Contemporary Authors

• Miss Ex-Yugoslavia ( memoir) Atria Books (New York, NY), 2018

• Sofija Stefanovic - http://www.sofijastefanovic.com/about-me/

  I’m a Serbian-Australian writer in New York.
  My memoir Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is a sometimes funny sometimes dark story about being an immigrant kid during the Yugoslavian Wars. You can order it below!
  I write, tell stories with The Moth and host This Alien Nation and Women of Letters New York. Find me working at The Wing.
  Updates at: @sstefanovic

• The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/books/miss-ex-yugoslavia-sofija-stefanovic-interview.html

  Q. & A.

  Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: An Escape From Impending War Into the Unknown
  By John Williams
  May 6, 2018

  Image
  CreditAlessandra Montalto/The New York Times
  When she was 22, Sofija Stefanovic was a contestant in a pageant to determine the “beauty queen of a country that no longer exists.” The competition for the title of Miss Ex-Yugoslavia was held in Australia, the country to which Ms. Stefanovic’s family had moved when the author, born in Belgrade in 1982, was 5. “It’s a weird idea for a competition — bringing young women from a war-torn country together to be objectified,” Ms. Stefanovic writes, “but in our little diaspora, we’re used to contradictions.” Having lived through the mounting political tensions in Yugoslavia, which led to a decade of war, Ms. Stefanovic had to adjust to life in a calmer but very different place. In her new memoir, she writes about the trials of immigration with seriousness but also a disarming humor. Below, she discusses the onstage performances she delivered that inspired her to write the book, her admiration for the creativity of certain revolutionaries and more.

  When did you first get the idea to write this book?

  I’ve always told anecdotes about my childhood, being an immigrant kid in Australia during the Yugoslavia wars and trying to fit in, but I never thought they would appeal to a larger audience. When I moved to New York City about four years ago, I went to a Moth story slam, where you put your name in a hat and if it’s drawn out you tell a story in front of a bunch of strangers. In New York, you can be whoever you want and no one bats an eye, so I thought, what the hell? It went really well, and people were receptive to it. I thought it was cool that people identified with the themes of cultures mixing and nostalgia. I was spurred by that.

  I was hoping to write when I moved to New York, but the performance part I hadn’t done before. That was exciting and really rewarding, because despite being introverted I really like being on stage. Being a writer, you’re isolated and alone. When you’re on your computer all day, no one claps for you at the end.

  What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

  As a child, there were a lot of things I couldn’t control: my parents moving us, English as a second language, the wars back home. I was really obsessed with Disney films and books that had classic narrative arcs — a beginning, middle and end. In the ones I liked the most, an outsider hero set out to do something amazing. I found, writing this book, that I still have a pretty strong need for narrative and to make sense of the world. I can’t just say, “This happened, and that’s it.” I have to dwell on it, and come up with the beginning, middle and end, to calm myself down and find some order in chaos. The problem is, as you’re growing up in the real world, it’s not actually neat. I keep asking these questions that don’t necessarily have answers, because it’s real life.

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  In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

  Image
  Sofija Stefanovic
  CreditMichael Carr
  At the beginning I wanted to interview people and do a kind of documentary glimpse into Yugoslavia. I intended to examine the immigrant experience and the wars that broke up the country. I still examine the immigrant experience, but through my personal lens, the child who was born in a country that was about to collapse and then suddenly had to face this whole new place. The older I get, the more realistic I am as to what I’m good at. I think a personal lens works better for me and it rings truer. I really admire documentary filmmakers — I studied documentary film — and I wish I could be objective and academic sometimes, but it always ends up being, “This is what happened to me, and this is what it says about a broader thing.”

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  Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

  Otpor, the student protesters who finally brought down Slobodan Milosevic. There had been opposition to Milosevic during his time in power. My parents were part of the movement. Finally, when the people were exhausted and Milosevic had been in power for so long and there had been all these wars, these students got together and started a revolution. It was based on nonviolence, which is fascinating to me. They would dress up turkeys and release them into the streets; they would flirt with cops to get them on their side. Through their creativity, and their being really organized and professional, these students, some of them who were in high school, managed to bring down Milosevic.

  I was in Australia while it was happening, but these were people my age, or even younger than that. I was a bit listless at the time, an adolescent thinking, “What’s the point of anything?” And then you see these young people who changed so much, who brought this fresh energy and wit to bring down Milosevic, who was the reason my family came to Australia.

  Persuade someone to read “Miss Ex-Yugoslavia” in 50 words or less.

  It’s the story of an oversensitive immigrant kid whose family moved from socialist Belgrade to Australia, and who had a hard time fitting in forevermore. If you’ve felt like a fish out of water, you’ll identify, and I hope it will make readers laugh and feel compassion for immigrant stories.

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/profile/sofija-stefanovic

  Sofija Stefanovic
  Sofija Stefanovic is a Serbian-Australian writer. She hosts the literary salon Women of Letters in New York and is a founding faculty member of The School of Life Australia. She is the author of the Penguin Special You're Just Too Good To Be True, a love story about lonely hearts and internet scams. Follow her @sstefanovic

• The Garret - https://thegarretpodcast.com/sofija-stefanovic/

  Sofija Stefanovic is a Serbian-born and Australian-raised writer and storyteller living in New York.

  She is known for her ability to explore the most personal - and true - stories. Sofija has published two books, You’re Just Too Good To Be True: A Love Story About Lonely Hearts and Internet Scams, and her memoir, Miss Ex-Yugoslavia.

  Sofija hosts the live storytelling events Women of Letters NYC and This Alien Nation, and she is a contributor to The Moth, The New York Times and The Guardian.

  Sofija Stefanovic_The Garret_Quote 1Sofija Stefanovic_The Garret_Quote 3
  TRANSCRIPT
  Astrid Edwards: Sofija Stefanovic was born in Serbia, raised and educated in Australia, and now lives in New York. She's a writer and a storyteller, known for her ability to explore the most personal stories. Sofija has published two books, she hosts the live events Women of Letters NYC and This Alien Nation, and is a contributor to The Moth, The New York Times and The Guardian.

  In this interview, Sofija reflects on the importance of understanding your strengths as a writer in order to be the best storyteller that you can be. Sofija, welcome to The Garret

  Sofija: Thank you for having me.

  Astrid: You're a bilingual writer and storyteller, with Serbian as your first language, English as your second. When you read for pleasure these days, do you choose to read in Serbian or in English?

  Sofija: I choose to read in English. Yes, my first language was Serbo-Croatian. I was born in what was then called Yugoslavia and learned English when I came to Australia when I was a little kid. But having been educated in the West for most of my life, I think that I'm faster and better at it and more articulate, so I prefer to read in English.

  Astrid: Not only are you bilingual but you have lived on three continents, which I would imagine expands your world view. Does it change your writing and storytelling, that international perspective?

  Sofija: Well yes. I was born in Yugoslavia, and then we moved to Australia, and now I live in America, I live in New York. And I feel like having moved there allowed me to write this book that I've just written, which is a memoir called Miss Ex-Yugoslavia. I needed to be away from my family and my friends and the people who are in the book in order to write it, and I think that I felt a lot more confident being in New York than I might have here, like it gave me a chance to reinvent myself a little bit and to see myself as a writer, kind of as a blank slate, because I feel like having grown up here, there are a lot of expectations I had of myself and other people have of me as well. So, I've co-written with other people a lot and I've done very specific types of writing and journalism, but I hadn't done much writing about myself. So, moving away from that context I think helped me to be somewhere completely new, to look at those stories again and write them.

  Astrid: How long have you been in New York and how long did it take you to write your memoir?

  Sofija: I've been in New York about four years. The memoir, the actual writing itself didn't take that long, that took maybe about eight months, but really it's... these stories that I've been telling for my whole life, so it feels like that taken me a very, very long time to write it. [Laughter]

  Astrid: I've marked a passage on page 66 of your memoir, a little section where you talk about what it meant for you as a young girl to learn English and be able to express yourself. Would you read that to us and then maybe explain how that ability to tell stories helped you to express yourself?

  Sofija: The passage is… ‘Having the language to express myself made it easier to define myself in the world. I rediscovered that part of myself that loved the spotlight, that wanted to be heard, and that felt her opinions and stories were valuable.’

  So, when I was a really little kid, and Serbo-Croatian was my first language, I was really articulate and I was a really quick learner of language and I used to kind of show off in front of my parents and their friends, and I was this precocious kid who had really good language skills, and I was always very proud of that. And I loved stories, like my grandma would tell me stories and I would watch a lot of films. I loved that idea of telling stories and articulating them.

  And then when we moved to Australia, it was... I was only five when we first came to Australia, but still it was very humiliating for me to suddenly not have language. I couldn't express myself at school, and I felt like I was dumb, and I felt like I was sort of less than for not being able to express myself and it was really hard for me. Having been someone who is really a bit of a show off, suddenly that part of me where I felt confident was silenced.

  I think it happens to many – it could be safe to say all people – who move somewhere where they have to speak a second language, that you're suddenly so much less articulate than you would like to be and it's so much harder to have a voice, and voices are so important. I think it happened to my parents as well, and especially to my Mum who came here as an adult, so it was even worse for her. She had been well-respected in her circle of friends and she was educated and she had a job, and then suddenly she came to Australia and she was an immigrant and she felt that everyone saw her as someone who was inarticulate and stupid.

  So, once I started learning English, back to that passage, because I was little I had the ability to learn pretty quickly. I watched a lot of TV, that was one of my best teachers. I would just sit there watching TV and I got stories. So, I knew that what I was watching would have some sort of beginning and a middle and an end, an even if I didn't understand the words I could fill in the gaps. Then once I started learning English and being able to express myself again, as I had when I was smaller, I felt really, really liberated and excited about it. I think that's the power of language, that suddenly you can say all these things that you feel.

  Astrid: Definitely. Later on, in Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, you talk about the differences in expression between Serbian and English, particularly the example that you give is terms of endearment, which are probably better. Is there anything else that you can't say in English or that you feel that English is not a good language to express?

  Sofija: I think English is a fantastic language and I love all the things that we can do with it. However, there are certain terms that I love in Serbian, like we refer to a loved one as ‘our soul’ and stuff like that. It's very romantic and there are really nice expressions that… I've never been able to translate songs, like there are a lot of songs that I like that feel really romantic and poetic to me in the original, and if I try and translate them to English, they sound really dumb.

  I also miss diminutives, because diminutives are really lovely ways of describing things, like describing someone as having... like when you see a baby, you say, in English, all you can say is like, ‘Look at your little hand!’ While we have all these different terms for little hand, things like that. Yeah, I miss that. I think that they are really beautiful ways of expression.

  Also, we have masculine and feminine forms, so like a table is masculine, a chair is feminine, and I feel like maybe that sort of makes the world a little bit more of a exciting place because it's almost like you're imbuing objects with personalities, in a way.

  Astrid: Well they say English is a bastard language, cobbled together from everything else, and one of the things that we lost was the declensions and the masculine-feminine for our nouns. Reading that passage actually made me think, has your book or books been translated out of English?

  Sofija: No.

  Astrid: Would you ever translate them – particularly your memoir – into Serbo-Croatian?

  Sofija: You know what I think? Not, just because I'm so over writing it. When I write something, I'm in some ways a bad writer, I think, because... well, maybe that doesn't make me... I just, once I finish writing something, when it's published, I generally never ever look at it again because I feel like I've spent so much time on this book, I can't do it anymore. I feel like everything that I needed to get out... You know how people say – and I really, really believe this – that to write a book you have to be committed to two years, at least, of work. One year is basically you're writing it and going through proofreads and edits, and the next year is you promoting it and selling it and talking about it. After that, you're really, really sick of it. [Laughter]

  I don't know, there are some people who I met recently, the really interesting writer called Viola di Grado who's Italian and she was really involved in the translation of her book from the Italian into English, and had a lot to say about it. I think I couldn't get as involved in it again because it's quite hard for me to put myself in that world, because it is also my life, it's a memoir, and I have to be in a certain head space for it. So, I think I will just allow a translation to happen and then if it's not quite right or if it's a little bit embarrassing, oh well.

  Astrid: Your first book, You're Just Too Good To Be True: A Love Story About Lonely Hearts and Internet Scams, was published a few years ago. Like Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, it deals with incredibly personal stories. Which book was harder to write and why?

  Sofija: The first one, You're Just Too Good To Be True, was shorter, that makes a difference. It was a Penguin special, and they do these really great kind of shorter form books, and that was where I was talking to other people about their experiences. It was quite hard because I wanted to represent people fairly and not upset anyone, and I'm generally anxious about things like that, so that was a little bit hard. But writing about myself and my own family was very hard for me, because I am a people pleaser and it's bad being a people pleaser if you're a also a writer, especially if you're a memoir writer, because really in the end, you're writing your own experience. You can't please everyone.

  You now, my mother plays quite a large part in this book, and she was very smart. Like when I said, ‘Do you mind that I've written...’ or you know, ‘How do you feel about this?’ She said, ‘Well, if I'd written about book about myself, it would have been completely different. I know that this is your version, these are your memories, and of course they're not perfect. It's not fact, it's memory, and it's art.’ She, I think, has a much healthier attitude towards that than I do because I always think like, ‘What if this person hates me…’ You know, so that was very... sorry, to answer your question, which was harder to write, this was really ... a memoir is really difficult to write.

  Astrid: When do you show the people that you write about your draft writing? For example your mother, your sister; in the first book, the older man, Bill.

  Sofija: Yeah, so I didn't show the older man in the first book the draft. I can't remember why I made that decision. I think it was because he didn't really want to see it. So, he was in the middle of being scammed and he was sort of... he didn't want to face the fact that he was part of an Internet scam, and I didn't include his last name or anything like that so he could have got by without being identified. I didn't show him.

  I think it's important to show... so I showed my mother and my sister, who play a big role in my book, because I thought that was fair and I was happy to take out anything they didn't want in there. Other people I just changed their names, often. There are some people who I'm not in contact with anymore or... yeah, and it's fine to do that as well. And some people are an amalgamation of two people.

  Astrid: You mentioned before that you've co-written works with other people. I know that you wrote Race Relations with John Saffron back in 2009, I believe it was. What is the difference for you writing with a collaborator or by yourself?

  Sofija: I actually really love collaborative writing because it's creative and there's that ability to go beyond what you can imagine, which is quite fun. You know, when you're sitting in a room with someone, you bounce ideas off each other and you come up with something that neither of you would have come up with on your own. I think that's really nice and I love having conversations with people and creative things coming out of them.

  Having said that though, it's also limiting in different ways. On John's show, we were writing about John, so I was his co-writer. When I've written with people before generally, I've had the role of co-writer, so trying to facilitate… to bring out someone else's voice, so I'd be writing in the voice of whoever I'm working with.

  Writing by myself, I actually really love it because it's in some ways liberating because you can write whatever the hell you want. Writing for print is also easier in many ways than writing for TV because a lot of things come into screenwriting. A lot of people get a say, the end product isn't just you, it's very much influenced by the editing and the directing and more things can go out of your control.

  So, I love collaborative writing, I think it's a very special thing and it's something I'd like to do again, but this is also interesting for me, writing on my own, and a bit scary as well, I guess.

  Astrid: Tell me why it was scary.

  Sofija: Because you don't have anyone to fall back on, you can't actually bounce ideas off someone. You're just by yourself and you're writing, and you have to keep sort of pushing yourself along. Being a writer, sometimes I envy my friends who work in normal workplaces because they have a support system of colleagues or a boss or someone who says, ‘Well done’, on something. If you're a writer, you're just sitting there and you have to keep saying to yourself, ‘This is really worthwhile’, and it's very hard to think that because often you read something and you think, ‘This is terrible, why am I even writing? Why am I here?’

  Astrid: What is your process, and how do you keep going on a day where it feels like it's not working?

  Sofija: I think it's okay to skip a day if that happens, because sometimes it's not worth it. When I'm feeling down on myself, I won't do the writing part, or I won't read over things. I have become better at recognising what kind of mood I'm in and what is the most productive thing to do. The memoir was interesting to write. I read a book called... I think it's called The Art of Memoir Writing by Mary Karr. It's really good and I followed a lot of her advice about how to write and kind of how to free your thoughts and memories.

  I had a really, really intricate structure, like I knew exactly how the book would be planned out. I planned it very carefully beforehand so I knew what each chapter would have in it. But to actually write the chapters, I'd kind of sit down in my room, put on like... maybe have a nice candle burning, put on some music that reminded me of that time, and then try and just access memories, so remember smells or sounds or conversations that I'd had word for word, and just let all of that flow into my head. Often I'd remember all these things that I hadn't thought of for a long time, and then I'd sit down and write like a big stream of consciousness, sort of massive chunk of stuff, not looking back over it, not focusing on it looking nice in any way. Then I'd go away for a few days, come back, and then craft it into something that made sense and that was like a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Each of my chapters kind of follow a narrative arc.

  Astrid: That sounds very immersive. I know you're also a storyteller for The Moth, and I listened to your performances and I recognised two of those stories from your book. Do you write what you perform or do you already know it so well that it's more impromptu?

  Sofija: Yeah, that's interesting. Actually The Moth, I feel like The Moth is probably the reason that I wrote this book. When I moved to New York, I've always... you know, that little passage you got me read talks about how I kind of liked being in the spotlight, but I always felt a little bit shy about it. Especially having English as a second language and feeling a lot more behind the scenes and in front of the scenes, and co-working with other people and like I said, helping other people's stories, facilitating other people's stories, I didn't feel that confident with my own stories. I always thought like they're kind of interesting and I tell them a lot, but I didn't think that there would necessarily be an audience for them.

  Then I moved to New York where people have really... everyone has something that they're doing, so many creative people and a lot of them are just kind of following their dream and aren't embarrassed about it, and there's no tall poppy syndrome like there is here. I went to a Moth storytelling night where you put your name in a hat and if your name gets drawn out, you tell a story. I would never have done it here. I would feel far too self-conscious, and I'd think people know me as something so I don't want to get up and do this. All the things that I would have thought here, I didn't think in New York, because people aren't afraid to embarrass themselves. I've heard some stories, some of them were amazing, some of them were not even that good and you know, not very well prepared, so I was like, you know, ‘I'll do this’. Then I put my name in the hat and told a story and it was really great. It was really fun for me because as a writer, often you're just sitting by yourself in a room and no one cares, and if you get onstage and tell a story, people clap, which is an amazing revelation. Yeah, you get feedback.

  People were interested. My stories are always about me as this Yugo kid growing up in Australia, and for some reason, New Yorkers were interested in that. I thought okay, ‘If they're interested in it, maybe I should keep going with this and write these stories and maybe there is something universal and it's not just’... because I feel like my strength is in telling very personal stories, they're always something that happened to me and I don't feel like an authority on global issues or anything so I always try and get my messages across through very personal stories. Because it was really nicely received in New York at The Moth, I kept doing The Moth and then started writing them as well.

  Astrid: You said that you facilitate other people's stories. You also host This Alien Nation, a live event series in New York sharing other people's stories of immigration. Have you ever asked anyone to participate on that based on their written work?

  Sofija: Yeah, I mean... so it's a show that every month, my co-curators and I invite a bunch of people who have backgrounds other than American, because it's in New York, and ask them to tell a story, which can be anything. It can be a big epic story of moving to America from somewhere, or it can be a little one like having a language misunderstanding with a parent, or a school experience, anything. We give them free rein. The people that we choose are always people who have an interesting story to tell and we find them through various means. Sometimes they are writers, sometimes they're storytellers who I've met on The Moth circuit.

  One of our co-curators is Michaela McGuire, who runs the Sydney Writers Festival, so she knows amazing authors. We have André Aciman, who wrote Call Me By Your Name. We had Françoise Mouly who is the art director of The New Yorker, she chooses the covers and she's French and so her story is very different. We had a woman who is a domestic worker, an activist, who talked about her experiences nannying. We just kind of get people who have all sorts of backgrounds, but they have to be... or they don't have to be, but it's nice if they're good storytellers, and writers are good storytellers.

  Astrid: Not all writers are great performers. Do you think your, I'm going to say confidence, telling your stories in public, for example in The Moth, improved your writing in your memoir?

  Sofija: Maybe. I write in a pretty, I'd say simple style, and in a conversational style as well, and that's similar to the way that I talk, so maybe it helped me hone my voice a little bit. I actually think it's a really good thing to do as a writer, to test out material and you rarely get that chance. Sometimes there are writing groups where you can go and read things to colleagues and people who can give feedback, and I think that they're fantastic. I think it's really... for me, I would always... whenever I'd write a chapter I would send it to my friend who is also a writer, and whenever she writes something sends it to me, and we have that kind of exchange. If you're not doing it, if you can't do it in a performance kind of environment, I think it's really great to keep showing your work to people somehow and getting feedback.

  Astrid: Have you ever been part of a formal writing group?

  Sofija: No, I think I've always been informal. I love classes and things, I’ll always do them. I never feel like I know enough, and I love doing refreshers and all sorts of classes that inspire me in my writing. I haven't been in a formal writing group but I've certainly done classes and workshops and things like that.

  Astrid: You've also been published in The New York Times and The Guardian. Can you tell me how you went about pitching an article or...

  Sofija: I am really bad with pitching things because it's a lot of work and you have to be really, really persistent, and I get really exhausted of that. I really hate rejection and a lot of pitching is rejection and getting just people... when I first moved to New York, I pitched everywhere, and I'd either just get like, ‘No’, that's the extent of the email, or nothing. It feels like you're being ignored intentionally which I guess you are. [Laughter] But it's more... the longer you are somewhere, the more people you meet, and it's always some sort of personal connection. For The New Yorker, actually I didn't pitch them an article. The editor who ended up publishing me came to a show that I did and said, ‘Hey, I think you're kind of funny. Would you like to do an opinion piece for us?’ That was very unexpected and very exciting, but I think that pitching... I think that being persistent with pitching is amazing, and I think that people who do it are fantastic because it is so hard and it's so punishing. You're just trying really, really hard. You have a great idea, and you just keep sending and getting nos. I find that really, really hard to do.

  Astrid: Have you experienced rejection a different way? Do you have an unpublished manuscript in the bottom of your drawer or have you gotten..

  Sofija: Yeah, oh I mean I experience rejection all the time. I pitched this memoir plenty of places who didn't want it. I found an agent, but there were other agents who didn't want me. I feel like rejection is a big part of it and all that you can do is keep going and get better, because the more you write, the better you get at it. It's all about experience. Sometimes I get really stuck on things and think this needs to be the best thing that I've ever done, and I never want to let go of this draft because it's not the best, but then I think well, it's not my last book... I hope it's not my last book! And the next will be better, so just keep going. Whenever I have some form of rejection, I just think, okay, is it time to move on to something else, which often it is, and what can I learn from this experience.

  Astrid: Do people come to you for advice, particularly when they see you onstage on The Moth or This Alien Nation?

  Sofija: Sometimes. I don't know how much good advice I have, though. [Laughter] Sometimes, yeah, people who are writing or who are working on things. I have, like I said, I feel like writers don't have much of a support network so I'm always happy... my colleagues sometimes send me things and I'm really happy to read them and give feedback and put n editorial eye to it as well.

  Astrid: How is performance storytelling different from written storytelling, in your mind?

  Sofija: It has to be a story that you can tell as if you're sitting around the dinner table with your friends, and you're there to entertain them. To me, I think that my writing... I think that that's kind of the way that I write as well. There are people who are beautiful at crafting gorgeous sentences and who are interested in the beauty of language and the written word on paper, which I think is different. For me, writing is like storytelling in that I want to get ideas across and I write in a simple, straightforward... often I think about who my readers are and I will always want people who have English as a second language to be able to read what I write without it being too complicated. I make an effort to write in a way that I speak and I try and speak in a way that is to the point, I guess.

  Astrid: And accessible.

  Sofija: Yeah.

  Astrid: That's a fascinating point. You know, you think about your audience or your future readers. What other advice do you have for either performance storytellers or writers who are trying to find their audience, find their tribe, I guess?

  Sofija: Who are trying to find their audience, I don't... well one thing about the storytelling, a piece of advice would be to keep it really truthful, to keep it honest and to think about what's the honest idea that you have or that you're trying to get across or the feeling that you're trying to get across, and just stick to that. Don't try and be too tricky with it. Often I'll have a really basic idea and then I'll be like, ‘Add this thing, and add this thing, and there'll be a twist’, and in the end, I'll always end up writing something big and then going back to what I had in the beginning, which was a really sort of straightforward essence of an idea.

  I think it's really interesting to find your audience, and it's really important to do that when you're writing because you might accidentally be pitching it to the wrong audience. I often think about that. Sometimes when you get rejected, it's good because the place that rejected you isn't really your audience.

  Astrid: Do you have an example of when that happened to you?

  Sofija: That I got rejected because it wasn't my audience?

  Astrid: Yeah.

  Sofija: I wrote a piece for Aeon, A-E-O-N, which is a really interesting online publication that I really like reading, and I tried really hard to write in their style. They commissioned it, and when I finished writing it and sent it over, the editor said it's not really... I think she said it's not really Aeon-ish or something, it's not really our thing, it's not really written in the way that we like to publish, and she didn't publish it. I got a kill fee which is nice, which is like when you've been commissioned and then they don't want it, but that made me think ‘Okay, well that's not my thing’. Clearly, I should play to my strengths, which is personal storytelling style. This was like a very kind of scientific article that I tried to get up, and I tried to write it in a way that I thought they would want.

  There's a lot of publications like that, like The New Yorker, if you read The New Yorker, they're very specific about the voice that they want you to write in. If you're a writer who's doing something for The New Yorker, you can have your own voice but you also need to make it...

  Astrid: You need to fit in.

  Sofija: A New Yorker voice, yeah. I don't know how good I am at doing these different voices. I've never tried for The New Yorker but I feel like I'd have to work quite hard to make it right.

  Astrid: That makes sense. Given that you've identified your strength — the personal stories, the truthful stories, the honest...

  Sofija: And there's always a bit of funny in mine as well, sometimes when I talk about serious things, I feel like I need to have something light hearted in it, that's the way that I like to connect with people, something that people can identify with. My themes, like I know kind of what the themes I'm interested in, the protagonist is me, who is usually like an outsider trying to fit in or observing the world through a specific lens. I think I've worked out those things, that they're the things that I can do, and then I've been sticking to that. Not that I won't change, I hope that I will, I hope that I won't forever be writing about my childhood. [Laughter] I think I'm old enough to maybe get over that now. But yeah, I think the more you write, the more you recognise what your vibe is.

  Astrid: What do you think is next for you, or what do you want to be next?

  Sofija: I don't know. I really want, in my heart of hearts, I really want to write fiction, but I've never had the guts to do it because fiction is so sprawling, you can write about anything. I've always fallen back on the idea that non-fiction is truth in some way, so you're bound... there are certain boundaries. I really like boundaries... I like deadlines, I love being given a task, and then with you have a writing class and you're given a prompt or something, I actually love things like that because they rein me in a little bit, because when I'm given nothing, like a completely blank slate, if you said write fiction, write whatever you want, that's terrifying to me. Even though I'd love to do it, I love fiction, I love reading fiction, and I think that one day I'll write fiction. I just don't know when that will be.

  Astrid: We interviewed Alexis Wright, the recipient of the 2018 Stella Prize recently, and she, when asked why she writes fiction, she said it was because it was the best way she'd found to tell the truth.

  Sofija: Yeah.

  Astrid: Which I thought was quite a profound way of looking at it. Sofija, you also host Women of Letters New York.

  Sofija: Yes.

  Astrid: Do you write to people? Letters.

  Sofija: Do I write letters to people?

  Astrid: Yeah.

  Sofija: Not really. For a writer, I one, don't write that much to people and two, I watch a lot of TV and films for someone who's a writer. I love books and I find them relaxing in a very special kind of way. I read a lot more as a child than I do now. But I don't know if it's that I'm all written out...

  Astrid: Maybe.

  Sofija: But I don't really write letters that much. I prefer talking to people.

  Astrid: Fair enough. I was lucky enough to receive a handwritten note literally a month ago. I haven't received one for years, and it was such a gorgeous thing to get.

  Sofija: I love it when I hear that people are letter writers, there are so many people... and yeah, in Women of Letters you find out... who was telling me, I think it was Deborra Lee Furness who's married to Hugh Jackman, she was saying that she's kept all these letters that they wrote to each other and that they still... maybe they still do it like on their anniversary or something, and it's so lovely. I always think I really must write letters, and sometimes you find old ones. I sometimes find old ones from friends or whatever, when we used to, I don't know, just write notes to each other. It's so much nicer than having an electronic copy of something.

  Astrid: Better than a text message. I guess my final question to you would be who would you most like to receive a letter from in 2018?

  Sofija: Ohhh...

  Astrid: Dead or alive?

  Sofija: Whoa, okay. Who I would most like to receive a letter from? I don't know. To me, I think it will be more of a... I don't think it's something like Gandhi or someone like that. I think it would probably be someone from my life. Yeah, maybe... maybe someone from... or maybe like my grandma who died. Someone who I didn't get to ask all the questions that I wanted.

  Astrid: That's a beautiful response.

  Sofija: I think someone like that.

  Astrid: Thank you, Sofija. Thank you for coming to The Garret.

  Sofija: Thanks for having me.

Sofija Stefanovic is a Serbian-born and Australian-raised writer and storyteller living in New York.

She is known for her ability to explore the most personal - and true - stories. Sofija has published two books, You’re Just Too Good To Be True: A Love Story About Lonely Hearts and Internet Scams, and her memoir, Miss Ex-Yugoslavia.

Sofija hosts the live storytelling events Women of Letters NYC and This Alien Nation, and she is a contributor to The Moth, The New York Times and The Guardian.

Sofija Stefanovic_The Garret_Quote 1Sofija Stefanovic_The Garret_Quote 3
TRANSCRIPT
Astrid Edwards: Sofija Stefanovic was born in Serbia, raised and educated in Australia, and now lives in New York. She's a writer and a storyteller, known for her ability to explore the most personal stories. Sofija has published two books, she hosts the live events Women of Letters NYC and This Alien Nation, and is a contributor to The Moth, The New York Times and The Guardian.

In this interview, Sofija reflects on the importance of understanding your strengths as a writer in order to be the best storyteller that you can be. Sofija, welcome to The Garret

Sofija: Thank you for having me.

Astrid: You're a bilingual writer and storyteller, with Serbian as your first language, English as your second. When you read for pleasure these days, do you choose to read in Serbian or in English?

Sofija: I choose to read in English. Yes, my first language was Serbo-Croatian. I was born in what was then called Yugoslavia and learned English when I came to Australia when I was a little kid. But having been educated in the West for most of my life, I think that I'm faster and better at it and more articulate, so I prefer to read in English.

Astrid: Not only are you bilingual but you have lived on three continents, which I would imagine expands your world view. Does it change your writing and storytelling, that international perspective?

Sofija: Well yes. I was born in Yugoslavia, and then we moved to Australia, and now I live in America, I live in New York. And I feel like having moved there allowed me to write this book that I've just written, which is a memoir called Miss Ex-Yugoslavia. I needed to be away from my family and my friends and the people who are in the book in order to write it, and I think that I felt a lot more confident being in New York than I might have here, like it gave me a chance to reinvent myself a little bit and to see myself as a writer, kind of as a blank slate, because I feel like having grown up here, there are a lot of expectations I had of myself and other people have of me as well. So, I've co-written with other people a lot and I've done very specific types of writing and journalism, but I hadn't done much writing about myself. So, moving away from that context I think helped me to be somewhere completely new, to look at those stories again and write them.

Astrid: How long have you been in New York and how long did it take you to write your memoir?

Sofija: I've been in New York about four years. The memoir, the actual writing itself didn't take that long, that took maybe about eight months, but really it's... these stories that I've been telling for my whole life, so it feels like that taken me a very, very long time to write it. [Laughter]

Astrid: I've marked a passage on page 66 of your memoir, a little section where you talk about what it meant for you as a young girl to learn English and be able to express yourself. Would you read that to us and then maybe explain how that ability to tell stories helped you to express yourself?

Sofija: The passage is… ‘Having the language to express myself made it easier to define myself in the world. I rediscovered that part of myself that loved the spotlight, that wanted to be heard, and that felt her opinions and stories were valuable.’

So, when I was a really little kid, and Serbo-Croatian was my first language, I was really articulate and I was a really quick learner of language and I used to kind of show off in front of my parents and their friends, and I was this precocious kid who had really good language skills, and I was always very proud of that. And I loved stories, like my grandma would tell me stories and I would watch a lot of films. I loved that idea of telling stories and articulating them.

And then when we moved to Australia, it was... I was only five when we first came to Australia, but still it was very humiliating for me to suddenly not have language. I couldn't express myself at school, and I felt like I was dumb, and I felt like I was sort of less than for not being able to express myself and it was really hard for me. Having been someone who is really a bit of a show off, suddenly that part of me where I felt confident was silenced.

I think it happens to many – it could be safe to say all people – who move somewhere where they have to speak a second language, that you're suddenly so much less articulate than you would like to be and it's so much harder to have a voice, and voices are so important. I think it happened to my parents as well, and especially to my Mum who came here as an adult, so it was even worse for her. She had been well-respected in her circle of friends and she was educated and she had a job, and then suddenly she came to Australia and she was an immigrant and she felt that everyone saw her as someone who was inarticulate and stupid.

So, once I started learning English, back to that passage, because I was little I had the ability to learn pretty quickly. I watched a lot of TV, that was one of my best teachers. I would just sit there watching TV and I got stories. So, I knew that what I was watching would have some sort of beginning and a middle and an end, an even if I didn't understand the words I could fill in the gaps. Then once I started learning English and being able to express myself again, as I had when I was smaller, I felt really, really liberated and excited about it. I think that's the power of language, that suddenly you can say all these things that you feel.

Astrid: Definitely. Later on, in Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, you talk about the differences in expression between Serbian and English, particularly the example that you give is terms of endearment, which are probably better. Is there anything else that you can't say in English or that you feel that English is not a good language to express?

Sofija: I think English is a fantastic language and I love all the things that we can do with it. However, there are certain terms that I love in Serbian, like we refer to a loved one as ‘our soul’ and stuff like that. It's very romantic and there are really nice expressions that… I've never been able to translate songs, like there are a lot of songs that I like that feel really romantic and poetic to me in the original, and if I try and translate them to English, they sound really dumb.

I also miss diminutives, because diminutives are really lovely ways of describing things, like describing someone as having... like when you see a baby, you say, in English, all you can say is like, ‘Look at your little hand!’ While we have all these different terms for little hand, things like that. Yeah, I miss that. I think that they are really beautiful ways of expression.

Also, we have masculine and feminine forms, so like a table is masculine, a chair is feminine, and I feel like maybe that sort of makes the world a little bit more of a exciting place because it's almost like you're imbuing objects with personalities, in a way.

Astrid: Well they say English is a bastard language, cobbled together from everything else, and one of the things that we lost was the declensions and the masculine-feminine for our nouns. Reading that passage actually made me think, has your book or books been translated out of English?

Sofija: No.

Astrid: Would you ever translate them – particularly your memoir – into Serbo-Croatian?

Sofija: You know what I think? Not, just because I'm so over writing it. When I write something, I'm in some ways a bad writer, I think, because... well, maybe that doesn't make me... I just, once I finish writing something, when it's published, I generally never ever look at it again because I feel like I've spent so much time on this book, I can't do it anymore. I feel like everything that I needed to get out... You know how people say – and I really, really believe this – that to write a book you have to be committed to two years, at least, of work. One year is basically you're writing it and going through proofreads and edits, and the next year is you promoting it and selling it and talking about it. After that, you're really, really sick of it. [Laughter]

I don't know, there are some people who I met recently, the really interesting writer called Viola di Grado who's Italian and she was really involved in the translation of her book from the Italian into English, and had a lot to say about it. I think I couldn't get as involved in it again because it's quite hard for me to put myself in that world, because it is also my life, it's a memoir, and I have to be in a certain head space for it. So, I think I will just allow a translation to happen and then if it's not quite right or if it's a little bit embarrassing, oh well.

Astrid: Your first book, You're Just Too Good To Be True: A Love Story About Lonely Hearts and Internet Scams, was published a few years ago. Like Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, it deals with incredibly personal stories. Which book was harder to write and why?

Sofija: The first one, You're Just Too Good To Be True, was shorter, that makes a difference. It was a Penguin special, and they do these really great kind of shorter form books, and that was where I was talking to other people about their experiences. It was quite hard because I wanted to represent people fairly and not upset anyone, and I'm generally anxious about things like that, so that was a little bit hard. But writing about myself and my own family was very hard for me, because I am a people pleaser and it's bad being a people pleaser if you're a also a writer, especially if you're a memoir writer, because really in the end, you're writing your own experience. You can't please everyone.

You now, my mother plays quite a large part in this book, and she was very smart. Like when I said, ‘Do you mind that I've written...’ or you know, ‘How do you feel about this?’ She said, ‘Well, if I'd written about book about myself, it would have been completely different. I know that this is your version, these are your memories, and of course they're not perfect. It's not fact, it's memory, and it's art.’ She, I think, has a much healthier attitude towards that than I do because I always think like, ‘What if this person hates me…’ You know, so that was very... sorry, to answer your question, which was harder to write, this was really ... a memoir is really difficult to write.

Astrid: When do you show the people that you write about your draft writing? For example your mother, your sister; in the first book, the older man, Bill.

Sofija: Yeah, so I didn't show the older man in the first book the draft. I can't remember why I made that decision. I think it was because he didn't really want to see it. So, he was in the middle of being scammed and he was sort of... he didn't want to face the fact that he was part of an Internet scam, and I didn't include his last name or anything like that so he could have got by without being identified. I didn't show him.

I think it's important to show... so I showed my mother and my sister, who play a big role in my book, because I thought that was fair and I was happy to take out anything they didn't want in there. Other people I just changed their names, often. There are some people who I'm not in contact with anymore or... yeah, and it's fine to do that as well. And some people are an amalgamation of two people.

Astrid: You mentioned before that you've co-written works with other people. I know that you wrote Race Relations with John Saffron back in 2009, I believe it was. What is the difference for you writing with a collaborator or by yourself?

Sofija: I actually really love collaborative writing because it's creative and there's that ability to go beyond what you can imagine, which is quite fun. You know, when you're sitting in a room with someone, you bounce ideas off each other and you come up with something that neither of you would have come up with on your own. I think that's really nice and I love having conversations with people and creative things coming out of them.

Having said that though, it's also limiting in different ways. On John's show, we were writing about John, so I was his co-writer. When I've written with people before generally, I've had the role of co-writer, so trying to facilitate… to bring out someone else's voice, so I'd be writing in the voice of whoever I'm working with.

Writing by myself, I actually really love it because it's in some ways liberating because you can write whatever the hell you want. Writing for print is also easier in many ways than writing for TV because a lot of things come into screenwriting. A lot of people get a say, the end product isn't just you, it's very much influenced by the editing and the directing and more things can go out of your control.

So, I love collaborative writing, I think it's a very special thing and it's something I'd like to do again, but this is also interesting for me, writing on my own, and a bit scary as well, I guess.

Astrid: Tell me why it was scary.

Sofija: Because you don't have anyone to fall back on, you can't actually bounce ideas off someone. You're just by yourself and you're writing, and you have to keep sort of pushing yourself along. Being a writer, sometimes I envy my friends who work in normal workplaces because they have a support system of colleagues or a boss or someone who says, ‘Well done’, on something. If you're a writer, you're just sitting there and you have to keep saying to yourself, ‘This is really worthwhile’, and it's very hard to think that because often you read something and you think, ‘This is terrible, why am I even writing? Why am I here?’

Astrid: What is your process, and how do you keep going on a day where it feels like it's not working?

Sofija: I think it's okay to skip a day if that happens, because sometimes it's not worth it. When I'm feeling down on myself, I won't do the writing part, or I won't read over things. I have become better at recognising what kind of mood I'm in and what is the most productive thing to do. The memoir was interesting to write. I read a book called... I think it's called The Art of Memoir Writing by Mary Karr. It's really good and I followed a lot of her advice about how to write and kind of how to free your thoughts and memories.

I had a really, really intricate structure, like I knew exactly how the book would be planned out. I planned it very carefully beforehand so I knew what each chapter would have in it. But to actually write the chapters, I'd kind of sit down in my room, put on like... maybe have a nice candle burning, put on some music that reminded me of that time, and then try and just access memories, so remember smells or sounds or conversations that I'd had word for word, and just let all of that flow into my head. Often I'd remember all these things that I hadn't thought of for a long time, and then I'd sit down and write like a big stream of consciousness, sort of massive chunk of stuff, not looking back over it, not focusing on it looking nice in any way. Then I'd go away for a few days, come back, and then craft it into something that made sense and that was like a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Each of my chapters kind of follow a narrative arc.

Astrid: That sounds very immersive. I know you're also a storyteller for The Moth, and I listened to your performances and I recognised two of those stories from your book. Do you write what you perform or do you already know it so well that it's more impromptu?

Sofija: Yeah, that's interesting. Actually The Moth, I feel like The Moth is probably the reason that I wrote this book. When I moved to New York, I've always... you know, that little passage you got me read talks about how I kind of liked being in the spotlight, but I always felt a little bit shy about it. Especially having English as a second language and feeling a lot more behind the scenes and in front of the scenes, and co-working with other people and like I said, helping other people's stories, facilitating other people's stories, I didn't feel that confident with my own stories. I always thought like they're kind of interesting and I tell them a lot, but I didn't think that there would necessarily be an audience for them.

Then I moved to New York where people have really... everyone has something that they're doing, so many creative people and a lot of them are just kind of following their dream and aren't embarrassed about it, and there's no tall poppy syndrome like there is here. I went to a Moth storytelling night where you put your name in a hat and if your name gets drawn out, you tell a story. I would never have done it here. I would feel far too self-conscious, and I'd think people know me as something so I don't want to get up and do this. All the things that I would have thought here, I didn't think in New York, because people aren't afraid to embarrass themselves. I've heard some stories, some of them were amazing, some of them were not even that good and you know, not very well prepared, so I was like, you know, ‘I'll do this’. Then I put my name in the hat and told a story and it was really great. It was really fun for me because as a writer, often you're just sitting by yourself in a room and no one cares, and if you get onstage and tell a story, people clap, which is an amazing revelation. Yeah, you get feedback.

People were interested. My stories are always about me as this Yugo kid growing up in Australia, and for some reason, New Yorkers were interested in that. I thought okay, ‘If they're interested in it, maybe I should keep going with this and write these stories and maybe there is something universal and it's not just’... because I feel like my strength is in telling very personal stories, they're always something that happened to me and I don't feel like an authority on global issues or anything so I always try and get my messages across through very personal stories. Because it was really nicely received in New York at The Moth, I kept doing The Moth and then started writing them as well.

Astrid: You said that you facilitate other people's stories. You also host This Alien Nation, a live event series in New York sharing other people's stories of immigration. Have you ever asked anyone to participate on that based on their written work?

Sofija: Yeah, I mean... so it's a show that every month, my co-curators and I invite a bunch of people who have backgrounds other than American, because it's in New York, and ask them to tell a story, which can be anything. It can be a big epic story of moving to America from somewhere, or it can be a little one like having a language misunderstanding with a parent, or a school experience, anything. We give them free rein. The people that we choose are always people who have an interesting story to tell and we find them through various means. Sometimes they are writers, sometimes they're storytellers who I've met on The Moth circuit.

One of our co-curators is Michaela McGuire, who runs the Sydney Writers Festival, so she knows amazing authors. We have André Aciman, who wrote Call Me By Your Name. We had Françoise Mouly who is the art director of The New Yorker, she chooses the covers and she's French and so her story is very different. We had a woman who is a domestic worker, an activist, who talked about her experiences nannying. We just kind of get people who have all sorts of backgrounds, but they have to be... or they don't have to be, but it's nice if they're good storytellers, and writers are good storytellers.

Astrid: Not all writers are great performers. Do you think your, I'm going to say confidence, telling your stories in public, for example in The Moth, improved your writing in your memoir?

Sofija: Maybe. I write in a pretty, I'd say simple style, and in a conversational style as well, and that's similar to the way that I talk, so maybe it helped me hone my voice a little bit. I actually think it's a really good thing to do as a writer, to test out material and you rarely get that chance. Sometimes there are writing groups where you can go and read things to colleagues and people who can give feedback, and I think that they're fantastic. I think it's really... for me, I would always... whenever I'd write a chapter I would send it to my friend who is also a writer, and whenever she writes something sends it to me, and we have that kind of exchange. If you're not doing it, if you can't do it in a performance kind of environment, I think it's really great to keep showing your work to people somehow and getting feedback.

Astrid: Have you ever been part of a formal writing group?

Sofija: No, I think I've always been informal. I love classes and things, I’ll always do them. I never feel like I know enough, and I love doing refreshers and all sorts of classes that inspire me in my writing. I haven't been in a formal writing group but I've certainly done classes and workshops and things like that.

Astrid: You've also been published in The New York Times and The Guardian. Can you tell me how you went about pitching an article or...

Sofija: I am really bad with pitching things because it's a lot of work and you have to be really, really persistent, and I get really exhausted of that. I really hate rejection and a lot of pitching is rejection and getting just people... when I first moved to New York, I pitched everywhere, and I'd either just get like, ‘No’, that's the extent of the email, or nothing. It feels like you're being ignored intentionally which I guess you are. [Laughter] But it's more... the longer you are somewhere, the more people you meet, and it's always some sort of personal connection. For The New Yorker, actually I didn't pitch them an article. The editor who ended up publishing me came to a show that I did and said, ‘Hey, I think you're kind of funny. Would you like to do an opinion piece for us?’ That was very unexpected and very exciting, but I think that pitching... I think that being persistent with pitching is amazing, and I think that people who do it are fantastic because it is so hard and it's so punishing. You're just trying really, really hard. You have a great idea, and you just keep sending and getting nos. I find that really, really hard to do.

Astrid: Have you experienced rejection a different way? Do you have an unpublished manuscript in the bottom of your drawer or have you gotten..

Sofija: Yeah, oh I mean I experience rejection all the time. I pitched this memoir plenty of places who didn't want it. I found an agent, but there were other agents who didn't want me. I feel like rejection is a big part of it and all that you can do is keep going and get better, because the more you write, the better you get at it. It's all about experience. Sometimes I get really stuck on things and think this needs to be the best thing that I've ever done, and I never want to let go of this draft because it's not the best, but then I think well, it's not my last book... I hope it's not my last book! And the next will be better, so just keep going. Whenever I have some form of rejection, I just think, okay, is it time to move on to something else, which often it is, and what can I learn from this experience.

Astrid: Do people come to you for advice, particularly when they see you onstage on The Moth or This Alien Nation?

Sofija: Sometimes. I don't know how much good advice I have, though. [Laughter] Sometimes, yeah, people who are writing or who are working on things. I have, like I said, I feel like writers don't have much of a support network so I'm always happy... my colleagues sometimes send me things and I'm really happy to read them and give feedback and put n editorial eye to it as well.

Astrid: How is performance storytelling different from written storytelling, in your mind?

Sofija: It has to be a story that you can tell as if you're sitting around the dinner table with your friends, and you're there to entertain them. To me, I think that my writing... I think that that's kind of the way that I write as well. There are people who are beautiful at crafting gorgeous sentences and who are interested in the beauty of language and the written word on paper, which I think is different. For me, writing is like storytelling in that I want to get ideas across and I write in a simple, straightforward... often I think about who my readers are and I will always want people who have English as a second language to be able to read what I write without it being too complicated. I make an effort to write in a way that I speak and I try and speak in a way that is to the point, I guess.

Astrid: And accessible.

Sofija: Yeah.

Astrid: That's a fascinating point. You know, you think about your audience or your future readers. What other advice do you have for either performance storytellers or writers who are trying to find their audience, find their tribe, I guess?

Sofija: Who are trying to find their audience, I don't... well one thing about the storytelling, a piece of advice would be to keep it really truthful, to keep it honest and to think about what's the honest idea that you have or that you're trying to get across or the feeling that you're trying to get across, and just stick to that. Don't try and be too tricky with it. Often I'll have a really basic idea and then I'll be like, ‘Add this thing, and add this thing, and there'll be a twist’, and in the end, I'll always end up writing something big and then going back to what I had in the beginning, which was a really sort of straightforward essence of an idea.

I think it's really interesting to find your audience, and it's really important to do that when you're writing because you might accidentally be pitching it to the wrong audience. I often think about that. Sometimes when you get rejected, it's good because the place that rejected you isn't really your audience.

Astrid: Do you have an example of when that happened to you?

Sofija: That I got rejected because it wasn't my audience?

Astrid: Yeah.

Sofija: I wrote a piece for Aeon, A-E-O-N, which is a really interesting online publication that I really like reading, and I tried really hard to write in their style. They commissioned it, and when I finished writing it and sent it over, the editor said it's not really... I think she said it's not really Aeon-ish or something, it's not really our thing, it's not really written in the way that we like to publish, and she didn't publish it. I got a kill fee which is nice, which is like when you've been commissioned and then they don't want it, but that made me think ‘Okay, well that's not my thing’. Clearly, I should play to my strengths, which is personal storytelling style. This was like a very kind of scientific article that I tried to get up, and I tried to write it in a way that I thought they would want.

There's a lot of publications like that, like The New Yorker, if you read The New Yorker, they're very specific about the voice that they want you to write in. If you're a writer who's doing something for The New Yorker, you can have your own voice but you also need to make it...

Astrid: You need to fit in.

Sofija: A New Yorker voice, yeah. I don't know how good I am at doing these different voices. I've never tried for The New Yorker but I feel like I'd have to work quite hard to make it right.

Astrid: That makes sense. Given that you've identified your strength — the personal stories, the truthful stories, the honest...

Sofija: And there's always a bit of funny in mine as well, sometimes when I talk about serious things, I feel like I need to have something light hearted in it, that's the way that I like to connect with people, something that people can identify with. My themes, like I know kind of what the themes I'm interested in, the protagonist is me, who is usually like an outsider trying to fit in or observing the world through a specific lens. I think I've worked out those things, that they're the things that I can do, and then I've been sticking to that. Not that I won't change, I hope that I will, I hope that I won't forever be writing about my childhood. [Laughter] I think I'm old enough to maybe get over that now. But yeah, I think the more you write, the more you recognise what your vibe is.

Astrid: What do you think is next for you, or what do you want to be next?

Sofija: I don't know. I really want, in my heart of hearts, I really want to write fiction, but I've never had the guts to do it because fiction is so sprawling, you can write about anything. I've always fallen back on the idea that non-fiction is truth in some way, so you're bound... there are certain boundaries. I really like boundaries... I like deadlines, I love being given a task, and then with you have a writing class and you're given a prompt or something, I actually love things like that because they rein me in a little bit, because when I'm given nothing, like a completely blank slate, if you said write fiction, write whatever you want, that's terrifying to me. Even though I'd love to do it, I love fiction, I love reading fiction, and I think that one day I'll write fiction. I just don't know when that will be.

Astrid: We interviewed Alexis Wright, the recipient of the 2018 Stella Prize recently, and she, when asked why she writes fiction, she said it was because it was the best way she'd found to tell the truth.

Sofija: Yeah.

Astrid: Which I thought was quite a profound way of looking at it. Sofija, you also host Women of Letters New York.

Sofija: Yes.

Astrid: Do you write to people? Letters.

Sofija: Do I write letters to people?

Astrid: Yeah.

Sofija: Not really. For a writer, I one, don't write that much to people and two, I watch a lot of TV and films for someone who's a writer. I love books and I find them relaxing in a very special kind of way. I read a lot more as a child than I do now. But I don't know if it's that I'm all written out...

Astrid: Maybe.

Sofija: But I don't really write letters that much. I prefer talking to people.

Astrid: Fair enough. I was lucky enough to receive a handwritten note literally a month ago. I haven't received one for years, and it was such a gorgeous thing to get.

Sofija: I love it when I hear that people are letter writers, there are so many people... and yeah, in Women of Letters you find out... who was telling me, I think it was Deborra Lee Furness who's married to Hugh Jackman, she was saying that she's kept all these letters that they wrote to each other and that they still... maybe they still do it like on their anniversary or something, and it's so lovely. I always think I really must write letters, and sometimes you find old ones. I sometimes find old ones from friends or whatever, when we used to, I don't know, just write notes to each other. It's so much nicer than having an electronic copy of something.

Astrid: Better than a text message. I guess my final question to you would be who would you most like to receive a letter from in 2018?

Sofija: Ohhh...

Astrid: Dead or alive?

Sofija: Whoa, okay. Who I would most like to receive a letter from? I don't know. To me, I think it will be more of a... I don't think it's something like Gandhi or someone like that. I think it would probably be someone from my life. Yeah, maybe... maybe someone from... or maybe like my grandma who died. Someone who I didn't get to ask all the questions that I wanted.

Astrid: That's a beautiful response.

Sofija: I think someone like that.

Astrid: Thank you, Sofija. Thank you for coming to The Garret.

Sofija: Thanks for having me.

• The Sydney Morning Herald
  https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/miss-exyugoslvia-review-sofija-stefanovics-story-of-life-between-two-worlds-20180426-h0z9bz.html
  Word count: 281

  ENTERTAINMENTBOOKSSYDNEY WRITERS' FESTIVAL
  Miss Ex-Yugoslvia review: Sofija Stefanovic's story of life between two worlds
  By Elly Varrenti
  26 April 2018 — 12:18pm
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  MEMOIR
  Miss Ex-Yugoslavia
  Sofija Stefanovic
  Viking, $34.99

  From Belgrade, Serbia to Bentleigh, Melbourne, Sofija Stefanovic tells the story of her family's immigration to Australia when Yugoslavia is "a powder keg" on the cusp of the 10-year Balkans War. She is five. It is 1982.

  Sofija Stefanovic tells the story of her family's immigration to Australia.
  Sofija Stefanovic tells the story of her family's immigration to Australia.

  The daughter of urban intellectuals, Stefanovic's father is an engineer and "a fan of the West" who wants to migrate. Her mother, psychology academic and "a loyal child of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia", does not. Her parents compromise. The family will go to Australia, gain citizenship after the requisite two years and, depending on what's happened to their country, will return. Or not.

  In this classic coming-of-age story, Stefanovic crafts fragments of memory into a chronological narrative that deftly weaves her personal story with the broader political one. She remembers herself as a child who was eager to please and be seen, loquacious, clever, thoroughly un-sporty, and mad about films and books. Also curious, Stefanovic listened in on adult conversations about a country in flux. "I was eavesdropping on my parents while pretending to play with the Lego set that my mother had got for my birthday from the international store …"

• The Australian
  https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/miss-exyugoslavia-sofija-stefanovic-sydney-writers-festival/news-story/5abc98778867cb51547a9dd5cddefa4a
  Word count: 1836

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  Miss Ex-Yugoslavia: Sofija Stefanovic; Sydney Writers Festival
  Sofija Stefanovic, author of MIss Ex Yugoslavia.
  Sofija Stefanovic, author of MIss Ex Yugoslavia.
  ANGELA LEDGERWOODThe Australian12:00AM April 28, 2018
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  In the opening scene of Sofija Stefanovic’s memoir Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, nine young women in miniskirts rub olive oil on each other’s thighs and slip rubbery inserts called chicken fillets inside their bikini tops to make their breasts look bigger. An oil-slicked Stefanovic (who is from Serbia) and her fellow ex-Yugo contestants, from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia, beautify themselves and each other in the dressing-room of Joy nightclub, a dubious Melbourne hot spot located above a fruit and vegetable market.

  They are about to battle it out — or, more precisely, strut in synch to pumping turbo-folk music — for the title of Miss Ex-Yugoslavia 2005, beauty queen of a country that no longer exists. The audience? Ex-Yugoslavians from all sides of the war, including people driven out of their villages by ethnic cleansing, people bearing scars from the bombs that left more than 100,000 people dead and two million displaced, and Yugo-nostalgics who pine for Yugoslavia as it was before the wars of the 1990s.

  On a chilly morning in March, I meet Stefanovic in her apartment in New York’s East Village, where she lives with her partner. Sitting in the sunlight cradling her three-month-old son in her arms, the scene couldn’t be further from the hairspray-hazed and fake-tan-scented ­atmosphere of that competition night 13 years earlier. “I was studying documentary film at Melbourne University at the time while working as a receptionist in Dandenong at a Montenegrin doctor’s office. That’s where I saw a poster for the Miss Ex-Yugoslavia competi­tion. It seemed like an interesting way to explore the complexities of my community and show it to Aussies.” Adds Stefanovic, “It seemed only fair to compete myself.”

  The book chronicles Stefanovic’s life from her childhood to her early 20s, going back and forth between Yugoslavia and Australia during the Yugoslav wars. She acknowledges that ­objectifying women from war-torn countries for their looks is a questionable idea. Not to mention pitting immigrants and refugees from different sides of a bloody conflict against each other. But, she’s quick to point out “In our little diaspora we’re used to contradictions. It’s not like Serbs and Croats hate each other, it’s more complicated than that. In fact, some of us really love each other and cherish this idea that we used to be neighbours and friends.”

  It’s this collision of people, ideas and identities, coupled with her realisation that shutting out the past never works, that underpins her quest for belonging and informs her endeavours in New York, where she hosts Women of ­Letters New York, a monthly salon founded by friends Michaela McGuire and Mar­ieke Hardy. She also is the creator and host of This Alien ­Nation, a live performance that celebrates the cultural missteps of immigrants in the US. She is a writer whose mission involves amplifying ­others’ stories too.

  ■ ■ ■

  Born in Belgrade in November 1982, Stefanovic describes Yugoslavia as a country destined for collapse. Unemployment clocked in at 14 per cent and inflation a hefty 40 per cent. The night her mother went into labour, only half the cars in the city were allowed on the roads because of petrol shortages. As luck would have it, her parents’ Fiat 650 was not on the list that day; they’d had to wake neighbours to borrow their car.

  Even so, her parents were thankful she was born in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It was a place that clung to the values of “Brotherhood and Unity”, the optimistic slogan of former socialist leader Josip Broz Tito that called for a unified Yugoslavia — a place where marriages between ethnicities were encouraged and celebrated, a place with free healthcare, wage parity and paid maternity leave, where one could buy David Bowie records and liberated women sunbathed topless. They counted their lucky stars she wasn’t born in a country such as Poland or Hungary, which had ended up behind the Iron Curtain.

  But by the mid-80s the rising influence of Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosevic confirmed their fears that war might be imminent. Both her parents were active in the opposition movement against Milosevic, but it was Stefanovic’s father, a computer programmer, who urged the family to move West. He struck a deal with his psychologist wife: they would move to Australia long enough to gain citizenship, then they could return to Yugoslavia with a ticket out should war erupt.

  “I guess this is it. The arsehole of the world,” says Stefanovic’s mother, Koka, in one of the funniest scenes in the book, on arriving at the clean and bustling Tullamarine airport in Melbourne with cranky five-year-old Stefanovic and her newborn sister Natalija. When an elderly male airport employee wearing shorts and knee-high socks eagerly calls Stefanovic’s mother “love”, she wonders aloud in Serbian if he is some kind of a sex addict. Such is their ­introduction to their new homeland.

  Coming to terms with huntsman spiders and heavy-breathing possums was one thing. The real challenge for Stefanovic’s mother was feeling alienated from her ex-Yugo community in Melbourne, the people she was supposed to identify with.

  “My mother moved from a city where she was at the centre of political discourse and where she was a respected professional, to the suburbs of another country where we were part of an ethnic minority, on the fringes of the society, where the conflict in Yugoslavia barely rated a mention on SBS World News,” Stefanovic says. “What made it worse was that she didn’t make friends in the diaspora easily.”

  Stefanovic’s mother, eager to stave off looming depression, her isolated housewife status, and make use of her background in clinical psychology, launched YugoLove, a matchmaking service that would pair eligible Yugoslavian singles in Melbourne who were interested with hooking up with someone from back home.

  Unfortunately, the one and only response came from an elderly Macedonian man who misinterpreted the ad and offered himself up as a potential husband. Though YugoLove fizzled, Stefanovic’s father saw how working again ­energised his wife, so he encouraged her to ­submit her University of Belgrade clinical psychology degree to the Australian Psychological Society and she was accepted.

  Meanwhile, Stefanovic was having a rough time at school because she didn’t speak English.

  “I had always been a high achiever,” she says. “I had been really good at my language, which was Serbo-Croatian, so I was humiliated at school that I couldn’t speak English.

  “Mum decided that she would let me watch TV all the time to help me learn. I watched Play School, Sesame Street and Masters of the ­Universe, about He-Man, She-Ra and Skeletor.”

  One day while walking home from school, Stefanovic excitedly told her mum how she had finally managed to engage the kids at school in a conversation — no one had laughed at her.

  “I said to my mum, ‘Today at school the kids were talking about He-Man and I joined in!’ My mother stopped pushing my sister’s stroller and looked at me. Then she said, ‘Well, I was not ­expecting this. What those children were talking about is a thin membrane that covers a woman’s vagina that is penetrated by a man’s penis the first time she has sex.’

  “I weakly said, ‘He-Man, his sister is She-Ra …’ Then the penny dropped. My mother quickly realised that I was talking about the show I watched on TV and not a hymen. She said, ‘Oh forget what I just said.’ But at that point it was far too late. I had these traumatic images in my head.”

  Grappling with English as a second language makes for funny stories such as this, but also ­illustrates a common divide between immigrant children and their parents.

  Just as Stefanovic was beginning to embrace her self-described “heaven-country”, the family secured Australian citizenship and her parents decided to return to Yugoslavia.

  Back in Belgrade, her Akubra and Driza-Bone-adorned father would walk hand-in-hand with eight-year-old Stefanovic along the grey boulevards on their way to nightly protests and vigils calling for peace. On one such stroll, they encountered a woman walking a tiger cub on a leash. The woman explained the cub had been born in Belgrade Zoo but recently had been purchased by one of the nationalist Serb leaders in Vukovar, Arkan — the cub destined to become a paramilitary mascot for the Tigers, a rabble of violent volunteer soldiers.

  By the end of 1991 Yugoslavia was officially at war — the Croatian wars of independence had begun. And so the family prepared for their second and final return to Australia in 1992. This time they wouldn’t be returning to the Melbourne suburbs they knew but to Whyalla in South Australia, a four-hour drive from Adelaide, where Stefanovic’s father had a job at the BHP steel factory.

  It was in Whyalla that Stefanovic had a profound realisation about Australia. “I saw a derogatory slur written on a wall referring to indigenous Australians. My dad had to explain that there were racist people in Australia, too,” she says. “I had thought I came from the worst place in the world because Yugoslavia was on the news all the time as a place of war and violence. I thought that Australia was this lovely harmonious country. It was a shock to discover that Australia had its own shameful history.”

  Throughout the book Stefanovic wishes she could cut ties with her Yugoslavian blood; blood riddled with associations of war and violence. Couldn’t she be a regular Aussie — a Kylie or Samantha — with one peaceful place to call home? Perhaps the bigger question (not lost on Stefanovic) is how the Kylies and Samanthas among us reconcile Australia’s own bloody history with their own.

  But Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is Stefanovic’s story. Part homage to her parents, part story of a woman coming to terms with her artistic self and mastering a language through which to create her art, and of bearing witness to those physically and psychologically affected by war, long after the tanks have rolled away.

  Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is published this week by Penguin Random House.

  Sofija Stefanovic appears on a panel at the Sydney Writers Festival on May 4.

• The Monthly
  https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/jessica-au/2018/20/2018/1529462508/storyteller-sofija-stefanovic-s-miss-ex-yugoslavia
  Word count: 726

  CULTURE BOOKS
  Storyteller Sofija Stefanovic’s ‘Miss Ex-Yugoslavia’

  BY Jessica Au
  A vivid account of growing up in a time of war, between two worlds
  In the popular imagination, to have grown up in the former Yugoslavia – in Zagreb, Belgrade or Sarajevo – during the 1990s would have been to come of age during a time of war. Even so, for those who were born there, the story must necessarily be different: muddier, deeper. As Sofija Stefanovic describes it in her memoir, Miss Ex-Yugoslavia (Penguin; $34.99), the former nation was also “our great transnational experiment”. Tito may have been a dictator – one whose elaborate funeral was repeatedly screened on television years after his death – and somewhat of a joke among educated intellectuals. But he also created in Yugoslavia a unique civic project. “This was our special place in the world, and there was much to love about our distinct mixture of openness and peculiarity,” writes Stefanovic. “[Y]oung Russians travelled to Belgrade to stock up on their illicit copies of Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs. The English came to enjoy our beaches, where liberated Yugoslavian women sunbathed topless. We were inexpensive, laid-back, built on hope.”

  By the time that hope had disintegrated into nationalist conflict, Stefanovic had left Belgrade not once, but twice. The first time, she is five, and the family have decided to head to Australia. The decision is not entirely unanimous – Stefanovic’s father, an engineer, is curious about the capitalist West and the possibilities of betterment and reward. Her mother, a psychologist and academic, and part of Belgrade’s intellectual set, is more sympathetic to the socialist endeavour and rightly fears cultural isolation. In 1991, a fated year, they return to Yugoslavia, just as pieces of the federal republic begin to separate like chunks from an iceberg, and the family leave for Australia a second time.

  Why write the self, and what about it is worthy of scrutiny? In part, it’s the author’s drive to turn over some aspect of her past, and integrate it with her present, what Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir calls the “psychic struggle”. It is this struggle that can give a book its energy and structure, its voice and its peculiar truth, and create emotional investment for the reader. Stefanovic, whose first book was the brilliant Penguin special, You’re Just Too Good To Be True, writes in Miss Ex-Yugoslavia with journalistic clarity, but what of this sense unique “you-ness”, that Karr writes of? Recent history stitches the book together, but Stefanovic’s real attention is on family anecdotes and growing pains. She knows the young Sofija to have a writer’s soul: she thinks in story, and she’s precocious and performative, yet she struggles to express herself. Twice alienated, she’s reflective too of the strange pressures of code-switching, finally mastering the languages (both spoken and cultural) of one country only to be pushed into another. Yet one senses that there’s more to be mined here, more “you-ness” to be had.

  Another of the rewards of memoir is connection: when the writer is able to delve into their own psyche with such a level of self-awareness that we feel a jolt of recognition, despite ourselves. Miss Ex-Yugoslavia follows a conventional form: birth, childhood, adolescence and emancipation, all book-ended by the local beauty contest that gives the book its name. Throughout, the voice stays rooted in the present, and there’s little of the sense of the long duration or shifts in time, self-doubt or precariousness, that can give memoir its rich and varied texture. Parts of the book grew out of the Moth, a live storytelling event held in cities worldwide, and some of the anecdotes, perhaps fashioned for these audiences, feel vivid but compressed.

  It’s no easy thing to look inward – other narratives, from the stories of nations to the stories of others, will always get in the way – and it’s not that Stefanovic doesn’t offer us interior glimpses either. Rather, it’s a question of balance, and of being in dialogue with a genre whose authors are increasingly unafraid to know their struggle and use it.

  JESSICA AU
  Jessica Au is a Melbourne writer and an associate editor at Aeon.