Immigrant Strong: August 2024
On Palestinian happiness, a picnic, and a Croatian woman's journey
It’s always a joy to feature friends’ books and it feels extra special to do that for a debut novel, set in Croatia, while writing this from Croatia! Kristin Vukovic’s The Cheesemaker’s Daughter, set on the island of Pag, confronts issues of home, identity, and how our past shapes us through engaging writing and a fast-moving plot with a behind-the-scenes look into the fascinating world of cheese making. (Read my book review for Panorama!) I’ve been lucky to be in a Pen Parentis writing accountability group with Kristin for years, and it’s a thrill to see her debut novel out in the world. I’ve joked that it’s a good thing I met her after she was well into writing the book or I would have thought the main character, a Croatian-American woman named Marina, was partly based on me ;)
(The photo is of an advance copy as I took it before I left for Croatia. And follow Kristin’s book tour updates here).
Upcoming writing and teaching events!
I’m so excited about these events and hope some of you will be joining me:
A piece I wrote will be performed at the Your Faithful Reader show in Manhattan’s Teatro LATEA during the Sept. 26-29 run. I decided to submit an essay after seeing the show last year, and loved the idea of readers anonymously submitting letters addressed to whoever or whatever they wanted. Those that are selected are performed by actors on stage in a theatre production bursting with creativity and emotion. Tickets are on sale now with a presale discount code!
On Saturday, Sept. 28 from 1-4 pm ET, I’ll teach the Writing About Your Immigrant Experience online class through Cooper Street Writing Workshops at Rutgers-Camden Writers House. Follow their website, twitter, or instagram for the upcoming registration link, and feel free to email me with any questions. The class is always affordable and involves a sliding-fee scale.
On Oct. 28, I’ll be reading my essay from the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024 at Stratford Library in CT. The book will be released that month.
I’ll also have an essay in this beautiful anthology: Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, scheduled for release Nov. 19. The book is available for pre-orders now from the publisher, or bookshop, or wherever books are sold.
Essays
I’m on vacation so it’s a short newsletter this month, but I hope you enjoy these three pieces:
For Electric Literature, here is Soma Mei Sheng Frazier on the Dangers of Writing About the Uyghur Genocide.
“While Měi lacks white privilege, these direct experiences grant her the privilege of sight. Once structural racism is pointed out, she’s able to see it. Like African Americans, China’s Uyghur population has been exploited for its labor and culture, surveilled and policed, while excluded from certain rights, privileges and jobs—creating socioeconomic disparity. The faces of the oppressed may differ from region to region, era to era—but the face of racism is always the same: an all-too-familiar sneer of derision that allows us to do horrific things to one another. That Black guy on the corner isn’t a person. He’s a risk that must be policed. Those Uyghurs with their beards and strange names aren’t people. They’re a threat to be contained.”
For The Rumpus, Sarah Cypher wrote Who Comes to the Ancestor Picnic?
“Our national life still rests on an uneasy downward slant, and we are still suspended on a taut line that runs between the opposing poles of Khalil Gibran’s advice—Have pride, but also: Be model citizens. And the tension humming in that line is always, Don’t bring the rest of us down. This tension, heard against the silence I can’t un-hear, is ever more maddening when whole Arab cities are collapsing under American-made bombs.”
I hope everyone takes the time to read Nabil Echchaibi’s LitHub piece, Making Space for Palestinian Happiness.
“I write these words skeptical about the power of language to do anything in the wake of a genocidal war that has not abated despite demonstrations, encampments, hunger strikes, statements of denunciation, UN resolutions, and international court indictments. The despair I feel in writing these lines is overwhelming and it makes me want to turn off all language, and yet I find inspiration in writers and artists who continue to fight through word and rhyme.”
Thanks for reading—and enjoy a few pictures from my beautiful country of Croatia,
Vesna
About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, and children of immigrants and refugees. For more info, here is a Q&A I did with Longreads about the newsletter. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.
About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then immigrated to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits in the human rights and international affairs fields. I have written about my immigrant experience for the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and Catapult, and have essays forthcoming in Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, and Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024. I participated in Tin House and Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshops, and won the Poet & Author and Parent Writer fellowships from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find me on Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe, or twitter, @vesnajaksic.