Stephanie Cotsirilos is an author, lawyer, and performing artist. Her published and performed work includes the novella, My Xanthi, anthologized stories and essays, scripts, songs, media, and a multicultural writers’ series. After twenty-three years in New York City, she now lives and writes in Portland, Maine.
Interviewer
In your Writer’s Journey, you describe your Greek grandmother as a touchstone in your life. How has she figured as a “touchstone” in your life as a writer?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
As you know, it strikes me as uniquely fortunate – perhaps astonishing – to find myself a writer managing words my paternal grandmother, or yiayia, was unable to read or write herself. In short, I benefit from remarkable privilege. I have options that she did not. Further, my yiayia has served as a touchstone for me as a writer because she represents the powerful difference between me and my characters, even if they seem to be like my own family. The mystery is that both “real-life” and fictional characters are as vastly distinct from me as my yiayia sometimes seemed. My task as a writer is to engage the contours of that vastness if not to bridge it. You see, I don’t believe you should write only about what you know. You take what you know to explore the infinite territory of what you don’t know – because, face it, the minute you get out of the self you recognize as “I” and interact with another human being, there it is: the unknown. If you don’t find a way to reach across it, how will you create any character other than a copy of yourself? How will you deploy your art form into the world? How will you ask your imagination and craft to embrace, with humility and as much insight as you can muster, people who are emphatically not you? How will you know what to research? How will you touch the heart of a reader whose life has scant resemblance to your own? How will you learn the different forms love takes, as yiayia’s did? It took me years to understand certain things about her. I can only hope that the understanding her presence triggered can streamline my progress toward grasping characters who lie in wait.
Interviewer
None of your four grandparents could have read your literary work in their lifetimes, especially My Xanthi, your novella that was published in 2021. And yet your grandparents have influenced your perception of “cultural literacy.” How so?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
My grandparents influenced my perception of cultural literacy because they made me aware that it existed. They made me aware of their own command of that type of literacy, and of the fact that they were living proof of cultural literacy’s many, many iterations. Had they not gotten themselves across oceans, thrown themselves into a new society and whipsawed themselves – and me – between the traditions that pulled at their lives, I would not have been able to write about such cultural tension or perceive it in others. The latter probably represents my grandparents’ most important influence on my understanding of cultural literacy: my acceptance that I need to keep expanding my capacity for what I will call cultural empathy.
Interviewer
Your tight bond with the written word began in early childhood. What do you remember about this “tight bond,” and how did it influence your teenage years?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
I remember being in my aunt and uncle’s home in Chicago when I was quite young but of reading age, and everyone else was out of the apartment. I cruised the bookshelves for something to read. I would read anything, including a book on breastfeeding I found. I remember the desire to read felt like thirst. To be frank, by the time I reached my teenage years, reading had become more prescriptive as school assignments took precedence. Looking back, I think this is a shame, but it’s how it was. I wanted to do well in school, so I buckled down. My impression is that I lost the pleasure of reading what I chose rather than what was required. By the time I reached my twenties, though, I rediscovered what I wanted to read. One of those books – T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, a retelling of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur – I read over and over again, particularly when I was depressed. The Arthur legend was not in my lineage, of course, but it’s all over the Anglo-America tradition. I found it comforting. I found White’s use of language comforting, I found the flawed characters comforting, I found the shredded elegance of the aging love between Lancelot and Guinevere comforting. I found them both fascinating as tragic figures. I found Arthur’s progression from page boy to the Majesty of England, weighted down by the crown of his immense responsibility, comforting because it felt real – presented in a fantasy or romantic context, yet unsentimental. The message was: If you are small, you can become large, but know that if you take power seriously, it owns you. That seemed true to me. The book’s prose is intimate and lovely and ultimately political in a quiet, personal way. A tight bond with this book sometimes kept me going through patches of despair.
Interviewer
You have written about the distinction between “intergenerational knowledge” and written language. Explain why your definitions of both reflect the differences between “cultural literacy” and written literacy.
Stephanie Cotsirilos
I’ll offer an example. As my son and I learned more about the Inca Empire that influenced his lineage, there was no escaping that the Inca transferred engineering, earth-based, hydrologic, agricultural, astronomical, mathematical, and an array of other knowledge and competencies – or literacy – across generations without what western scholars recognize as a written language. To me, that is an example of “intergenerational knowledge” transmitted through an Incan “cultural literacy” we Americans are not yet capable of understanding. A more familiar, Eurocentric approach relies on “writing” as the basis for transmitting knowledge and competence. This written literacy tradition is far from confined to Europe, of course, and encompasses alphabetized and glyph-based cultures. How widely written literacy is or was disseminated within a culture was a function of, well, culture. Then there is the matter of transmitting values, the need for empathy, ways of expressing love. All these can make or break a society. They can be transmitted nonverbally, in which case written literacy is no longer the central point.
Interviewer
In your Writer’s Journey, you describe a technique called “getting off the words” in theater, dance, song, and screenplays. Why did “getting off the words” become so significant in your life?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
Because words can constitute liberation or leg irons. I wrote in my Writer’s Journey essay that authenticity before an audience often springs not just from words but from pauses, silences, movements, one’s very presence and neurological/emotional journey around, below, behind the words. Even with Shakespeare – where words are seemingly paramount – the actor must honor the poetry with something from within. Otherwise the audience may as well just read the script and have done with it. I also wrote in my Writer’s Journey essay that when I coached a small group of non-singers to sing, I spent a few sessions with Olympia Dukakis. She leaned hard on each word in a song. The melody was collapsing under the words, yet she challenged me: “Well, when aren’t words the most important thing?” “In a symphony,” I said. Sound, by itself, is communicative power. Imposed upon a violin sonata, words would be shackles. Many, many artists, parents, healers, and others operate outside the ambit of words. Once I realized such powerful, nonverbal dynamics worked for readers of books as well, I started to write more cleanly, I hope. This was not always easy. I need to remind myself daily that omissions are as important as what you include in your writing. As for “getting off the words” in life generally, sometimes the most important thing is to know when to shut up. Just don’t send that text, okay?
Interviewer
What was the impetus for you to leave “getting off the words” and return to the written word? How did this experience factor into your future writing, especially with My Xanthi?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
The decade after my husband’s death begged me to memorialize my recollections and my grief. So, not being a composer or a dancer or a painter or a sculptor, I turned to what I used to thirst for as a child: words. Grief and memory cast in words figure prominently in My Xanthi.
Interviewer
Let’s talk about My Xanthi. A blurb by Carol Smith identifies My Xanthi as a “coming-of-age” story and describes it as “a taut psychological thriller.” What is your interpretation of her insights?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
Nick comes of age during the course of the book, of course, as does his family. He develops from a four-year-old boy worried about his mother’s illness, evolves through adolescence and realizations about his parents and the law, and matures into a deeper curiosity about Xanthi’s suffering and her role in his family and hers. The Milonas family as a whole loses its innocence in a different kind of coming-of-age. At first, the family is devoted to the purported American dream of immigration, assimilation, success, prosperity, and makes a good deal of progress toward those ends. The 1960s and the Civil Rights movement, political assassinations, the Bull Connor violence against peaceful protesters and more – not to mention extended Milonas family members’ wrongdoing and encounters with the contempt of “whiter” elements of society – disabuse the Milonases of the purity of the American dream. Injustice, which Nick begins to recognize through Xanthi and her history, makes that dream inaccessible to too many and prompts Nick, ultimately, to champion the despised and disenfranchised through his legal practice. As for the “taut psychological thriller” component, I interpret Carol to have been referring to the psychological twists later in the book. They appear in Xanthi’s last letters and in Nick’s dreams. I won’t offer spoilers here. I will thank Carol for her kind words.
Interviewer
When you began writing My Xanthi, what story did you believe you were writing? Was it the story that eventually became an epistolary novella involving letters between Xanthi, who was living with the Milonas family outside Chicago in 1954, to her daughter Koula, who was living in Tripoli, Peloponnesus, Greece?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
When I began writing My Xanthi, I didn’t know what story I was writing outside scattered personal musings of Nick and Xanthi. As I listened to my characters more closely, paid attention to their environment, their sensory realities, their relationship to one another, what they needed in the moment, what memories of my own they invoked, the characters led me, incident by incident, to construct the story’s plot. I would develop outlines that reflected where the novella stood at the time and where it could go – then returned to the characters to test authenticity. Then I outlined and shaped the novella again. Identifying what was compelling about the narrative was a cumulative process, as were the emergence of Koula and the letters. The epistolary character of My Xanthi – and certainly its climax – came together fairly late in the game.
Interviewer
The epistolary frame in My Xanthi brings back memories to Nick Milonas of when Xanthi was his nanny. After thirty years working as an attorney in Southern California, he begins to read Xanthi’s letters late at night and relives memories of his childhood. Did you find the attorney Nick Milonas before you began to write My Xanthi? And if so, did his character change as you wrote?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
I knew a lot about Nick the moment I began writing. My Xanthi was triggered by his voice, and Xanthi’s, in my head. I knew what kind of person he was and what he needed ethically. His core character didn’t change very much during the course of writing the book, but the specifics of his history, responses, hopes, and reactions to the evolving Xanthi did change – or, more accurately, they developed. Xanthi’s character expanded much more than Nick’s did during the writing process. At first I heard her as reticent, contained, no-nonsense. It soon became clear that she wouldn’t reveal much that way, so I opted for a different kind of personality for her – the voluble one that appears in the book.
Interviewer
As I was reading My Xanthi, I thought: What if the sequel to My Xanthi took place in Greece during the Greek Civil War and centered on the lives of Xanthi and Koula? Further, what if the story were a larger, longer story about Tessa, Nick’s teenage daughter, who condemns her father for his lawyerly perception of Law and Justice? Perhaps, even, the character Tessa will write the sequel when she herself becomes a lawyer, like her father, and works on the side of Justice.
Stephanie Cotsirilos
Well, you’ve just named several of the possibilities I’ve considered as well! Only time will tell about a possible sequel…
Interviewer
You are giving a workshop about writing fiction to a group of high school students who want to become writers. What do you tell your audience?
Stephanie Cotsirilos
I will leave the workshop’s specific subject to one side, because the possibilities are almost endless. Instead, I’ll simply riff on the very idea of becoming a writer. Read. Read some more. Read good books on craft. Read books, articles, essays, poetry that inspire you and get in touch with why they do. Find people you can trust and study with them. Understand that this does not necessarily happen quickly. If it does, celebrate. Find friends you can trust to talk to about writing or with whom you can exchange pages of the drafts you’re working on. This might not happen quickly, either. The people you surround yourself with might change. That’s fine. Write, write, write. Keep notes of what you notice in your life. Observe the specifics, the details, the cast of light on the sidewalk. All this, you can do right away. Do not beat yourself up if what you’ve written isn’t good at first. Love your writing, even when you hate it. Love what you’re devoted to. You are a member of a planet-wide group of millions whose writing, minds, and hearts connect in ways you’d never expect. Just begin and talk to generous people about your next step. You see? You’re a writer. Becoming an author is another phase. It will come in its good time.
