Stephanie Cotsirilos

Stephanie Cotsirilos writes about humor, injustice, and resilience. Tapping a multiracial family and her prior careers on Broadway and as a lawyer, she’s author of the novella My Xanthi, short stories, and essays. Her songs and scripts were produced in New York. Since then, she has produced and performed in live and videoed multicultural writers’ series in Portland, Maine, where she now lives. She was the inaugural Krant Fellow at the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska.

Twitter: @scotsirilos

Instagram: @scotsirilos

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

You bet. I’ve been an actress, a singer, a lawyer, a nonprofit consultant, now a writer and author, and throughout much of my life, a mom. In every role, I’ve sometimes wondered, “When will folks catch on and realize I’m winging it?” This question stung most during my widowed motherhood, when I needed to offer my child honesty and firmness without ever obscuring my unconditional love. Born in the high Peruvian Andes, he’s an extraordinary human being, so he survived my self-doubt. Nowadays, my impostership has become an asset in constructing characters for novels. What a treat: to create a vibrant, fictional person from sleight of hand. When that happens, it feels good to be winging it.

Not all books are for all readers . . . when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?

Great question. I used to force myself to finish the book. Now, unless it’s part of my research, I’ll bail after the first fifty pages if the book and I are truly at odds. I do this for two reasons. First, there’s so much to read, and time is precious. Second, I believe it’s unfair to the author to keep plodding through with impatience. After all, the book in my hand represents someone’s hard-earned efforts. Rather than continue grudgingly, I prefer to respectfully close the cover and leave room for another reader to enjoy the work.

Is there a work of art that you love? Why? Have you ever visited it in person?

The Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre. An ancient Greek, headless marble statue of a goddess with wings, it sits atop a staircase my mother and I ascended together sixty years ago. I’ve revisited the Winged Victory only once, and nearly burst into tears. She is ready to take flight, she represents my heritage and my beautiful mother who died too young, and she exhorts me to write about the people who came before me.

Is there another profession you would like to try?

I tell myself I’d like to attend divinity school – though, being a profound skeptic, I can’t envision graduating into the role of clergy. Nevertheless, my characters and I want to know: what is it within humanity that transcends adversity and biology? This mystery stalks the central conflicts in the stories I write. It lurks behind “Little Buzzcut,” a published finalist in Mississippi Review’s Prize in Fiction. The story was triggered by family separations at the U.S./Mexico border and centers around a little Guatemalan boy guided through his grief by his murdered abuela’s – grandmother’s – spirit. I wonder if divinity school would help me explore spiritual strength. I’d love to be in the company of people who are searching as I am.

Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?

Yes. Thank you for this question! In speaking about my debut novella, My Xanthi, I often share that my first language was Greek, not English. I can barely speak Greek now because I so rarely use it; nor can I handle its formidable non-Western alphabet remotely as easily as I can French or Spanish. Still, I remember dreaming in Greek, thinking as a child that it was the language of deep love, incomparably beautiful. Greek was spoken almost exclusively in the homes of my immigrant grandparents, some of whom were literate; so I heard variations on the language. When I wrote My Xanthi, I drew on a beloved Greek woman who helped care for me and my siblings when Mom was ill. Using only English, I tried to replicate the timber and cadence of this beloved woman’s voice through Xanthi herself. My goal was to make her English sound translated and resonant; to leave room for humor and to capture, if I could, sentiments like “I eat the universe to find you.”