Friends and colleagues,
I’ve started a newsletter to share my recent work! These missives will be infrequent, but feel free to unsubscribe if your inbox is overloaded.
First up, I have a stranger-than-fiction true crime story in the latest issue of The Atavist Magazine. It’s about a kidnapping victim in Vallejo dubbed the “real-life Gone Girl,” a Harvard-trained lawyer convicted of bizarre home invasions, and the rookie detective who cracks the case. At heart, the story is about how easily we get misled by the narratives we impose on the world. In other words, life isn’t like the movies.
If you’d rather listen than read, there are audio versions on Audm and Apple News+. I stopped by the Creative Nonfiction Podcast to share the backstory, along with tips on structure, organization, and my favorite writing tools (shout out to Pear Note and Scrivener). Longreads has a transcript of the interview, as well as another with my amazing editor, Seyward Darby.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, I felt horrified and helpless. My father and 94-year-old grandmother, who is a Holocaust survivor, were trapped in their Kyiv apartment as airstrikes targeted the capital. Thanks to a lucky tweet of mine that went viral, Mayor Vitali Klitschko and his brother Wladimir — both famous boxing champions — arranged safe passage for them to Germany. (Our local NPR affiliate covered the story.) I made a resource doc for people looking to evacuate based on tips I received.
In the early weeks of the war, I also reported on efforts to battle misinformation by cold-calling ordinary Russians. For The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, I wrote about a YouTuber in Kyiv who was live streaming calls to families of Russian soldiers. He has since started recording in-person conversations with men he says are Russian prisoners of war and listening in as they phone loved ones.
As a refugee who emigrated from Soviet Ukraine with my mother and grandmother, I found it extra-special for my first New Yorker piece to appear in an issue with this hauntingly beautiful cover (above) by Ana Juan called “Motherland.”
For The Information, I wrote about Call Russia, a grassroots initiative that lets volunteers around the world dial a random Russian phone number through WhatsApp or Telegram. I sat in on some conversations, and surprisingly, only heard one curse word.
I’ve been working on another big project over the past year: this little guy!
His name is Emil Liev, and he turned one in March. He’s very tall and loves turning the pages of books, throwing zucchini chunks on the floor, and bouncing around to music (especially this original song by my friend René Peña-Govea).
Feel free to reach out to let me know what you think or just to say hello!
Cheers from the San Francisco Bay Area,
Katia
So thrilled to see this in my inbox, and looking forward to reading it all and for more! And thank you SO MUCH for these stories from Ukraine -- so glad your dad and grandmother got out. And to know about the cold-calling project. My dad and stepmom just got out of Russia and it's so, so bad, especially for the people they had to leave behind. True dissent is just ... not possible.