Debbie Ledesma: What led you to become a writer? Was it hard getting published?
Vera Nazarian: Good question. I think I became one despite myself -- tricking myself into it, really.
When I was a little kid back in Moscow, Russia, I've always thought I would become an artist or a folk dancer or an astronomer. In fact, if you'd asked me then about a life of solitary writing I would have said, "Oh how boring! Imagine, to sit at a desk all day and just write." I was forgetting that an artist also just stares at a piece of paper or canvas all day. It somehow never occurred to me to connect these two diverse creative modes.
However I've always been creative verbally, had a flair, my teachers said -- wrote great expository essays in elementary school, scribbled little poems, embraced all writing assignments. And all along I read voraciously -- first in Russian and then, after we left the USSR, in English, and even Spanish. At some point in the US, in junior high, seventh grade, inspired by our recent reading of Tolkien, Piers Anthony's Xanth and Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, a good friend started to write a fantasy novel. And I said to myself, "Hey, why don't I do that too?"
And so I started to write. And I wrote and wrote all through high school. At some point, sitting in the school library, during reading period, I looked up from my leopard print hardcover composition notebook where I was scribbling a derivative Tolkien epic full of purple prose in tiny handwriting and thought to myself, "Damn! I am a writer! How did that happen?"
In those days, I relished the sweet sense of keeping a unique secret in my mind -- a wonderful magical universe that I could go to any time, any place, and no one had to know. It was my personal place, better than any I've read about in any other book. And when I wrote, I was in the process of pulling that personal universe out of nothing and into the cold reality of the greater world. The act of sharing with readers was at first too much of an intimate thing. But it evolved into an intense necessity to share.
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