Today we talk about A Migrant Woman’s Story: what does it all add up to, a book Maria Obrycka-Ross published with our publishing house Europe Books.
Europe Books had the pleasure of interviewing the author Maria Obrycka-Ross to get to know her better, where she found the inspiration to write A Migrant Woman’s Story: what does it all add up to, as well as how it felt to see her debut book published.
Below you can find our interview. Take a seat and enjoy your reading!!!
- Where and when did you find the inspiration to write your story?
I found the inspiration to write ‘A Migrant Woman’s Story’ in the diversity of the world around me. I wrote the story of my migrant experience inspired by the richness of cultures in countries which I adopted. Perhaps most importantly, I felt the need to write this book because of the changing mode and rhetoric of recent debates on the issues of migration. Today, with millions of people on the move, we need to understand the complexity of migrants’ life, its promises and difficulties. I believed that to fully explore dangers, anxieties and uncertainties faced by migrants there is a need to overcome shortcomings of narratives which dominate the public arenas. I wanted to write about migrants’ experience to add a new voice to discussions of the problem of migration. I hoped that by painting a picture of my long a journey through several countries, I could bring migrants’ worlds closer to people in receiving nations and could help both groups to appreciate and understand each other.
- What is the message you want to convey to your readers?
I wrote ‘A Migrant Woman’s Story’ to convey to my readers the message about the importance of understanding the diversity, distinctiveness and tragedies of migrant life. I also wanted to convince my readers that migration is one of the most important steps on the way to freedom. To do it, I described my experience of uprooting as a struggle for freedom. Additionally, I aimed to show that migrant life as constituted by the continuous acts of balancing freedom and belonging. My lifelong search for freedom illustrates the difficulties of finding ways to guard autonomy, while at the same time securing belonging. Showing that by constructing the balance between detachment and belonging in creative ways, I argued that migrants could add the value of novelty and freshness to their new countries. Finally, I hope that my story conveys to my readers the message about the importance of the subjective and structural features in shaping migrants’ experiences.
- How would you define your writing style?
‘A Migrant Woman’s Story’ is neither autobiography nor literary fiction nor academic work but rather a blend of my personal recollections, literary readings and sociological analysis. This type of socio-literary-autobiography, which is set somewhere between of memoir and other writing about and interpretation of the self, comes close to a genre of autofiction. The genre of autofiction itself is not something new, however in my genre-bending writing of the life story, interpretive and normative explanations of the past reality is further enriched by input from sociological imagination literary illustrations. The book can be associated with autofiction as it fuses the personal and the political and speaks not only about my migrant experience but also about some more universal feelings of uprooting and belonging. The flexibility of borders between memories, literary works and sociological insights permits me to explore mundane processes forming migrant experience. At the same time, as autofiction is a genre where writing about yourself is a point departure for broader social observations, my narrative, by referring to specific historical times and political contexts, transmits historical knowledge.
- How did it feel to publish your debut book?
Publishing ‘A Migrant Woman’s Story: what does it all add up to’ was a rather a novel and surprising experience for me because previously I did publish only academic books. It was also an interesting experience because publishing my first book outside the scientific field taught me a lot. I was only accustomed to writing scholarly works which relay on a research overview of the major relevant facts, call for discussions the work of a wide array of theorists and demand critical arguments. Perhaps most importantly, I found that writing in a more subjective style, not far from a genre of autofiction, is a pleasure in its own right. Writing ‘A Migrant Woman’s Story’ was very freeing and enjoyable experience. The sense of achievement, that comes from learning unfamiliar ways of writing, leaves me more interested in writing, via sociological divagations and literary illustrations, not about facts, but rather about people’s values and experiences.
- Are you working on a new writing project, you can tell us about?
Yes, I am working on a new writing project. Presently I am writing a book on the phenomenon of silence. The project’s provisional title is ‘Voices of Silence’. I will study this concept with an input from literary sources, sociological imagination and personal stories. We all know the metaphor; words are weapons, but we do not often think about silence as a powerful tool of communication. This work will deal with the concept of silence as a rich, essential and multifunctional aspect of communication. By exploring people’s reliance on silence to achieve various goals, it will focus on the paradoxical nature of silence, which can convey respect and disrespect, compliance and rejection, trust and mistrust and it can destroy or sustain relationships. The book, after identifying functions, roles and characteristics of silence, will argue for the relevance of this phenomenon to the social, political, and emotional aspects of individual and collective lives.
Europe Books thanks the author Maria Obrycka-Ross once again for taking the time and answering our questions. We are really pleased to have walked alongside her on the editorial path that led to the publication of her book A Migrant Woman’s Story: what does it all add up to. We wish her the best of luck for his book and for her future works.
To you, my readers, I hope this book will captivate you and make you reflect on the phenomenon of migration which means freedom whilst trying not to lose that sense of belonging which distinguishes those who decide to migrate.
So, my dear readers, all I have to say is to enjoy your reading!
Your editor!