Hello! Hello!

​I often ask my sources to share with me their life stories, so it's only fair that I too make myself vulnerable and share mine. 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, by train and forest, 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 inside them all the money my family had in the world. 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 spent my formative years 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, Palestine, and several African countries. We soon moved to a shelter for refugees in a decrepit building in Paris, across from the Grande Mosquée de Paris and a few blocks from the Jardin des Plantes and its old zoo that had a lovely donkey and a peacock.

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I've experienced and witnessed autocratic rule, military violence, exile, poverty, hunger, discrimination, and injustice too many times to count, but I've also witnessed the generosity, courage, and kindness of strangers.

 

BELONGING (OR NOT)

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. I am also a citizen of the European Union, and understand that having any of these three citizenships — never mind all three at once — is a privilege, and that with this particular privilege comes the responsibility of speaking up when others can't. I am forever an alien and forever a refugee and immigrant, and I am proud of it.

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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 more than 70 others. I trekked, mostly solo, through mountains, valleys, and deserts on five continents, and camped all along. Our planet and its inhabitants, human or other, 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. My father comes from Podlasie, where the last European bisons roam, and his people (and mine) are called People of the Forest and speak an ancient dialect that I came to know thanks to my paternal grandmother. My own mother comes from large, flat plains near the modern border with Ukraine.

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If you ask me "Where are you from?" believe me when I answer this: I don't know. For people like me, cultural/ethnic identity is complicated, and although I was born in Poland, I do not identify as Polish. I was too young when I left, and perhaps that assimilation camp in France did its job, for I identify culturally as French and sometimes as French Canadian, but on most days, I feel as though I belong everywhere and nowhere at once. And that's ok. We don't need to belong to or identify with any given culture to be whole. But if you must know, I feel most at home in a forest, any forest of any kid, so maybe there's that.

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EDUCATION

Formal education can only go so far in teaching you about the ways of the world, and I've learned just as much from my professors and teachers (and books and libraries) as I have — if not more — from the many, many people I've met who took the time to chat with me, broke bread with me, sat beside me on a long bus ride, or just shared a laugh. I am forever grateful for everything I've learned and keep learning, and hope to learn.

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As a writer and journalist, I owe my craft to the numerous writing instructors and mentors with whom I had the honor of studying. Just recently, at Boston University, I studied under National Book Award winner and Chinese dissident Ha Jin; under the late Leslie Epstein, who was friends with Saul Bellow, took Doris Lessing to a baseball game, and would regularly chat with JM Coetzee, and who taught me grit; 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 owe a mountain of gratitude to a phenomenal writer and editor, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacqui Benaszynski, with whom I worked and who showed me how to take feedback and know when to let go; and to my feature writing professor, Kim Cross, who's always and forever there to help me do better.

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I hold 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, a British master's in creative writing, and a master's of fine arts (MFA) in creative and narrative writing from Boston University. Before all of that, I studied at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, a liberal Jesuit institution in Montreal that afforded me a classical education seeped in the Socratic method.

 

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 where I conducted a graduate research investigation that involved two years of field work and uncovered systemic 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, Lemon (corgi) and Ringo Starr (schnauzer mix). 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. I dabble in gardening, watercolors, and linocut printmaking, and just now, I'm teaching myself how to bead. I hike on the weekend and travel to Mexico City as often as I can to report, investigate, and write, and just eat all the tacos. I wear my heart on my sleeve, obsess a little (too much) about outdoor gear, and I'm always on the lookout for someone who can help me repair my old German hiking boots I will never ever give up on.​