Author, Anca Vlasopolos
Today I’m not posting about my own books or commenting on the ins-and-outs of indie publishing. I’m interviewing the fascinating former Michigan author, Anca Vlasopolos.
Welcome to “Painting With Light,” Anca.
Thank you. Glad to be here!
You have a fascinating but somewhat frightening background. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
I was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1948, about two months before the Communists were “elected.”
My father was of Greek origin, my mother was Jewish and newly returned from Auschwitz and three slave-labor camps. My father became a political prisoner of the Communists because he was a professor of Economics and criticized the Stalinist five-year plan. He died three years after his release.
My mother applied for a passport to leave the country permanently when the government decreed, in 1958, that the country needed to be cleansed of Jews.
We left in February, 1962, and when we tried to come to the U.S. we came up against the Immigration Act of 1927. It had such strict quotas for “inferior” people from South and Eastern Europe that the quota for 1962 was already filled.
We finally came to the U.S. in 1963, as U.N. refugees. We ended up in Detroit, where my mother had two aunts who’d immigrated in the 1920s. They had to sponsor us for us to be allowed in.
With all that turmoil in your life, what were you like in school?
I was extremely shy, and having to change countries, languages, and schools several times in my teens didn’t make me any less shy. But I decided by taking drama and joining the debate team I’d overcome my shyness.
Did it help?
It didn’t, though I learned to speak for myself and for others. I was also impatient when school was boring, so I could be somewhat of a hoodlum, throwing spitballs and otherwise disrupting classes.
When you weren’t disrupting things, you must have read a lot. Tell me, who are your favorite authors?
Ursula Le Guin, Virginia Woolf, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, W.S. Merwin, Jane Austen … among many others.
Do you have any funny or peculiar writing habits?
I work on poems or passages of prose in my head long before I commit them to paper. My husband finds that strange.
For your fiction, do you work from a plot outline, or just see where an idea takes you?
I have a general notion of where I’m going, but I do let the book and characters take over. In my historical novel, I ended up with chapters about the Pacific theater in World War II, which I never anticipated when I started writing about a Japanese boy lost at sea in 1841.
Where do most of your ideas come from?
That’s tough. With a poem, it’s usually an image, an analogy I see in nature. With prose it very much depends on the piece—novel, short story, essay.
For my historical novel, two stories generated the book: one in National Wildlife about the near-extinction of the short-tailed albatross, brought about by a Japanese who’d traveled to the U.S. in the nineteenth century.
The other was a story told to me by a friend, who said that the public library in Fairhaven, MA, had Japanese effects sent by a man who’d grown up there in the 1840s, informally adopted by a whale-ship’s captain. The stories clicked … the man was the same in both!
Is a memoir more difficult than writing fiction or poetry?
I didn’t find it so.
What’s your favorite quotation?
The one that kills me is from King Lear, when Gloucester tells Lear, “Let me kiss your hand,” and Lear replies, “Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.”
When do you do most of your writing?
Whenever I please, now that I’m retired. The trick was finding time when I was working.
How have you evolved creatively since your first book?
I think others would have to decide. As I think all writers do, I write who I am at the time.
You taught English and Comparative Writing at Wayne State University in Detoit. What do you consider your proudest teaching moments?
My students getting jobs after earning their PhD’s.
How have you been promoting your work?
Not well. I am on some social media, and I have a website. It takes a lot of money to promote oneself effectively, or a lot of schmoozing, which I detest.
Do you have anything else in the works right now?
More poetry and either a long short story or a novel about a dying young painter.
Good luck, Anca … and thanks for doing the interview.
Thanks for having me, Ron. It was a pleasure.
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Please take a moment to visit Anca’s website and take a look at her interesting books. Her new book of poetry “Often Fanged Light” is available April 2019.
You can also visit Anca’s listings on Amazon, and try her work for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.
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I’ll be joining other authors signing books at Detroit Festival of Books at Eastern Market on July 21 and at SterlingFest in Sterling Heights, Michigan on July 27.
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Gentle Readers, my books have all garnered some terrific reviews. You can see all of them by using the Amazon link below. Check them out. Better yet, buy one and read it. You just might like it.
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You’re invited to visit my author’s website, BROKEN GLASS to hear the remarkable radio interview about my novel “Blood Lake” on The Authors Show. You can also like my Book of Face page, find me on Goodreads, or follow my shorter ramblings on The Twitter.
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Comments posted below will be read, greatly appreciated and perhaps even answered.
Painting With Light 