the writing came first

I write the truth without the performance (well, maybe a little). Poems and essays from the place of being human after the clean story falls apart.
I was born in Kyiv, raised across three languages, trained in pedagogy, psychology, and business. I crossed an ocean once and started over more times than that, building something new from whatever was left, losing people and whole versions of my life along the way, and outlasting more than fits in a short bio. Lyme and cancer are nowhere near the top of that list.
I was writing through all of it. For two decades, some of it went up on my website, and more of it stacked in drawers and on shelves. Somewhere after fifty, the drawers got harder to close. I started putting covers around the work, giving it enough weight to hold.
The books came late only by publishing standards. The writing had been there all along.