Courtney Angela Brkic 11-10-2004
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Issue Date
2004-11-20
Authors
Brkic, Courtney Angela 20041110
Publisher
SUNY Brockport
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Abstract
Brkic reads "Stillness" (1:57) from "Stillness: and Other Stories". Interviewing Brkic are Anne Panning and Ralph Black of the SUNY Brockport English Department. Native to Washington D.C., Courtney Angela Brkic studied Anthropology and Archaeology at William and Mary in Virginia. She studied abroad in Zagreb, Croatia on a Fulbright Scholarship working with women after the war in the mid-1990s. She worked in Bosnia Herzegovina as a forensic archaeologist, in Zagreb, Croatia as a translator, and at the Hague giving summary translations at the International War Crimes Tribunal. In 1999 she returned to the US to pursue her MFA in fiction at New York University under the auspices of a New York Times fellowship. Brkic's work has been published in journals such as The Alaska Quarterly, Third Coast, and Zoetrope. At the time of filming she was working on translating Antun Branko Simic's poetry. In 2003, she published "Stillness: and Other Stories" and in 2004 published "The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living". The conversation begins with the background of where the stories came from for "Stillness: and Other Stories". Brkic talks about the family history which drew her back to the parts of the world her father had fled due to political unrest. She talks about how the tone and the stories in "Stillness: and Other Stories" themselves aren't fiction but the characters in these short stories are. Panning invites Brkic to speak about her work with refugees and post war populations and what that was like for her. She also spoke about how it influenced her fiction and nonfiction work. She spoke about how her poems and stories seemed to be better when time had passed between her experiences and when she wrote about them. The approach of using temporal distance to her advantage while writing invited an array of critiques and commentary. Brkic spoke about the different criticisms she's received for her work and talked about how they may be justified in their own way. She also voiced that some of those critiques were complimentary, even if they weren't necessarily meant to be so. Panning and Brkic talk about the UN and the view with which Brkic wrote her UN based character. They spoke with familiarity of the jaded attitude of UN workers when entrenched in a humanitarian crisis while also doing little or nothing to help the population in distress. Brkic ends the interview by reading the preface of "Stone Fields" an Epitaph for the Living" (46:06)
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