Each year, the Writing University conducts interviews with writers while they are in Iowa City participating in the International Writing Program's fall residency. We sit down with authors to ask about their work, their process and their descriptions of home. Today we are talking with Anna DAVTYAN Աննա Դավթյան, a poet, fiction writer, playwright and translator from Armenia.
Anna DAVTYAN Աննա Դավթյան (poet, fiction writer, playwright, translator; Armenia) is the author of four books, two of which—Խաննա [Khanna] (2020) and Զորա [Zora] (2024)—have been bestselling novels in Armenia. She is the recipient of four fellowships from the Armenian Ministry of Education and Culture and two first-place prizes (one for fiction, one for a play) from the Yerevan Book Fest. She is currently working on a series of critical pieces titled Breakfasts. Her participation was made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.
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1. Do you have a plan or project in mind for your time at the residency?
Yes. I will be working on a series of articles/essays on language and literature in general, but also go really detailed with those of Armenian context, which will include what would be the "right" language of literature on the whole, or something as detailed as which auxiliary verb to use — ա or է — in which cases. The essays will include topics like consistency: does one need it with a character in a novel or in a plot line? Or the phenomenon of what I define as "gaps" in a poem, which I see related to what I named "poetry moment". Or how to write the second sentence of your novel, if you seem to have found the first one? Or eroticism, porn, or sex, which one do we write today? Or contemporary literary generations in Armenia. And much more else. The series will have a puzzle-like structure, some chapters may go as long as ten or more pages, others connect with what I would anticipate to be four-five lines. It will become a book for readers and writers in search of some answers, for which I have received the Armenian Ministry of Culture and Education grant. Some of the pieces might be interesting to my fellow writers here, so I asked my translator, Ani Jilavjan, who was a University of Iowa student of Translation Studies, to kindly translate some of these pieces. The book title will be "Breakfasts."
2. What does your daily practice look like for your writing? Do you have a certain time when you write? Any specific routine?
It firstly depends on what I am writing. If it's a poem, it could be late at night. If it's a novel, I do keep strict discipline of writing every day, no matter how tired I am after my classes of Creative Writing or cooking and cleaning. I do not have specific time to write, but I need to get at least three pages a day when I am writing a novel. And it's always in my bed with my computer on my lap. My bed is my daytime office. I struggled so long to find a proper place to write, but in the end I just understood that if you really have what and how to write, your bed can be quite the place. It's the best place for no distraction.
3. What are you currently reading right now? Are you reading for research or pleasure?
I am reading my fellow writers of IWP right now and my admiration and delight of reading their works take me back to balance, since the adaptation process has me a bit uprooted and dizzy. I have decided to translate one or two poems of each of them and have them published online in the Armenian journal Granish. I can already feel the taste of them sounding in Armenian, though they are all so different from one another, but I look forward to doing it. Besides this, I do much research for my critical writing.
4. What is something the readers and writers of Iowa City should know about you and/or your work?
I am an Armenian writer in its fullest sense. I never do texts which are called "born translated". I do not work for the market, I do not write to sell well. Though my books are bestsellers in Armenia. But I have the full confidence that anything deeply private is completely universal. So I think what is privately Armenian and privately mine is good literature for everyone to read. Like being asked by a journalist "You speak about everything, do you have anything private?", Allan Ginsberg answers "When you speak about everything, the world becomes your private place".
5. Tell us a bit about where you are from -- what are some favorite details you would like to share about your home?
Any Armenian finds it more or less a duty to say that they are from one of the oldest countries of the world — Armenia, that it was the first country in the world to adopt Christianity in 301 AD, that it has great Medieval Churches and Cathedrals, and speak about the Armenian Genocide in 1915 carried out by Turkey and unrecognized until today, but what I find really taking care of me and my anxious inner world back there is the feeling of Time, it's a Time Shelter (using the title of 2023 International Booker prize winner Georgi Gospadinov's novel), and you do really good in your time travels rather than space. Armenia is tiny. Armenia is deep.
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Thank you so much Anna!