1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book (Voix de glace/Voice of ice, prose poems, first edition 2007) is bilingual, French/English, written in my second language (learned in school) and translated into my third (learned as an immigrant adult). Even though it received an important French prize, my life wasn’t changed in any way by it; only my CV. Since I self-translate myself, my translations are part of my creative work. My most recent work in English is an atypical historical novel, Two Queens and a Chronicler (New York, Open Ends Press, 2025) written as a dialogue between a Romanian-born American writer and two of Romania’s queens. My latest translation is the translation into French of my first collection of short stories written in English, Elegy for a Fabulous World (English edition, 2009; French edition, 2026). To compare these works would be like comparing two different identities. On the other hand, it would be interesting to compare the first edition of Voice of ice to its 2025 edition because the changes I made reflect major changes in my own life and mindset. I will give you only one example: the line from the poem “Mourning the country” (first edition), “What is a country? A fiction for the brainless” becomes “What is a country? An impossible land” (second edition).
2 - How did you come to prose poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
At the time, I was more inclined toward lyricism than today, and poetry is more open to lyricism than prose. The longer the form, the less lyrical. Also, English being my third language, it was easier to start with a shorter form.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The only one of my books that came out of copious notes is my first novel (as yet unpublished). Prior to this, I had written prose poems and short stories, and it wasn’t easy to move from them to a larger form with a coherent structure. Structurally speaking, there is a greater difference between a short story and a novel than between a prose poem and a short story. My other works (short stories, novels) are written without notes and with only a few changes. The only work standing apart in the way it was created is the first one (Voice of ice). I created the short pieces in French in my head, and only after several versions (all memorized and unwritten), I committed pen to paper, which meant that the written (final) version is different that the original (unwritten) one. That’s why I claim that this is a bilingual book without an original.
4 - Where does a prose poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Often, a prose poem or a short story comes to me from a specific rhythm or phrase that I’ve read somewhere. I write when I am inspired, even when I write novels—that is, I don’t suffer of “writer’s block” because I never force myself to write. When I start working on a novel, I don’t know all that will happen in it. Part of the pleasure of creating resides for me in discovering the form and the content of the work as it develops. While I have an idea about the work from the beginning, its manifestation always “betrays” the initial concept. I like to surprise myself.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing public readings, but they are certainly not part of my creative process. Like Proust, I distinguish between a public/social persona and a creative self.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I studied philosophy in France in the 90s and wrote my dissertation on the most “difficult” 20th century French philosopher, Maurice Blanchot, so “theoretical concerns” are very much part of my writing. My non-fiction book (part memoir, part theoretical inquiry), Comment peut-on être Américain?/How Can One Be an American?, the result of a 30-year reflection on differences between American society and Europe, is scheduled for publication next year in France. It is a very complex work with a thesis about the creation of American identity linked to the creation of the country as a gradual conquest of land and of nature, which has triggered a subliminal desire to control nature and replace it with artifice and technology. Likewise, most of my novels address questions of cultural differences between the US and (Eastern) Europe, the construction of reality through language, and the different structures of thinking articulated in/through the language we speak.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
A writer is someone who works primarily with language and offers a description of society or vision of the world through his/her work. Whatever the content of a writer’s work, what counts is the interplay between his/her inherently subjective selfhood and its objectification in/through writing. It seems to me that this vision of the writer is threatened in many Western societies and in particular in North America where a writer is now expected to regurgitate certain ideological dogmas and even use a ready-made language that reminds me of what we used to call “wooden language” under communism. While in communist Romania, this language was enforced by a dictator and a unique political party, in North America, this expectation comes from the cultural institutions, the academics and the writers themselves (not all, obviously, but those who occupy key institutional positions). It is a mystery to me how such writers don’t find this language repugnant and how they can imagine that by using it they are “fighting oppression.” If your language is made of slogans, ready-made formulas, academic jargon and ideological kitsch, no matter how well-intentioned, you cannot free anyone else because you are yourself unfree.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My experience in working with American editors was extremely negative because they attempt to rewrite your/one’s work according to their own vision of literature and what “good writing” is supposed to be, or worse, according to what they imagine readers want. I believe there are two main causes for this attitude: 1. creative writing programs and the culture of the workshop. I am aware that there are as many teachers as classes, and they are not all the same, but generally speaking, these programs and workshops have created a type of student that no longer regards a work of literature as the incarnation of a unique mind and sensibility, but rather, as a product that can be manipulated (made “better”) throughs some kind of collective or third-party input, whereby the latter is made of people who are there by chance and may have nothing in common with the author of the respective piece; 2. A hypercapitalist vision of literature and of the publishing industry, where said work is treated, as I said, as a product, and not as the materialization of a Subject’s mind and imagination. In the process of rewriting done by many editors, this Subject is utterly annihilated, which is even more ironic if said Subject happens to be an immigrant and the editors make a big deal of their “support” of immigrants. Usually, they support an essentialized abstraction called “immigrant,” but have no respect for the individual. It goes without saying that I don’t object to minor and necessary corrections of grammar and orthograph, but rather, to changes of style and vision. So far, my experience with French editors has been better (knock on wood!), though the younger ones are increasingly similar to their American counterparts.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I hate advice when it comes to literary writing because it’s based on the presumption that there is a “good” way of writing and in order to achieve it, one needs to take a class or listen to the best advice. In reality, what is good for one writer is bad for another. Therefore, I neither take nor give advice.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (prose poems to short stories to novels)? What do you see as the appeal?
It has been a natural, organic process of moving from a “smaller,” more emotional genre to a “bigger,” more analytical one. Almost all my novels are satire or social criticism, while my short stories are absurdist and fable-like, and my prose poems have been described as “surrealist.” The longer I lived in the US, the more I had something (critical) to say about society, which could only be said in the discursive form of the novel in the tradition of realism.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have no “typical” day because I suffer of severe insomnia, and when my day starts depends on how I sleep. But I generally start late and very slowly. I have coffee and read for about half an hour; I only write late at night. Sometimes I go to bed at 4 am.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I always return for inspiration to classics and writers I love. To which writers, it depends on the language in which I write at the time. If I write in French, my model is Proust. If in English, it depends on my mood.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Baked or grilled eggplant, which in late summer fills all the Romanian neighborhoods.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Many of the poems in Voice of ice were inspired by Northern California nature and its wild beauty. Some of the prose poems in The Snail’s Song are playful descriptions of small animals (snails, porcupines, turtles). As for visual art, I am sometimes inspired by film scenes, more rarely by paintings, though my first-published novel, The Wife Who Wasn’t, a satirical comedy about Moldovan immigrants in California, includes two characters who are painters of Orthodox icons (an art with specific rules that I describe in detail) and the theft of a painting by Egon Schiele. My second novel, Speaking to No 4, discusses architecture, more specifically, differences between French monasteries and Japanese temples.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have been shaped emotionally by 19th century Anglophone novels, and intellectually by 20th century French writers and philosophers. But underneath them all are hidden Romanian and world folktales, which are the primary structure sustaining all the others.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Not much. I don’t have a bucket list, and I hate extreme sports and similar adventures. I have mostly bourgeois dreams: to travel. I lived for 30 years in the States, so I haven’t seen much of Europe, and I would like to see as much of it as possible. I haven’t even seen most of Romania, my country of birth. Outside of Europe, I would like to go back to Japan, a country whose culture I find fascinating and whose language I once attempted to learn. Learn Japanese, I suppose this could be a goal for the future.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
My dream was to be a figure ice-skater or a classical ballerina, but my parents were not the kind to encourage such ideas, and, alas, it is too late now. But I wrote a novel (as yet unpublished) in which the main character is an ice skater—fiction is the best revenge against life.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Maybe the fact that as a child and a teenager, my biggest pleasure was reading. Or maybe the fact that my first-grade instructor told me in front of everybody else that I wrote like a writer. Ever since, I’ve wanted to be a writer.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I haven’t read a “great” book in a long time, but the most recent good book I read is Le Jardin des rochers by the celebrated Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote this fascinating novel about China and Japan in 1936 in French. The last great film: Que la bête meure (May the Beast Die), 1969, by French director Claude Chabrol.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I am translating into French my second novel, Speaking to No 4, which will be published early next year in France.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
