Ask the Author: Stephanie Cotsirilos
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Stephanie Cotsirilos
I’m the granddaughter of four Greek immigrants and an artist and civil lawyer in a family of criminal defense lawyers. I’ve benefited from assimilation and considerable privilege. Yet for as long as I can remember, I’ve felt behind me the aging, the transnational, and the displaced who were central to many first-generation families, including mine. These people have never left my subconscious. They are the foundation on which I stand. Sometime in 2016, their voices insinuated themselves into my ears to trigger My Xanthi.
Forebears behind these voices included a literate grandmother and an illiterate grandmother, neither of whom mastered English and neither of whom would have been able to read my book. They spoke Greek, which was my first language. I rapidly became bilingual as a very small child and have never forgotten the roll and cadence of the Greek I was accustomed to in the homes of my extended family. All of them – including my well-educated, professional, bilingual mother and father – convinced me Greek was the language of unconditional love.
When Mom was ill, my childhood included someone very much like Xanthi – who, by the way, never did what Xanthi did in my novella – and who resisted English. My goal was to make Xanthi’s letters sound translated from Greek; to capture, if I could, sentiments like “I eat the universe to find you.” Through this process, I began to remember what it felt like to dream in Greek and to pick up hints of tragedy in my elders’ backgrounds. We did not dwell on the past, though. Like Nick’s family, we were too busy becoming American.
Because the voices that inspired me were so insistent, I initially thought they were all that mattered, and I aimed to pull them together into a short story in 2017. Colleagues and workshop classmates convinced me otherwise. I started writing toward a longer form.
I traveled to Los Angeles to research the neighborhoods in which Nick and his family might live. I researched the Greek Civil War, about which my family did not speak much. I consulted closely with one of my brothers to confirm, adjust, and re-write Nick’s own background as a criminal defense lawyer, and to make sure I didn’t mess up references to criminal law procedure.
Four years after having started My Xanthi as a short story, a small, diverse, independent press in Los Angeles – one that specialized in novellas – decided to traditionally publish mine.
Forebears behind these voices included a literate grandmother and an illiterate grandmother, neither of whom mastered English and neither of whom would have been able to read my book. They spoke Greek, which was my first language. I rapidly became bilingual as a very small child and have never forgotten the roll and cadence of the Greek I was accustomed to in the homes of my extended family. All of them – including my well-educated, professional, bilingual mother and father – convinced me Greek was the language of unconditional love.
When Mom was ill, my childhood included someone very much like Xanthi – who, by the way, never did what Xanthi did in my novella – and who resisted English. My goal was to make Xanthi’s letters sound translated from Greek; to capture, if I could, sentiments like “I eat the universe to find you.” Through this process, I began to remember what it felt like to dream in Greek and to pick up hints of tragedy in my elders’ backgrounds. We did not dwell on the past, though. Like Nick’s family, we were too busy becoming American.
Because the voices that inspired me were so insistent, I initially thought they were all that mattered, and I aimed to pull them together into a short story in 2017. Colleagues and workshop classmates convinced me otherwise. I started writing toward a longer form.
I traveled to Los Angeles to research the neighborhoods in which Nick and his family might live. I researched the Greek Civil War, about which my family did not speak much. I consulted closely with one of my brothers to confirm, adjust, and re-write Nick’s own background as a criminal defense lawyer, and to make sure I didn’t mess up references to criminal law procedure.
Four years after having started My Xanthi as a short story, a small, diverse, independent press in Los Angeles – one that specialized in novellas – decided to traditionally publish mine.
Stephanie Cotsirilos
Two moments. The moment when you write what you didn’t realize was true. The moment when someone reads what you wrote and teaches you something entirely different, beautiful, and true about what you meant.
Stephanie Cotsirilos
I attend to images, sounds, and smells around me. I listen to people’s stories – even something so simple as an anecdote shared in a parking lot. I absorb the news and imagine it happening to me or someone I love. I allow memories in. And I write something – something – every day. Inspiration is born not merely of itself – in fact, not even usually of itself – but of practice. Practice creates strength, even when practice is frustrating. You can’t play Bach without mastering the scales. You can’t weave an ash basket without having learned the technique. Practice is also meditation. Some would call it prayer. Others would call it an opening into the subconscious. Sometimes I don’t know what the subconscious is saying until I begin to write. Writing is not something that happens to you. It is an act.
Stephanie Cotsirilos
Expiration Date, my next novel, which was triggered by 2017 media reports. After a twelve-year hiatus, Arkansas scheduled eight executions in ten days. The reason? A scarce lethal injection drug’s shelf life was about to run out. My novel explores intimate blowback from that ugly incident, invoking the voices of three fictional protagonists ensnared in Arkansas’ plan: a victim’s mom, her childhood friend, and a death row prison guard. Expiration Date is extensively researched – I come from a family of criminal defense and death penalty defense specialists – and, in the end, considers the grace in ordinary choices human beings make to locate their goodness. My ambition for the book is that it finds transcendence in regular people.
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