinist in the Kyiv subway station that I heard play the summer I turned seventeen. I was heartbroken because my parents, wary of any lines being crossed, had forbidden me from spending any time alone with Dima. My father had insisted on taking me with him to Kyiv on a meeting he had with another family stationed in the Ukraine and I was being very sullen about the whole thing.
I’d discovered that he talked to me less when the old Canon a volunteer from the States had gifted me was against my face, so I was taking a lot of photographs. This was before digital—it was all on film, so I didn’t press the shutter too often. This gave me time to line up shots, to teach myself how to find alignment with the horizontal and vertical lines in my environment. To figure out what was interesting to me. I played with light, discovered texture and depth. Began to notice details. Contrasts. Most of all, I loved that with a camera between me and the world, I was allowed to stare at people and it wasn’t considered rude.
We were in one of the lively subterranean markets that filled the Kyiv subway station tunnels when I heard the violin—a lonesome Rachmaninoff refrain echoing off the dirty tiles and slipping past the stands filled with pirated movies and music from America, sliding around the pelmeni ladies who sold the dumplings in little plastic baggies.
I followed the music, to where an old man who looked like a cross between Rasputin and Tolstoy stood before a filthy wall where several faded Soviet-era concert posters had been lovingly pasted against the tile. He played with his eyes closed, the deep lines of his face filled with a youthful rapture, a lightness that took hold of his frame and gave it a momentary respite from old age and patched coats.
My eyes caught on the posters behind him—the face in the black and white photographs was much younger, but I recognized that transcendent smile. He’d been a soloist—and a popular one at that. Today his concert hall was Arsenalna station, deep beneath the Dnieper. Instead of an orchestra pit, he played behind an open case that held a few kopeks.
It was the first time my body told me to shoot—as though the image itself had the ability to reach between my ribs, grab my heart, and give it a good, no-nonsense twist.
The man, the posters, the case, the station—it was the whole of the Ukraine for me. The Soviet past and my present had become entangled in a single moment, a single image that that his violin scored and my camera wanted to capture and hold forever, a pinned butterfly.
I took a breath and raised the camera to my eye.
Eight years after my brother’s death in Afghanistan, my subway Rachmaninoff would lead me to a platoon of Marines in the mountains of Kandahar province, photographing them as they fought on what would become the deadliest day of that nearly endless war—and my first combat embed.
For updates on Ukraine and a weekly shot of empathy during other seasons, you can't do better than Lynsey Addario's Instagram - she is the real-life Dasha. I love her memoir, It's What I Do.
Please keep Lynsey in your hearts - her life is on the line every moment she lifts her camera.
It's scary out there and I am sending you love and deep breaths,
