Tag: Armenian Genocide

JUNE, A MONTH OF GLOOM AND BLOOM

June 24, 2024 / Laura Rink / 8 Comments

I’ve been mentioning flowers in almost every blog this year, not just in the Windows section but in the opening paragraphs. Bits of color holding my attention, lightening my mood, and lifting my energy. June is no different—purple and white lupine, wild daisies, yellow buttercup. June has been alternating between sunny summery weather and dark gray rainy days. Tee shirt or shirt, fleece, and vest. Flip flops or wool socks and boots. But this is not a surprise; this is the nature of June in the Pacific Northwest.

Last month I wrote about a health issue, AFib, which took me by surprise. After having a sleep study confirm I have a moderate case of sleep apnea, the beginning of this month I started using a CPAP machine, and for the last seventeen days I’ve had no episodes of AFib. Seems a bit too easy. Well it’s not that easy—I’m still getting used to wearing the lovely nasal mask which can disrupt my sleep while also helping me sleep better. The no-AFib episodes is a big motivator to keep at it.

Work: Among writers, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and The Story is a well-known craft book. In my Armenian family book, the situation is clear: my Armenian grandmother and her two sisters survived the Armenian Genocide and rarely spoke of it. Why were they not marched into the desert with the rest of the Armenians in their village? How did they live during the remainder of the genocide, during the aftermath of WWI, and establishment of the Republic of Turkey?

The story makes meaning of the situation. Right now the story in my manuscript is in a bit of a muddle. Is it my relationship with my grandmother? My need to know, wrapped up in my own identity? The role silence has played in my life? Why the past matters? Does the past matter? A few of these or something else entirely? I have to remind myself to trust the process, to keep writing because that’s how story makes itself known. Time and time again I’ve huddled over my keyboard in the gloom and kept writing and sure enough the clouds parted, the sun shone, even if only for an afternoon, even if only for a glimmer of the story to shine through. Collect enough glimmers and you have yourself a day full of sunshine, a book full of story. (h/t Pam Houston for the concept of glimmers)

Wonder: If only I had more time to write, all writers everywhere have moaned. While time is essential, in and of itself time is not enough. Late in my writing life, I’ve discovered the wonder and the revelation of the following truth, and a greater understanding of my struggles to write.

“Writing is not a matter of time, but a matter of space. If you don’t keep space in your head for writing, you won’t write even if you have the time.” – Katerina Stoykova-Klemer (h/t Dinty W Moore)

Does this resonate with you? How can we keep space in our heads for our creative work?

Windows: June has now brought what we’ve been longing to see: fawns. We have a single and one set of twins, as best we can tell. The fawns are more skittish than curious right now. That will change. But I did manage to get a few pictures.

APRIL, A MONTH WITH TWO ANNIVERSARIES

April 24, 2024 / Laura Rink / 9 Comments

April showers bring May flowers, so the saying goes. In other words, endure April for the reward of May. Yet April offers its own bounty: cherry blossoms, swaths of tulips, and the unfurling of maple leaves, to name a few. April also brings those showers, tree pollen, and temperatures often more like winter than spring. April is an energetic month.

Work: I’m drawn to quotes that reframe the challenges of writing and alter my mindset in an expansive and helpful way. For example, here is a recent newsletter quote from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits:

“If you feel resistance before you begin, it’s usually procrastination and you need to get started.

If you feel resistance after you begin, it’s usually feedback and you need to make adjustments.”

These days I do sit down and get started, because I’m eager to write this book about my Armenian family, to watch the shape emerge, morph, fall flat, and rise again. But it’s taken me a while to implement the second part of the quote. I’ll stare at paragraphs that aren’t working, as if time alone will somehow solve the problem. I’ll make line level edits as if tiny alterations can fix larger issues. (Sometimes they can.) But now I’ve realized a larger adjustment is often what is needed.

Sometimes that adjustment is relocation: the scene or section belongs somewhere else in the book. I move it out of the way and the narrative flows again. Sometimes that adjustment is reordering within a section—printing out and cutting that section into paragraphs can help with the reordering. Sometimes that adjustment is a scene compressed into summary or a summary expanded into a scene. Sometimes that adjustment is acknowledging that this particular material doesn’t belong in the book at all.

If you want to understand, and gain strategies to overcome, the role of resistance in your life, I recommend Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a book from which I could pull dozens of expansive and helpful quotes. A book that belongs in every creative person’s library. And we are all creative people.

Do you have a favorite quote that inspires you or reframes an idea or experience?

Wonder: April 24^th is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and also my parents’ wedding anniversary. I wonder at their concurrency.

On April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals and thus began the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians, a genocide that also took the lives of Assyrians, Greeks, and Jews. It wasn’t until 1988 that Armenia, then a republic of the Soviet Union, designated April 24 as a public day of commemoration. The California State Assembly, in 1997, declared April 24 as a Day of Remembrance for the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923.

On April 24, 1964, my parents married, picking that date because it fell on a Friday. They married in Las Vegas surrounded by family and friends, and returned to work on Monday.

Really there’s not much here to wonder about. These two anniversaries share a day because coincidences happen. I hadn’t made the connection until recently because the Armenian Genocide wasn’t talked about in my family. We didn’t commemorate the tragic event that my paternal grandmother and her two sisters survived.

This April, my sisters and I, and our families, gathered at my parents’ home to celebrate their 60^thwedding anniversary, to celebrate love and family. My parents are together, still here, and Armenians are still here, despite the genocide set in motion on April 24^th.

Windows: Two trees in bloom: cherry and dogwood.

March, A Month To Spring Forward, Still

March 27, 2024 / Laura Rink / 2 Comments

The harbingers of spring continue this month, with azaleas, daffodils, and forsythia in full bloom, and maples, alders, and dogwood trees beginning to bud out. We have a mallard couple visiting our pond and a blush of robins spreads over the front field bobbing for worms.

Work: This month I’m poring over a ship manifest & port of arrival form, carbon copies of one great-aunt’s letters from the 1930s, and research on Battle Creek College, Michigan and the Montefiori Hospital in the Bronx, NYC. All that to help me reconstruct the story of how another great-aunt, Silvia (Sirvart) Haigazn, came to America in 1928, after surviving the Armenian Genocide, and subsequently established a new life for herself here. My struggles with this particular section are threefold.

First, balancing the research and the writing. There is the delight in finding out new information about Silvia and facts about where she went to school and worked. Most of this information, while personally gratifying, will never be used in the book, and I have to limit the research time in order to keep writing. Secondly, making choices about story, structure, and voice. I need to take my Tante Silvia’s situation and shape that material into a story that will be compelling to a disinterested reader. But which story, highlighted by which elements of her life? In what form? In what kind of voice? Each of these components of craft influence the others and I’m looking for the best match. And thirdly, how much of this book is biography versus memoir? In other words, how much is the narrator also developed as a character in this section? Do I interject related memories and events from the future? Or stay firmly in the late 1920s and early 1930s? I don’t know yet.

All of which is to say I need to not get bogged down in these challenges but keep writing so the story, structure, and voice can reveal themselves more fully which in turn will make clear what research is required and how much of myself needs to be present.

What challenges have you been facing in your creative work? To me, creative work includes, among many others, such activities as gardening, cooking, quilting, etc. Do you have strategies for dealing with those challenges?

Me and Tante Silvia, circa mid-1970s

Wonder: Most people want to stop falling back and springing forward, temporally speaking. So why, you may wonder, did we yet again this month move the clocks forward? In 2019, the Washington State legislature passed a bill to remain year round on Daylight Savings Time. But to do so requires the approval of the federal government, which hasn’t taken action. The last two years a bipartisan group of Washington State senators put forth a bill to have the state remain on Standard Time, which doesn’t require the approval of the federal government. I’m team Standard Time and was disappointed to learn that the bill never made it out of committee. For more on my year-round time preference, check out my March 9^th Facebook post.

How do you feel about the time changes—love, hate, or indifferent? Which time do you prefer to remain on, or do you enjoy the shifting of the clocks?

Windows: These hellebores are a philosophical bunch of navel gazers with beautiful faces not easily seen.