What We’ll Remember: An Interview with Debut Author Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

“My stories often start with a feeling that unspools somewhere deep inside.”

The advice I find myself offering most often to creative writing students is the importance of taking the long view in regard to our careers as novelists, poets, and essayists. Unlike in other professions (elite athletics is frequently invoked in this context), writers have the benefit of a lengthy timeline—ostensibly their entire lives—to practice their craft and, with luck and perseverance, achieve their goals.

When a debut author arrives on the scene, many of us in the literary community are interested in hearing about that writer’s path to publication, and in my case, I’m particularly drawn to the backstory of writers who have racked up a few miles on their personal odometers before they’re signing books at their first launch party.

Alice Munro, famously, was in her late thirties when she published her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades. Penelope Fitzgerald was likewise well past the first blush of youth when she began publishing her lapidary novels, among them The Blue Flower, Human Voices, and The Beginning of Spring. I know I’m not alone in my admiration for Munro’s and Fitzgerald’s books, and I wonder now if one reason why their work continues to be read and celebrated is because they were indisputably virtuosic writers when they published their first titles. They arrived on the scene with every room in each of their houses having already been furnished and smartly organized.

Enter Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, whose stories I first heard about from two mutual friends (one of them fellow Catapult instructor and fiction writer Matthew Lansburgh) who have been a fan of her work for some time. After our introduction, I began reading and discussing her short stories with her, several of which appear in her debut collection, What Isn’t Remembered, winner of the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

By the time we met, Kristina had been writing and publishing fiction in esteemed journals such as The Southern Review and Zoetrope for more than fifteen years, but she hadn’t yet signed her name on a book contract. Along with her talent, I admired her work ethic and patient resolve to continue to hone her stories, sentence by sentence. She was never in a rush and seemed to know instinctively that if she kept writing, one day a publisher would call and announce they very much wanted to publish her book.

As sometimes happens, after years of committed writing and revising, a debut author finds herself with not one but two new books due for publication within a handful of months. As mentioned above, Kristina won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize last year for her story collection What Isn’t Remembered. Around the same time she received the news her manuscript had been chosen for this award, her agent sold her debut novel, The Orchard, to Ballantine.

Over the year and a half we’ve been working together, it has been both a pleasure and a privilege to see Kristina’s career blossom. She kindly agreed to speak with me recently about her trajectory from beginning writer to this propitious moment in her writing life.

Kristina and I corresponded via email and Google Docs. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

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Christine Sneed: What Isn’t Remembered is your first book. Would you say a bit about the experience of getting here—for example, how long it took to write these stories, and besides the Prairie Schooner contest, were there other contests you submitted to? Did your agent also send out this collection?

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry: One of the first stories I wrote as a graduate student at Radford University appeared in Timber Creek Review in 2003. It was called “Bathhouse Night” and I included it in my thesis project, which later that year won the award for the program’s best creative thesis. I remember being so surprised and so happy, filled with hope that I’d soon publish a collection. “Soon” turned into twenty years, an entire life—long, studious, difficult.

But if I had to live it all over again, I’d still choose to be a writer. I love what I do, and no amount of rejections can convince me otherwise. In fact, rejections make me work harder. The oldest story in What Isn’t Remembered was written in 2007 and the newest in 2020. Most of the stories have been previously published in reputable literary journals.

Throughout the years, I submitted various collections to various contests, adding or subtracting stories, trying to figure out a magical combination. But nothing ensued, although I came close a few times, and my single stories were finalists for many awards, including eight Pushcart nominations. “Boys on the Moskva River,” which opens the collection, was the winner of the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction.

I’d submitted to the Prairie Schooner Book Prize on my own, but my agent sold my first novel to Ballantine Books only a month before my collection won the prize. It was so bizarre—impossible to believe—and yet, it was true. As a Russian Armenian who was raised by a single mother and who grew up in the USSR and witnessed perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet empire, I’m used to fighting for every morsel of food or recognition. But, like many of my compatriots, I also believe in miracles. And having two books published only six months apart is indeed that—a miracle.

CS: Last year, as mentioned above, you sold your first novel, The Orchard, which will be published next March. Is it the first novel you’ve written? Tangentially, both The Orchard and What Isn’t Remembered include Russian characters who at times confront extreme physical and emotional hardships before and after perestroika. Do you see The Orchard as a natural companion to the stories in your collection?

KGN: The Orchard is loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard. The main plotline, however, grew out of my short story “Champions of the World,” published in The Southern Review in 2011. It took me years to develop that story into a novel, and then more years to rewrite it.

The Orchard isn’t my first novel, but it’s my first published and most beloved novel. Even though all of the names, characters, and events are fictitious, the setting and the times are real. The novel is dedicated to my generation—Generation Perestroika—who, in a single decade, had lived under Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, and who, at sixteen, had lost everything it had ever believed in.

CS: Russian is your first language, but I believe you write fiction in English. How long has it taken you to reach your current level of impressive fluency? (Nabokov comes quickly to mind as a native speaker of Russian who also sometimes wrote in lyrical and playful English.)

KGN: Thank you so much for such a flattering comparison, Christine. I’m not Nabokov, by far—one can never reach such depth, such perfection, such level of intimacy, which, to me, is exactly what sets him apart from other fine writers who create in a foreign language—how intimate he is with that language, how shamelessly free (although he himself considered it a tragedy for a writer to abandon his native tongue).

I went to a special English school in Moscow, where we started learning English at the age of eight. It was then and there that I fell in love with English, which seemed so direct, so “verbal,” compared to Russian, which can be overly descriptive, replete with adjectives and adverbs. I remember telling my mother after my very first class that I wanted English to be my profession. And she laughed and said: “It’s a language; it can’t be a profession. But maybe you can become a teacher.” She could never have said “writer.” In the Soviet Union, women weren’t allowed to write fiction—that is, no one took them seriously. Poetry, yes, and maybe an occasional detective story or a screenplay, but not novels. Those belonged to men and men only. And most of those men were long dead.

Perestroika changed that, of course, and now we have many women who write powerful fiction, but back in the 1970s things were rather hopeless. So, you see, I’ve been studying English all my life, although I could never have imagined that my adopted tongue would become my vocation, just as I could never have imagined that America would become my second home.

CS: Many of the stories in What Isn’t Remembered are intensely romantic, are darkly comic, and also feature elements of magical realism. I know you read widely and are very familiar with Gogol, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, to name a few of the most influential Russian fiction writers. Who else do you count among the writers who inspire you?

KGN: There are many brilliant writers whose fiction inspires me, but there are three literary goddesses whose work I worship: Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and Alice Munro. When I read their novels or short stories, I’m reminded again and again that fiction writing isn’t simply an acquired skill, it’s a sublime gift of storytelling, of something that reaches beyond the craft, beyond what can be learned, understood, studied, or analyzed.

Their storytelling isn’t an artifice; it isn’t fabricated or constructed in any visible, palpable way. Their novels and short stories are cathedrals, frightening in their beauty and perfection and grandeur. All I can do is marvel at their genius.

Fiction writing isn’t simply an acquired skill, it’s a sublime gift of storytelling.

CS: Musicians populate some of your stories, and classical music is especially important in the title story, which focuses on a former pianist, Mana, whose husband, Victor, still makes his living as a cellist. Are you a musician or have you studied music? I had the sense as I read this collection that music is as important to you as a writer as literature is.

KGN: In the Soviet Union, arts, and especially classical music, played a major role in people’s lives. My family was no exception. My mother spent the last of her money on books, theater, or tickets to the philharmonic. With my classmates, I also attended operas and ballets at the Bolshoi. Just like most of my friends, I was forced to take piano lessons. I wasn’t gifted enough to pursue music seriously and hated learning pieces by memory; I always made mistakes.

My son, however, grew up to be a pianist—classical and jazz. Over the years, my husband and I endured countless hours of his daily practices. We drove him to lessons, recitals, auditions, concerts, and summer festivals. One such festival took place in Cremona, Italy, where we spent a few blissful weeks, surrounded by ancient buildings and classical music, the pulse of centuries. I began writing the title story while still there, after attending one of the concerts, where Rachmaninoff’s cello sonata in G minor had been performed. It was so gorgeous, so voluptuous, so heartbreaking, the sound engulfing the theater and the audience. It haunted me for days. At the time, I was also rereading Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and the two experiences assimilated—as often happens in life and art—and later converged into “What Isn’t Remembered.”

CS: There’s a striking sensuality to many of your characters, a lust for life as well as for the flesh of a lover. Writing sex scenes is difficult for many writers, but you’re very adept at it. Do you have any advice for writers who struggle to write good sex scenes? And who are the writers you’ve learned from in this regard?

KGN: Ah, sex scenes—my favorite subject! I hesitate to give any prescriptive writing advice because it depends on the story: characters, setting, language. I often compare sex scenes to nudity in paintings. It differs exponentially from one artist to another—from Rembrandt to Klimt to Picasso. Also, I think that a sex scene in any story must serve some developmental purpose, must function as a plot point. A writer shouldn’t embed sex to entertain the audience, just as she shouldn’t describe a meal or what everyone wears, unless those details reveal something meaningful about the characters. Short stories have no room for any gratuitous information.

I admire eroticism in Jeanette Winterson’s and André Aciman’s work. But I’ve really learned how to craft sex scenes from reading Toni Morrison. It’s impossible to gauge how much her books have taught me. When she died, I was in Russia, but my American friends kept sending me their condolences—they knew what she meant to me. She was my literary godmother. The Bluest Eye made me want to become a writer.

You see, I grew up in a country that ignored or forbade sex. Women and men were kept in the dark and as separate as possible. Other than condoms, no birth control existed, and women often had to get abortions, and frequently illegally. Men weren’t allowed in birth houses, so they weren’t privy to all the pain, or anything their wives and lovers went through while delivering babies. They couldn’t relate.

Before perestroika, in novels and short stories, as well as in movies and plays, sex scenes had been omitted. Or they happened to be so chaste, depicted in sighs and whispers. No one talked about rape, incest, pedophilia, or women trafficking, although we knew all of that existed. Yet those ugly, raw, despicable sides of sex had never been discussed. In the USSR, two people couldn’t even rent a hotel room unless they were married.

Homosexuality or homoeroticism remained a shameful, forbidden land, even though it did exist, but no one would ever admit their sexual preferences or lustful urges. Sex was meant for procreation and procreation only. In that regard, writing sex scenes for me is an act of rebellion against those false moralistic norms and the sanctimoniousness, the prudishness that is still present, to some extent, in my home country, and here too. Many Americans I know, especially in the South, feel overwhelmed and even disturbed while reading sex scenes, no matter how tastefully done. But sex, like love, is an inseparable part of our lives until it isn’t, until we’ve grown so old that an image of a beautiful naked woman or man no longer evokes a desire but a memory of one.

Short stories have no room for any gratuitous information.

CS: When you start a new short story, do you begin with a character, an image, or an idea for a scene set in a particular place? Do you write several drafts, or do you tend to rewrite as you go?

KGN: It depends. All stories are different—some come to me almost fully formed; others demand weeks, months, years. Julio Cortázar once said that any story/novel begins long before its first sentence and ends long after its last. Or something similar. I can’t agree more. There’s all that life, all that experience, all those loves and joys, sorrows and disappointments, longing and heartache a writer brings into each story.

My stories often start with a feeling that unspools somewhere deep inside. It’s hard to describe, but I recognize it immediately and wait until it grows, looms so large I can’t ignore it. It might be lonely or angry or sweet or bitter, but it’s there, waiting for me to turn it into a story, to build it a house. And sometimes I fail, like the rest of us. The house crumbles.

CS: What is something you’ve learned in the last year about publishing your first two books that you’ve been surprised by?

KGN: I’ve learned how tireless the editors, copy editors, project managers, and proofreaders are; how many friends I have; and that publishing a book, not to mention two, is an honor, as well as an enormous responsibility—to those who’ve been reading and supporting my work for twenty years, but also to my future readers, who will encounter my work for the first time. It feels both fascinating and terrifying.

CS: What are you working on now if you don’t mind sharing a few words about it?

KGN: I’m writing a new novel. It’s inspired by my visit to Sputnik Hotel, where my aunt worked as a receptionist and where my father happened to spend one night in the 1980s. I was sixteen and hadn’t seen or talked to my father for fourteen years, since my parents’ divorce, so my mother and my aunt decided that I should surprise him. They wanted to see if he would recognize me.