Write Now
How we find time to commit Ukrainian stories to paper
Recently, a partner organisation considered organising a panel for the Lviv BookForum, a major literary festival with a three-decade history, and then decided against it. ‘Are you doing an event there this year?’, they asked me. ‘Yep’, I said. ‘25 events. INDEX is curating a documentary cluster’.
Apart from that, during the next thirty days, INDEX is running a closed ceremony for this year’s Victoria Amelina Fellowship and the presentation of a German-Ukrainian Society with Franziska Davies, opens the new cycle of the Veteran Fellowship and the exhibition of the illustrator Mykola Leonovych who is currently missing in action, participates in a dozen partner initiatives, supports the work of current fellows and residents, and designs new programmes for 2026 (you can read more in our newsletter). In addition to leading this feisty institution and managing its tiny team of four brilliant women and one adorable dog, I fundraise to keep INDEX afloat, edit the new issue of the London Ukrainian Review, travel between Kyiv and Lviv, and go on advocacy trips abroad.
This activity notwithstanding, I’m sometimes introduced as a writer (genuine thanks to everyone who remembers me as a woman of letters, not spreadsheets). Indeed, writing is the engine of my life.
How do I find time to write?
My friend, a brilliant author and editor Mariia Shuvalova has found it for me. For about six months, she has been organising one-hour online writing sessions in the morning for her friends. As Mariia knows too well from her own experience, these women are too busy saving the world to find time for the one practice that fills their life with meaning. She has gently persuaded us that we can afford one hour of writing on a weekday.
Mariia knows what she is doing. Peer pressure works. Planning works. Mariia magic works. Our survivors’ guilt can be put on pause for an hour. Thanks to these sessions in no small part, I have finished my creative nonfiction book, Scheherezade Goes to Izium: Tales from Ukraine.
We thought that this magic should work for the many, not the few. So, we are opening up bimonthly writing sessions on YouTube. The first one is scheduled for Monday, 8 September. Join us and write, now.
