How to Revisit and Write About Trauma, with Author Ani Gjika

ANI GJIKA IS AN Albanian-born literary translator, writer, poet and and author who moved to the US at age 18 and earned an MA in English at Simmons College and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, Framingham State University’s Miriam Levine, Reader Award, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize. Her new book is An Unruled Body: A Poet’s Memoir, just out from Restless Books and the winner of the 2021 Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. She and I dig in here for a talk that includes how to revisit and write about trauma. Listen in and read along.

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Marion: Welcome, Ani.

Ani: Thank you, Marion. I’m so happy to be here. And thanks for reading that long bio.

Marion: Well, it’s a very impressive bio and I want people to know who you are because it gives them the context for understanding why I want to talk to you so much. So I recently listened to an audio archive, which I’ll link to in the transcript I run on my site, in which you have this wonderful answer to the question, what is the most pleasurable aspect about writing? And you say this, “The moment of writing itself when you feel you’re hot on the trail of an image or metaphor, or discovering a way to end the poem that you did not know.” And you go on to speak, “Maybe it’s alchemy, something that’s almost magical of trying to translate an idea onto the page.”

I agree. And I really abhor all those memes on social media that make writing out to be a painful chore. So fill me in a bit further about your version of the pleasurable aspects of writing.

Ani: Yeah, thank you. I mean, I do feel that it may be painful just to finally get to the space where you feel like you’re hot on the trail with something or just finding the time and sitting down. But then once I do sit down and when the moment arrives that I feel like maybe an image comes to me or I have a question in mind that I really feel like I need to answer or something from the past like there’s a moment in the past where I may have been observing something and I mentally make a note that, “Oh my gosh, I need to write about this.”

And somehow that arrives back in the future at a moment where I’m sitting down and writing and somehow it finds its own place within what I’m writing at that time. I don’t know if this makes sense, but it’s kind of magical how the pieces of a puzzle fit when you show up to write, when you show up for the work.

Marion: I think so. I think it is magical, and I love the idea of asking a question. I watch a lot of shows, I read a lot of books, and I’m always reading reviews, for instance of plays I’m never going to see, movies I probably won’t see because I love when a good reviewer talks to me about what it’s about or what question it asks. And I think that’s a really important thing. My audience is writers and I think they need to be reminded that sometimes you’re saying, “So what goes into the idea of a relationship with somebody in terms of accommodating each other’s appetites or something? What’s the deal here?”

So that idea of asking questions is really a wonderful one. Can you think of a question you’ve recently noted, written down and said you want to explore in your writing perhaps?

Ani: Yeah. Well, there’s this question that I keep thinking is maybe what I want to write about in the future. I haven’t started writing, but probably because of what this memoir is about. I think the next one is in my head, it’s like, “What is the concept of return? What will that mean to me? Returning physically maybe to Albania, a country that I haven’t visited. In 27 years, I have only visited once.” And so I do have this question of what is there for me if I were to return to visit? Not necessarily to live there, but could I see my past maybe through a different lens or my adolescent years maybe.

I was so caught up in the fears of being myself, walking the streets there. But I wonder now when I think about it, did that fear make me miss out on really seeing the country, really seeing the people my own self? And so I don’t know. I just have this desire to return and see what I can write from that space, from that question.

Marion: I love that idea. And in your new book, An Unruled Body: A Poet’s Memoir, as you just referenced, you grew up in Albania. And the short version history for those listening is that Albania was proclaimed independent in 1912 after almost five centuries of Ottoman rule. And that during most of the second World War, Albania was invaded by Italian and German forces and became a Stalinist state until its transition to democracy after 1990. And of your early years there, you write, “The aftermath of a dictatorship is not freedom, unity, prosperity. There’s mayhem first. And in Albania, young women pay the highest price.” And you describe a society of sexual assault, including your own.

So let’s talk about jumping in there. As you say, you’re thinking now what would return be? So first of all, do you remember what question you were asking when you sat down to write this book? Because you brought up this whole idea of question, and I’d be interested to know perhaps what your intent was at first going into this beautiful book.

Ani: I didn’t really have a question at all. One day just sat down and somehow started writing what is the prologue right now or the car scene in the book. And that’s where it all began. It always felt like this was the beginning of the book. And then after that, I decided, “Well, I’ve never really written about this part of my life in Albania.” I’ve written a lot of poems about Albania or from my Albanian childhood, what home means to me and all of that. But I have never really explored the period of adolescence in that country.

Marion: Well, I think the idea of return is fascinating because you write about this assault and it’s the aftermath. Whenever I interview a memoir writer, I always ask the same question and I’m going to ask it of you, which is, “What are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask her to write about a previous trauma? Are we asking her to relive it, reanimate it, inhabit it? Or are we asking her to look at it from here all these years later and report very cooley?”

I mean, I think a lot of writers worry that we’re asking a writer to re-traumatize herself. So what do you think you were asking of yourself as you went back and wrote about those really very hazardous years as a young woman that you endured?

Ani: I think I was interested in the silence like silence as a language. As I was writing about this, I came to an understanding that it was a period in my life where the way I name it in the book is that I became proficient in silence. And I wanted to portray what that looks like in a culture where it’s really difficult to see yourself because you’re constantly being watched and you’re constantly aware of that feeling.

Marion: I love the subtitle in your book that your memoir relates to us, that this is a poet’s memoir. And while throughout the book you have these marvelous and surprising poetry inserts in the copy, I feel the real distinction between this and another writer’s memoir lives in the whole role, language plays in your story. It’s its own character. That’s hard to do. So talk to me about making the decision to make language such a living, breathing character in your beautiful book.

I know you’re a translator, I know that you speak several languages, but you talk so much about language is a presence you write and we must speak to be seen. So if you would just talk a little bit about the realization of this and then how you decided to make it such a major character in this beautiful book.

Ani: Wow, that’s a beautiful question. I feel that maybe my whole life I’m so immersed in language and languages. And also as a writer, I think I’m the kind of writer who takes a long time with an idea and a poem or a book. It takes me years and I’m constantly thinking about those ideas, kind of like a spider with their silk, I guess. It’s just constantly keeping it in my mouth. Actually, it makes me think of that moment in the book where I have peas in my mouth as a child and I won’t spit them out. I’m constantly having thoughts and language in my mind slowly brewing, right? This is how I work.

So because I come from this space, it’s kind of like at the front of my mind languages. And in the process of writing this book, I don’t know, it naturally came out as prose, but I’ve always wanted to include poetry in it. So from the very first draft, I had poems scattered through, but I had entire poems. And so it wasn’t until during the editing process that my editor said, “What about only selecting tiny excerpts from your poems?” And then as soon as she said that, I knew how to stitch and un-stitch what I had previously, put on the page. But yeah, I don’t know. It feels like it’s a process that comes naturally.

I’m not really consciously thinking when to write in prose, when to write in poetry as I wrote this book. Yeah, it was kind of… I don’t know. I felt like it was an innate kind of feeling going through, going about writing and revising this book. In some ways it makes me think that maybe I just played a lot through the writing of this book, and I hope I did okay with it.

Marion: It feels like you enjoyed it. I think that you played a lot is a lovely way to consider it because there’s some very intense scenes in it absolutely. And you’ve answered a little bit about how the work of being a translator informs your writing in terms of this language. You’ve translated so much work and you’re so celebrated for it. Is there any other aspect of translation do you think? Does the act of running two languages through your head or moving from one to the other? I’ve never done translation, so I don’t know how I exactly would describe it, of course. Does the actual act of translation in any way inform prose writing or poetry writing in ways that we would be informed by?

Ani: Yeah. When I’m in the process of translating, I feel like it’s the same space or the same energy I’m working from when I’m revising. Because when I’m revising, I’m trying to think of diction a lot, word choice. And not just word choice, but the musicality of the line or how the image that I’m writing, whether it’s coming across the way I think of it in my head or I see it in my head. And so in the process of translating, I’m also trying to create in English or struggling with diction to bring in English, the kind of imagery or musicality or the message I see sense from the original author in that original text. So the process of revision and the process of translation to me are very similar. It’s the same enjoyment. I get the same sense of pleasure from both.

Marion: That’s wonderful to hear. I think a lot of writers will be very relieved that there’s pleasure and revision. People are so surprised. The students I work with are so surprised when I say, “I’m going to teach you how to write a first draft and then I’m going to teach you what to do with it.” I think everyone initially thinks, “Oh, no, no, my first draft will be good enough.” And I’m always here to tell you that it won’t be. I take enormous pleasure in revision. It’s like when you comb your hair when it’s really, really knotty and you get to put conditioner in it and suddenly one inch leads to two inches and three inches.

Suddenly you’re through it and you say, “Oh, it’s so smooth and silky.” And just two minutes ago it looked like a rat lived in it. And that’s definitely the difference between my first drafts and next drafts is you smooth it out and it is pleasurable. But you seem to take a lot of pleasure in language. I’ve read your poetry. I haven’t read all of it, but I read and delighted in the poem a different origin in which you riff on Eve and the snake and what they might be up to. And I have to tell you, I like your version better than the one we grew up with. You say that she might have bit the apple to make a new friend.

Ani: I’m so surprised you found this poem. I’m so grateful that you looked it up. That’s great of you.

Marion: I love it.

Ani: Thank you.

Marion: I love this poem and it’s surprising and delightful, and compelling, and unique. So let’s talk about what happens in the mind. You just said that revision gives you pleasure, but when an idea like Eve biting the apple to make a new friend popped into your mind, a lot of writers would swat that away like, “Oh, I can’t say that, but they’ll come after… Whatever, who cares?” So what process is it that allows us to take that and polish it up and make it work? Is it permission? Is it the joy that you’re talking about? Is it just a purely joyful experience? What is it that allows us to say, “Ooh, that’s weird. I like it.”

Ani: Yeah. I think I just have to go with what’s coming at me. I have to follow what feels honest. If I write this line and it’s exactly what I’m thinking, I trust myself, I go with it and I see where it takes me. So I’m not usually questioning whether, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I wrote that. This is blasphemy.”

Marion: Good.

Ani: If a thought comes and it feels true to me, I just have to continue in its path and see what else comes after it.

Marion: Yeah, good. And I think that’s such encouragement to people, and you have some beautiful prose in your memoir. You have many lovely and powerful passages, but perhaps the one I most want to dig into is this one, and you write fairly late in the book, “I arrive at English the way I imagine someone must arrive on the night of the prom. It is an entrance, the way a 17-year-old in the movies enters a ballroom and is not recognized at first. No one expects her to look this beautiful. But of course it’s her. Everyone can see. And the whole night belongs to her. But I am not in a movie. This is real. I see myself in the moment. I begin to write poems in English like film developed in a dark room. I am no longer in negative, but in full color.”

And that is just lovely. Can you remember that one kind of unfurling in your head or what it felt like as you started to work with the prom and the connection to English, to the language? Again, getting back to this idea of language and working those two ideas together.

Ani: I don’t remember exactly how the two came together, but I do feel that I always think about the time when I became just more comfortable in English or writing in English because I guess it happened the way this memoir wrote itself in three days at that time as a very rough, rough, rough draft. But at that time, I had this one afternoon where I sat down and I wrote all these poems in English in one sitting. And so it was like an arrival. Or whenever I think of finally writing a poem that I think, “Oh, this is going to make it. I’m going to go through revisions and this will be a poem that I can send out in the world someday.”

When that happens, it feels like I’m arriving. So writing in English at that time, yeah, I had this sense of arriving somewhere and then maybe I was writing about other lessons so much in this book, maybe I tried to connect it to the idea of arriving at a prom, which I never had.

Marion: Yeah, it’s lovely and we get it. We totally get the role of language and how when English was yours, you felt like you were arriving. I think we take so much for granted about speaking and we’re not as careful as we could be. And this book made me so much more in love with what words next to one another can do, because we got to see how you acquired your English, your language, and made a life of it. And the other thing that you seem to know how to do beautifully is book structure. I could teach an entire course on your book.

The end of act one, in the classic book structure for memoir, we get the aha. And in your case, it’s when you realize that your body and you are strangers to each other. And much later, as the book turns for home, you speak directly to your body that in part defines for the reader your definition of who you are. So let’s talk structure a bit. Did you map out the book? You say it came to you in a three-day first draft. All my writers right now, by the way, are lying on the floor grabbing a bottle of gin. So just want you to know that…

Ani: Let’s go from the beginning. I did have these three days of just writing by hand, and I usually write by hand. So I wrote by hand in two notebooks, but then obviously there was no there. After that, I just decided… Because I teach writing, so I decided, “Well, what do I do with all this material?” First, I should come up with an outline. It just made sense. That was the very next step that I should make an outline. And from that time for five, six years, I always had this structure of dividing the book into four parts, and each part was centered around language.

It was a different aspect of language. The first part was the breakdown of language because I was thinking about how in communist Albania I was surrounded by language of harassments and secrets and lies. So language was kind of broken for me then. And then later I had a section on the power of language, and that’s where I talk about poetry and falling in love with English.

So I had four different sections for many years, and I just kept adding on layers and layers of other stories that connected with the themes I had been exploring in the book. And then it wasn’t until this year during the process of editing that both my editor and I, we were thinking about, “Okay, how do we braid all this a little bit more so that we have two, as you call them, acts?” Because it does feel like before-and-after moment. Moving to America is the second part.

So I would say that before I had this book structure around the theme of language, and then later on a few months before sending it off to print, we braided it further so that the book has just two stronger parts.

Marion: Yeah, it does. It has some very strong moments. Somebody I interviewed recently talked about how she puts everything into Scrivener, which is a software package, and you talked about an outline. Did you write out an outline? Did you draw out an outline? Did you sketch an outline? Give my listeners some idea of how you outlined this.

Ani: It’s just an outline in a notebook, right? It’s just me and my notebook. And I had an outline by sections. So I had four sections to begin with. And then under each section I had chapters. And then after that stage, I had notecards. I made notecards where I actually wrote the title of each chapter and the theme of each chapter so that I could go back and figure out where are the gaps? Are there any gaps in particular chapters about how the theme is developed?

Do I need to add more or characterization? Can I create another angle of looking at this person that the reader would appreciate? I’m not just only portraying this person under this one light. So these notecards I came up with when I was taking the class, Memoir Incubator, at GrubStreet with Alysia Abbott. This was part of the assignment. You had to create this packet of notecards where you… And I don’t know if there’s a word for what we were doing. I’m sorry, I don’t even remember.

Marion: No, no.

Ani: But having a whole pack of notecards where I sketch out the entire book scene by scene, so that on one side of a note card, there’s a scene, on the other side it’s what the theme this scene is speaking to?

Marion: Oh, I love this.

Ani: So that was wonderful as an exercise because it also made me realize, “Oh, maybe I don’t need this scene.” Actually, it’s not serving the book.

Marion: So you’re curating from your life the scenes that you might use and then you’re putting them on index cards. On the front, you give the scene a name, and on the back you give the scene, what’s the purpose of it, what’s my intention here? And then you’ve got a lot more than you need and you shuffle some of them out there before you start writing or are you using those cards as you’re writing?

Ani: This was done after I had written. So I had written a full, full draft.

Marion: I see.

Ani: Or several full drafts and the notecards came at a later stage. And that was very useful, at least for me. So I had done all the work, or at least up until that point, what I thought was the necessary work. And then I could go to this step and figure out… Even reorganizing the chapters. These index cards, having them all in front of you, it helps in deciding… “Oh, maybe I should move this scene up here or put it later in the book.” Because it gives you a bird’s eye view in a way as you’re shuffling through them or if you open them up on the floor or on your desk. So that was a magical process as well and I really enjoyed it.

Marion: I love that. Years and years ago I was taught to do that and then use what nobody has anymore, which was a huge cork board. And to pin them in order, the scene, just to give each scene a name, and then on the back of the card have all kinds of descriptors of who’s going to be there and what they need to do and all that. But then I would put them up on a cork board and move them around.

But cork is very precious now and we don’t have cork boards so much. But I love this idea of doing it after you’ve got a draft. I have to think about that more. But that’s really a gift. Thank you for that. I have never heard that one before. I love GrubStreet and I know their memoir project. It’s fantastic.

Ani: Yeah, I’m sure different people in the group because we were all at different stages. Some people had a full draft, some had less than that. So I’m sure the activity of the notecards helps also with building the manuscript. So it depends on the person at different stages, wherever they are. I think it’s a really useful tool to either build or revise.

Marion: Well, I think it sounds great. I’m going to try it. And I thank you for that. So as we start to wrap this up, I know you’re a teacher and I speak to my students all the time about how they have to have community. This is a very solitary thing that we do for a living, but you’ve got to spend a lot of time with others to put ideas in your heads and have conversations and have support. When I was a young writer, I didn’t have any writer friends, and now all my friends and my husband, my sister, my best friend, I’m surrounded by writers.

Can you just speak a little bit about having a community of writers as we exit this interview? Just talk a little bit about the value of having other writers in your life.

Ani: Yes. I love hanging out, I guess with friends that are writers of different genres. I have friends who are fiction writers. And the one I’m thinking of right now is Stacy Mattingly. She writes fiction and she’s always someone who brings writers together. We have this group of people that is made up of poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, translators and we get together every once in a while, sometimes to share our own work, but at the same time, to just share whatever someone has published.

That’s always been a place for me where ideas percolate and we might come out of that meeting of wanting to write something else. I attend conferences in other workshops as often as I can, depends on finances, but I love to just show up at a particular workshop or at a particular author talk whether I can go there in person or on Zoom now that we have this option. And so just making myself available to these meetings or these spaces where diverse writers are in conversation with one another has always been a space of inspiration. And that’s so important to be able to continue to put yourself out there.

Marion: Yeah. Thank you for that confirmation that people need to get out. One of the things I’ve noticed with a lot of young writers I deal with is that COVID drove them in and post-COVID they’re staying in. And so anything else you can say to them, Ani would be very welcome about how they should get out and hang out with other writers. So as we exit this interview, what words of get out and stay out have you got for those writers?

Ani: Yeah. Maybe just gather a few people that you have always shared love for writing and just make time together to read something together. Somebody just recently told me that she’s a poet and she goes on walks and she just asks people to join her on a walk, and as they’re walking, they’re reading poetry together.

Marion: Oh, that’s perfect. Thank you, Ani. That’s the best advice I’ve heard in a really long time. I’m very grateful for you coming along today. The book is beautiful and I’m really honored to meet you. Thank you so much.

Ani: Thank you. I’m honored to meet you as well. And thanks so much for making time for me.

Marion: You bet. The writer is Ani Gjika. See more on her at ani gjika dot com. Her new book is An Unruled Body: A Poet’s Memoir just out by Restless Books. Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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