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Pursue the Things You Love Doing
27 May
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- Categories Life, quote, Visual Art, Writing
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May 27, 2019
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Yiasou!
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and speaker based in New York City.
She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of "Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road.'"
You can email her at stephanie_701 {@} yahoo.com
What have you been craving lately? My mother isn’t Greek so I grew up eating a lot of traditional American food — hamburgers, chicken cutlets and frozen vegetables, pepperoni pizza, and Chinese takeout. Ever since COVID-19 began, though, I’ve been craving — fiending for — Greek food. I suppose it’s psychological. That yearning to see my family (they now live in Greece) and be with them during the pandemic. Since I can’t see my family I’ve been ordering a lot of Greek takeout and making my own at home. My mother told me she’s been making pita pizza so that was my latest Greek creation. It was a total winner, with requests to make it again! I paired it with a horiatiki salad, and a Kalamata martini. Want to try it?
In the publishing industry, we often refer to the beginning of a work as “throat clearing” — and we cut it.
The blue hour.
Be a builder of castles. Live out your wildest fantasies.
One of the more frustrating parts of being Greek American in the literary world is the expectation that I have extensive knowledge of Greek mythology (no, I did not get read mythology at bedtime as a child) while simultaneously Americans do not seem to have knowledge of contemporary Greek and Greek diaspora literature. I felt so “seen” by Natalie Bakopoulos’ “Scorpionfish,” which came out last year. The novel centers around an American who returns to Athens after the death of her parents, which echoes a great fear of my own that one day I will have to make a similar trip. The dual narrative switches off to reveal a character called “the Captain.” As my own father was a sea captain, this was likewise a character that I related to. The novel is set against a Greece that tugs at my heart. A Greece of economic turmoil and refugees. A Greece of community and beauty. It is a story of identity, of love, of grief, of Literature. There were moments when Bakopoulos touched on themes and situations in ways that gave me pause because I had never experienced another author articulating with such specificity things that spoke to my identity. I feel grateful for this book on a personal level, but you don’t need to be Greek to appreciate it. It’s a tender story rich in beautiful sentences. What books have you read that made you feel “seen”? Or do you perhaps read to understand others’ experiences better? (There’s room to do both!)
Happy 200th birthday, Charles Baudelaire! This quote, a line from “Le Voyage” (as translated by William Aggeler) in “Les Fleurs du mal” (“Flowers of Evil”) makes my little wanderlust heart take the key off the chain around my neck, slip a tube of red lipstick into my purse, and head out the door for anywhere but the room in which I’ve sheltered for more than a year.
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