By Tetyana Denford

Time seems to travel in a circle. Or at least, I remember thinking that when I saw that my book was being bought and read by people after the war in Ukraine started, in February 2022. It’s as if the thread I pulled in 2016, when I began writing this book, was the thread that brought it all together now. Time is funny that way, you only understand how it connects events by looking backwards. "You can't connect the dots looking forward," Steve Jobs famously said. "You can only connect them looking backward.” 

My family is full of threads that are stories woven into a tapestry of who we are: most cultures are like that, but Ukrainians in particular; we are now seen in the world as a country full of storytellers, and fervently stubborn survivors. It was one of these stories, about my maternal grandmother, that catapulted me into finally pursuing a writing career, and I wrote it really for myself, and my own family, but I knew that it would resonate with families the world over. You see, survival and grief and hope are universal themes that we all live with, and the more we talk about them with our parents and grandparents, the more empowered we will be to be transparent in navigating our life on this planet. Or at least, not be ashamed to share that for the most part, we’re figuring it out as we go along. None of us have the answers. 

The Child of Ukraine was one of those stories that flowed out of me like an imperfect fever dream: I saw it play out in my head cinematically, and I wrote it with pure instinct. Was it perfect, even after the 8th draft? No, but no life is, really, and no story is. And once I’d published it, I saw a wave of interest with people not just because it was a story about a mother making impossible choices in her life, but because it prompted people to start asking questions of their own family history, to know where they came from, and to see their living history as full of people that are humans, not just parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. 

Having published the story in 2020, I noticed that the ebbs and flows of people wanting to read the book was one of those things that I had to accept: people weren’t really aware of Ukraine and Ukrainian stories even as recently as two years ago. Ukraine had always stayed within Russia’s shadow and had always been seen as a poor country full of farmers and cleaners and rent-a-brides. Sadly, this media portrayal was pretty pervasive for a long time. It was only since the war began and Ukraine was front and center in the news on a daily basis, fighting for hope and survival, did the attention on my book (and other Ukrainian translators and authors) kick in. Albeit the circumstances were unfortunate, but the passion for this story was immense. I started seeing a huge investment in not only the media but from readers and agents and activists around the world, reaching out to me and others on how we all feel about writing and creating art during a time of such unrest and grief.

How do I feel? How do we all feel, collectively? Tired, is the first word we can all agree on. But I suspect that every single Ukrainian around the world feels heard, supported, and validated. We have been waiting in the wings for so much of our art and for all of our voices to be amplified, and now we have a moment to extend the narrative past war, past death, and destruction. I feel it is our time now to create a lasting legacy of hope, of creativity, of modernism, of architecture and industry. We are a country with a modern leader who is using social media platforms to create an awareness of Ukrainian culture, our heritage, and our history. And within that history, I’m so pleased that my book, and future books, will connect people not only to Ukraine and its people, but also Ukraine and the countries around it: Poland, Hungary, and even Austria and Germany. 

When my grandmother was dying and I told her about the book that I wrote based on the epic story of her life, she said to me, “little mouse, surely my life isn’t that interesting. So many of us went through much of the same during that time.” Which made me realise that these incredible stories of love, loss, betrayal, and hope is now more important than ever, in an age where time and news stories move so quickly. We, the artists, the voices, are the creators of a new legacy of hope and empathy and change; we are the dreamers, we are the future. Stories like this will create lessons of determination and pride when so much of the world feels like it’s not listening. It is, and we are the ones who will encourage it to, we will connect those threads and create more circles.

Tetyana Denford grew up in a small town in New York, and is a Ukrainian-American author, translator, and freelance writer. She grew up with her Ukrainian heritage at the forefront of her childhood, and it led to her being fascinated with how storytellers in various cultures passed down their lives to future generations; life stories are where we learn about ourselves, each other, and are the things that matter most, in a world where things move so quickly.