Mary kay zuravleff biography template
An Interview with Mary Kay Zuravleff
“Where I was born isn’t how I was raised. Though I hailed from Marianna, Pennsylvania, I was brought up hearing that wolves talk and Old Believers rise from the dead. That a good woman can make soup from a stone, and a good man’s snot is black with coal dust.”
From the opening pages of American Ending, Mary Kay Zuravleff’s new novel, narrator Yelena Federoff draws the reader into her vivid and gritty world as the first American-born daughter of a Russian coal miner and his wife. The story unfolds from 1900 through the early 1920s and recounts the Federoffs’ hardscrabble life — one in which boys leave grade school for the mines, and girls get married off in their early teens to crank out babies they can barely afford to feed. The Russian Orthodox Church may dictate its followers’ lives, but Yelena longs for something different: an American ending.
What led you to write a book about Russian-immigrant coal miners?
One of the reasons I wrote the book was that I saw the 1920 census that listed my grandmother, who married a Russian, as an “alien.” That’s a strong word. Who gets to be an American citizen is one of the points of the book. I knew my grandmothers, Mary and Kay, both of whom I am named after. They were Old Believer Russian Orthodox from Suwalki, the same town the Russians in the book came from. My entire life, I heard their family stories. So, I took those stories from my grandparents and moved them around in time.
How long did you work on the book?
After one of my children looked at some prayer books my great-grandfather had painted by hand, they said that I’d been “doing this my entire life.” It’s the notion of choosing your topics versus your topics choosing you. But as to the various drafts of the book, it was more like eight years that I worked on the book.
The Old Believer Church dictates Yelena’s family Winter 2024 | By Hilary Ritz American Ending Mary Kay Zuravleff’s grandparents on both sides of her family lived in the Appalachian mining town of Marianna, Pennsylvania, at the turn of the 20th century. They were Russian Orthodox immigrants living hardscrabble lives; the men worked and died in the coal mines and the girls were married off at 14. Relying on the experiences of her family members and those like them, Zuravleff invested eight years in writing a richly detailed, immersive literary novel, “American Ending,” and the hard work paid off with a mention on the Oprah Daily spring reading list in 2023. We talked to Zuravleff about the research for her book and the lives of the people she wrote about — and the parallels with immigrants to the U.S. today. I agree with the reviewer who said you must have time-traveled to write this book. How much research did you do, and how much did you learn from your family? Well, the book takes place a hundred years ago, so a lot of those people are gone, but I did grow up knowing both sets of grandparents and also great-aunts and -uncles. I heard a lot of stories. My grandfather on my mother’s side had black lung from working in the mines. My grandmother went to the foreman and said, “You will pay him in money and not scrip.” And my grandmother on my dad’s side lost her citizenship because she married my grandfather [who was born in Russia]. All those things are in the novel. I had to do a tremendous amount of research on Marianna, Pennsylvania. I certainly didn’t know how people lived in the mines or how the houses were built up the hill. I did a lot of mining research: How much did a miner make? What did they eat for breakfast? What happens in an explosion or a cave-in? That took a lot of work. When you set out to write the book, were you thinking about the parallels between immigration back then and immigration today? This boo Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, inspired by both her grandmothers and her coal-mining grandfathers. Her third novel, Man Alive!, aWashington Post Notable Book, was praised by People magazine for its "impressive intelligence and sly humor," and the New York Times called her second, The Bowl Is Already Broken,"a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world's bickering and scheming." She is the recipient of the American Academy of Art's Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts. She has taught writing at American University, the Chautauqua Institution, Johns Hopkins and George Mason Universities, and she has written and edited extensively for the Smithsonian. Her essays and short stories have appeared in such venues as The Daily Beast, American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, This Is What America Looks Like, and Why I Like This Story. She was born in Syracuse, New York, raised in Oklahoma City, educated in Houston and Baltimore, and has made Washington, DC, her home. American Ending, a heartrending novel told with grit and humor, was named to Oprah's Spring Reading List!Mary Kay Zuravleff's captivating tale weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga set in the coal mines of Appalachia. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were one hundred years ago. Read the interview in The Washington Post, and there is plenty more info here. American Ending Across Americais MKZ's effort to visit or zoom with a book club in all 50 states! See the list of states and contact her here! Want a signed copy? Order here and in the comment form at checkout, ask for a signed book and whatever inscription you'd like. "An exhilarating tale about what this c Down the road in Washington, DC, there is a group of writers reading and supporting each other much the way we do in the Baltimore Writers Club. (Which is no less powerful for being imaginary — we have had correspondence from people wondering how they can join it.) And by supporting, I mainly mean throwing each other book parties. I met Mary Kay Zuravleff at a party for her third novel, “Man Alive!,” in which a man struck by lightning finds that all he wants to do in life is barbecue. Zuravleff is definitely not the kind of writer who returns to the same material over and over — before that, she’d written novels about the trials of a museum director and about the possibility of life after death. With “American Ending,” she has again broken new ground, this time with historical fiction set in Pennsylvania coal country in the early twentieth century. Her narrator, Yelena Federoff, is pulled out of school to take care of babies and help keep house before she gets to sixth grade, and by the age of twenty has faced the 1908 mining disaster, problematic immigration laws, the Spanish flu epidemic, the reactionary culture of the Old Believers of the Russian Orthodox church, and plenty of “Foolish Questions,” a long-running newspaper feature authored by Rube Goldberg with sarcastic answers to stupid questions. As the Kirkus reviewer wrote, “In Yelena’s voice, sprinkled with Russian words and early 20th century idioms, a whole world comes steaming to life: the horrors of the mine, the closeness of the ethnic neighborhoods surrounding it, the babble of the schoolhouse, the smells of the kitchen, and so much more. When Yelena’s little brother invents a cage with an air tank attached, so that the canaries can do their jobs in the mine without having to die for it, it seems a metaphor for the love that kept these immigrant families going Alumni Books and Music
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