a weaving of stories in a Bulgarian village
The Nest
Writers, it’s said, are magpies. We create by gathering, borrowing, weaving, and shaping shiny scraps offered by others. “The Nest” is, in just that sense, a collection. During the summer of 2015 myself and Eireene Nealand, traveled to the Bulgarian village of Bela Rechka for a festival on memory.
Our desire was to draw out connective tissues that hold stories together. For this reason, we have allowed fact to blend with fiction, the private with public, and the internal with the external. We wove together the stories of the people of village, creating a nest installation that we distilled in the words of this book. The idea is that the stories and pictures together create a significance that many can claim as their own. As you, too, enter into this latest migration of “The Tales of Bela Rechka,” we hope that you will use this book to incubate your own “festivals of memories,” joining us in working to heal further tensions that arise in the crucial and fraught, always-responsive, and ever-shifting, contours of our social tissues.
We self-published the book and have since presented the book in the United States and Bulgaria for its approach.