I was born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania, during the Soviet Era. I wrote for the first time when I was nine. It was a poem, a half-page long. I wrote it in cursive as neatly as a nine-year old could. That way, my grandmother would be able to read it. Or I’d be able to read it to her, fluidly without “ums”, since it was written so clearly.

My grandma glanced at it. “If you keep at it,” she growled, “you’ll be cleaning toilets for a living.”

That’d be a horrifying profession, I thought, shuddering. I had a hyper-acute sense of smell and could detect the stench of mildew and waste carried shamelessly by our nineteenth century crumbling building’s drafts, and by impudent winds blowing through a tiny window leaf of our apartment. (I could’ve been a dog in one of my past lives.)

I must have wiggled my nose too much because my grandma said that I’d be better off as a professional sniffer…the way I study at school and the type of books I read, I’d never get into a college. “You’d be sniffing shit for kopeikas,” she snapped. “Here!” she pointed her thick, straight index finger, the fingernail lacquered with a pale-rose nail polish, at the volumes of Pushkin and Lermontov on our bookshelves, “you can get a head start.”

I didn’t want to read Pushkin and Lermontov—they sounded too rhymey, which felt like a rolling pin working through my grey matter, flattening anything that was once three-dimensional. I also didn’t like the fact that Pushkin and Lermontov died senseless deaths at a young age—stupid duels.

Regardless, I loved fairytales and science fiction and fantasy and anything that had nothing to do with the world in which I lived. But go and try convincing my grandma that Alexander Beliayev, Fredric Brown, Asimov, and Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, to name a few, were as good as Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Gogol. It’s like trying to prove to her that WWII was won in collaboration with other nations. “Stalin and Russians won the war,” she’d say, “period!”

So I kept my prose and poems to myself, writing them in my head for over thirty years until I’d begun running out of terabytes in my memory. That was a surprise, since I always believed that the human mind was a limitless repository modeled after the universe’s infinite expanse. I guess anything ethereal or material that’s confined to a box, a.k.a. a skull, is bound to run out of space sooner or later. This fact compelled me to start putting it all down on paper.

Currently, which can change at any time, I live in New York with my husband and our miniature schnauzer Charly. When I’m not writing, I enjoy shooting (and finding) arrows with a recurve bow, playing piano until my hands wander away on their own accord, reading, cooking, and walking in the woods.