Miroslav Penkov's Blog

I: So here’s a question for you, a fresh one, I promise, one that no one ever asks: when did you learn you wanted to be a writer?

MP: There is a good reason why this question is a cliché. “Why you write” is another one. These are very irritating questions, not because people ask them frequently, but because I can never give a satisfying answer. I’m always a bit suspicious of writers who can articulate their motivation clearly or pin-point a specific moment in time when they knew writing was what they wanted to do.

I: Like the moment you identified in an earlier post? When, as a child, you heard a local writer speak?

MP: I’m very suspicious of this moment. Not because, in my retelling, I manipulated what happened. This local writer really came to my kindergarten and everyone listened impressed and he really picked me up on his knee. All this really did have a tremendous impact on me. But I didn’t know it at the time. It’s taken me a number of years to understand this moment, to recognize it for what it is. It’s very possible that I’m charging this moment with the meaning that suits me best. And it suits me best if, in my quest toward writerhood, I can look back and find as many instances as possible that, when pieced together, will make clear what I’ve always known – that I am meant to be a writer.

I: You’re not making much sense here.

MP: How about this: I’ve always known that I am a writer. But I haven’t always believed it. And I still don’t, not always. Writer is something that you can’t go about attaching to your name, willy-nilly! It’s a title you have to earn before yourself, and I haven’t really earned it yet. And I’ve written a lot of words, and I’ve published stories, and a book in Bulgarian, and now a new book is on the way in the US, and I teach writing and I still can’t, with all honesty and a clear heart call myself a writer. This has nothing to do with modesty, either.

I: I propose we try to rescue this conversation. How did you start writing prose? Did you follow the more common pattern of writing poetry first?

MP: I’ll quote Umberto Eco here in an interview with The Paris Review: “At a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.” Only I didn’t have to burn anything. The week before I came to the US our apartment in Sofia got robbed clean. My earliest poems were in a shoe box. The box got stolen. So I assume the robbers made a very good poet out of me.

I: What was your favorite book as a child?

MP: Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” This is a top book. Incredible atmosphere. Here is another augural moment: I read the book when I was nine, in three days (and I was a pathetically slow reader, still am) and I knew right away that I wanted to write my own books. So I invented my own detective: his name was Ernest List and he was chubby and short and very smart. His sidekick was an old lady whose name I no longer remember. Miss something, naturally. And I wrote this long thing, a novella, about a case they solved, but that notebook too is gone now, lost. It was great fun, writing it. So for a long time I didn’t read other books. “The Hound…” was plenty fuel. And I wrote my own. Why read, when you can write your own?

I: This might be the stupidest thing you’ve said so far.

MP: And yet it took me years to understand it. That a writer ought to do two things: write and read. And reading is probably the more important of the two. You can always drop the writing and you’ll still be something: a reader. But if you drop the reading, there will be nothing of substance left; you’ll be nothing.

I: So for a while you wrote bad poems and detective stories. Then what happened?

MP: Then I read a biography of Stephen King. Not a novel of his, not his stories, but a biography about him. Some of his novels were described briefly in there and that was inspiration enough. So I guess I wrote my first serious story inspired by a synopsis. Only then did I read Skeleton Crew the first book of his I ever read. I will never forget that feeling of reading those stories and not being able to restrain yourself, not being able to finish a story even before setting the book aside and rushing to the computer, mad, in frenzy to write my own. I’d write a story a day, three-four-thousand-word stories. I’d write two or three a week. Then I’d read them out loud to my parents and put the stories in a drawer. I didn’t know what to do with them, whether they were good or bad; I knew that it gave me immense pleasure to write them; whether someone would read them was of no concern to me.

I: Why weren’t you sending them out to journals?

MP: What journals? We’re talking 1999 Bulgaria here. Exactly ten years after communism fell. Two years after the huge crisis of ’97. There were no journals. Or so I thought. And then one day, it was the early summer of 1999, I was buying a newspaper for my uncle from a street stand, this boy and his mother in front of me asked the seller something and the seller said, “You should see this new magazine. It’s new. It’s very good.” And he gave them a booklet, the size of an American manila envelope, and an angelic choir descended singing upon me, there on the street, because this was a moment after which nothing was the same.

I: You mean to say the magazine was “Zona F,” a digest of genre literature, edited by the Bulgarian Armenian science fiction writer Agop Melkonian. You mean to say they published your first story.

MP: A digest of genre literature! You make it sound so pedestrian. I mean to say this was “Zona F,” man, the magazine, the only magazine. There were no others in all of Bulgaria, none at all that would publish someone like me at the time, an absolute nobody, someone who wrote stories and wanted to keep writing them.

I: So how did it happen, this first publication?

MP: In their very first issue “Zona F” ran a contest for a story not exceeding 150 lines I think. I’d written this story about a man who couldn’t feel pain. He was born this way and he kept losing body parts, a finger here, a finger there. And then, when his wife got sick with cancer he was jealous of her. He envied her pain and despised her for being able to feel it. The story didn’t win the contest, but it was an honorable mention. Then one day someone called home. I was visiting my grandparents in Gabrovo. But in Sofia, my father answered the phone. The man on the other end said he was calling from “Zona F” and that they wanted to publish my story. But they also wanted to see if I’d be interested in helping them with the journal. “Listen,” the man said, “my father loved your boy’s story. Can I drop by your apartment? I live not too far away. Can we talk in person?” So he stopped by and they talked. He was Agop Melkonian’s older son.

I: But you didn’t know who Agop Melkonian really was.

MP: No. I didn’t. That’s because I wasn’t reading books at the time. Then I found out just how significant of a writer in Bulgaria he was. And then I met him. Listen, there are very few things in life that you can be certain of and this is one of those things: without Agop I wouldn’t be here now. He published my stories, he trusted me with writing magazine articles, he treated me as though I was a writer, not the sixteen-year-old geek that I was. I slowly, gradually I started to believe that maybe, possibly, this writing thing… that I could keep at it. It is so sad that he didn’t live to see this book.

I: You seem to have gotten sad here. Should we stop for today? Should we do a third part of the interview next week?

MP: Maybe. It’s getting awfully gimmicky, though. So maybe not.

Here you can read Part One of the interview