When I was writing in Bulgarian, I could hide behind beautiful prose.

What's great about symbols, what a writer can do with them is provide a really vivid, interesting image, and the reader will do the rest of the work. That's always been very interesting to me. Like if I just introduce the storks, I don't have to say what they mean because the reader will do that. And if I bring in the dark history of the region, other trends come up, for example how in ancient Egypt they are associated with the souls of the dead. You can surprise yourself by introducing an image and then see how developing the story fills it with meaning that is suddenly new.

Words physically have power to bring things into existence.

I have done literary translation because the University of Arkansas, where I did my MFA, was program of creative writing and translation, and it's a very different experience. You're trying to honor the writer. You shouldn't allow yourself, for example, to encounter a sentence that's three lines long and break it up into four smaller sentences.

All these wars, all these territories. For example, Macedonia is a disputed territory, and there are people directly to the west of Bulgaria who are in Serbia now because of where they lived when the borders were drawn but who are Bulgarian. It makes the Balkans an insanely interesting place to explore.

I never wanted to write about Bulgaria. When I was still living there I did my absolute best to never write a story with a Bulgarian character with a Bulgarian name, and only after I came to the US and I was far away and missing it a great deal did I realize that writing about could be my way of returning back home. I think it was only through my writing that I fell in love with the country and with the history.

I'm a big believer in the collective unconscious. The idea that there is a deep connection between all of us that goes back to our ancestors and forward to the people who will come after us. It's essentially the job of the artist to anchor that nebulous space, and I think that's what a writer does: goes to that strange place and brings back these little trinkets. The unspoken experience percolated throughout the generations allows you to have knowledge of things you wouldn't know first hand.