Hello!

Since I often ask my sources to share with me their life stories, it's only fair that I too make myself vulnerable and share mine. So, here we go:

 

EXILE AND IMMIGRATION

I was born behind the Iron Curtain to a family of artists and political dissidents. We escaped when I was still very little, right after the Soviet-backed government declared martial law in Poland. We crossed to Eastern Germany god knows how, crossed Check Point Charlie from East to West Berlin with god knows what papers, got on a train, and defected to the West in Paris. I wore small red rain boots on that journey, with all the money we had in the world inside them. Some of my earliest memories are of the tanks we left behind in the streets of Warsaw, of a soldier who searched our train compartment when we left Berlin for Paris, and of eating my very first banana ever, right outside the Gare de l'Est. 

 

I grew up as a child refugee on political asylum in France, where I first lived in a refugee and assimilation camp in Marans, a small village near La Rochelle, with for neighbors other asylum seekers from Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, and several African countries. We soon moved to a shelter for refugees in decrepit building in Paris, across from the Grande Mosquée de Paris and a few blocks from the Jardin des Plantes.

 

I've experienced and witnessed autocratic rule, military violence, exile, poverty, hunger, discrimination, and injustice. But I also witnessed the generosity and kindness of strangers. I became an immigrant to Canada at age 10, and a Canadian citizen in my early teens. Later in life, I became a landed alien to the U.S. and recently gained American citizenship.

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BELONGING (OR NOT)

All in all, I've lived in 11 countries so far — Poland, France, Canada, Mexico, India, Italy, the U.K., Zambia, Hungary, Hong Kong, and the U.S. — and visited over 70 others. I trekked, often solo, through mountains, valleys, and deserts on five continents, and camped all along. Our planet and its inhabitants are, indeed, magnificent, and some.

 

I am fluent in French, Spanish, Polish, English, and Joual. I used to be fluent in Italian, too, though I seem to have lost in the last few years most of my spoken fluency; I do, however, understand and read Italian at native level. I can get by, with caution and at a teeth-grinding slow pace, in Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Portuguese, and German. I tried my hand (and pretty much failed) at Japanese, Hindi, and Marathi.

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If you ask me "Where are you from?" believe me when I answer that I simply don't know. For people like me, cultural/ethnic identity can be complicated, and although I was born in Poland, I've always identified culturally as French, and sometimes as French Canadian, though on most days, I feel as though I belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

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EDUCATION

I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy and Latin from McGill University, a bachelor's in language acquisition from Queen's University, a British research master's degree in sociolinguistics and linguistic human rights, and a British master's in creative writing. I also have a master's of fine arts (MFA) in creative and narrative writing from Boston University. 

 

As a writer and journalist, I owe everything to many instructors and mentors whom I had the honor of studying with. Just recently, at Boston University, I studied under National Book Award winner and Chinese dissident Ha Jin; under Leslie Epstein, who was friends with Saul Bellow, took Doris Lessing to a baseball game, and would regularly chat with JM Coetzee; under National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez, who lived for some time with Susan Sontag and wrote about her; and under Alicia Borinsky, who herself had studied under Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel García Márquez.

 

I've also taken graduate courses in journalism at several universities in the U.S., and have a graduate certificate in editing from the University of Chicago. For a time, and years ago, I taught art history, French and Spanish and their respective literatures, the theory of knowledge (another way of saying philosophy), wilderness survival and outdoor ed, and creative writing (nonfiction and fiction). I fell in love with investigative work while living in Zambia, and I conducted a graduate research project that involved two years of field work, and uncovered harm linked to linguistic human rights. 

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NEW MEXICO

Today, I live in the high desert and mountains of New Mexico with my husband and our two dogs, Liz Lemon (corgi) and Ringo Starr (super mutt / goat). I'm a staff writer and reporter at The Santa Fe New Mexican (or The New Mexican for short), the oldest newspaper in the American west — and for its weekly magazine — and I freelance as a journalist and translator for other publications in the U.S. and abroad. When I have time, I dabble in gardening, watercolors, and linocut printmaking.

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