Romanistan
The authors of Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling present: Romanistan! Do you love rebels? Do you want to live in a place where outcasts shine their brightest? Welcome to Romanistan! We're your friendly neighborhood Gypsies, celebrating Romani identity and outcast culture, and practicing good diplomatic relations with other marginalized communities.
We love the rebels who are living their truth, even if it clashes with tradition. We also love tradition and honoring our roots. This podcast is for everyone who loves and supports Roma & related groups, and anyone who feels like a misfit and wants to uplift others to create a beautiful community.
We feature pioneers in culture, fashion, art, literature, music, activism, cuisine, and everything good. We adore the intersections of gender, sexuality, spirituality, ability, and identity. We cover all topics, from the difficult to the glorious. Let's sit crooked and talk straight.
Hosted by Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele. We reclaim the slur Gypsy, but if you aren’t Romani, we prefer you don't use it. xoxo.
P.S. The Romani people are a diasporic ethnic group originally from northwest India, circa the 10th century. Now, Roma live all over the globe, and due to centuries of oppression, slavery, genocide, and other atrocities, Roma are still fighting for basic human rights. We seek to raise awareness of who Roma are, and highlight Romani resilience, creativity, & culture.
Romanistan
Lynn Hutchinson Lee on water spirits, storytelling, and her debut novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens
Daughter of printmakers and painters – an English Romany father and Scottish-English-Irish mother – Lynn Hutchinson Lee is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Toronto, Canada. Lynn spent her childhood summers in a forest surrounded by marshes and bogs, and their lush beauty and magic haunt her writing. She was first place winner of the 2022 Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction. Her writing is published in Room; Weird Horror; Northern Nights; KIN: An Anthology of Poetry, Story and Art by Women from Romani, Traveller and Nomadic Communities; Prairie Fire’s 50 Over 50; Wagtail: The Romani Women’s Poetry Anthology; Guernica’s This Will Only Take a Minute (winning the Editor’s Choice Award); and elsewhere. She is co-editor of Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia (Exile Editions). Following her novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens, her novel Nightshade, shortlisted for the Guernica Prize, will be released by Assembly Press in 2026.
No major spoilers about Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens, but we do discuss the plot at length from 26 mins-45 mins.
Romani crushes for this episode are Mihaela Drăgan of Giuvlipen and the late and great Ronald Lee.
Thank you for listening to Romanistan podcast.
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Romanistan is hosted by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens
Conceived of by Paulina Stevens
Edited by Viktor Pachas
With Music by Viktor Pachas
And Artwork by Elijah Vardo
Welcome to Romanistan.
Speaker 3:We're your friendly neighborhood gypsies.
Speaker 2:I'm Paulina.
Speaker 3:And I'm Jez. And today we are so excited to talk to Lynn Hutchinson Lee about her debut novella, Origins of Desire and Orchid Femme.
Speaker 2:Daughter of printmakers and painters, an English Romani father and Scottish English, irish mother, lynn Hutchinson Lee is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Toronto, canada. Lynn spent her childhood summers in a forest, surrounded by marshes and bogs, and their lush beauty and magic haunt her writing. She was first place winner of the 2022 Kagawa Award for Fiction. Her writing is published in Room Weird Horror. Northern Lights Kin, an anthology of poetry. Northern Lights Kin, an anthology of poetry, story and art by women from Romani, traveler and nomadic communities. Prairie Fires, 50 over 50, wagtail, the Romani woman's poetry anthology. Garnica's this Will Only Take a Minute winning the Editor's Choice Award and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Through the Portal, tales from a Hopeful Dystopia, exile Editions, following her novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens. Her novel Nightshade, shortlisted for the Guernica Prize, will be released by Assembly Press in 2026. So yay, we're so happy to have you Welcome.
Speaker 4:Thank you, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 3:So we always like to start with the basics. Tell us a little more about where you're from, where your family is from, and what's your visa.
Speaker 4:I come from a Romani child family on my father's side from England. They came to Canada in the early 1900s. In England they were entertainers and they lived in the north, in Lancashire, and they traveled in their Vardo back and forth across that particular part of England, entertaining at fairs and parties and so on. They built puppets and my grandfather, bertrand Hutchinson, built horses for carousels and painted them and he was also a part of the Showman's League at one time when he came to Canada with the whole family they were still entertaining. They were on the road in southern Ontario and they also built houses and did construction, sold cars eventually, that kind of thing. They were also working initially in the tobacco fields of Southern Ontario.
Speaker 3:I just love the puppet making in your family history. I feel like my mom would have wanted to talk to you so much about the carousel horses. She loved carousel horses and found a vintage one that she kept in the house. They're just so cool. They really are, they're just so cool.
Speaker 4:They really are. They really are, and I have no idea of the skill and expertise it would take to actually not only conceptualize of one but actually carry it out to the final stage of painting. Oh yeah, I didn't know my grandfather, but he was apparently an amazingly talented person. He was able to do a lot of different things. A lot of different. There goes my mind. Again, he was able to do a lot of different things with his skills, and I think that's a common Romani trait you move from one practice, one economic practice, to the other, depending on the circumstances around you.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. I really like that statement. It rings so true we're experts in everything.
Speaker 4:All of a sudden, and my dad was as well, when they came to Canada and they were in the tobacco belt and he decided he wanted to be an artist. So he began to study at night school in Hamilton, which is sort of north of the tobacco belt, and he became a painter and a printmaker and he was accepted into all different kinds of artistic societies, like the Royal Canadian Academy and so forth, and was actually acknowledged as the topmost printmaker of his time in Canada. And then he stopped practicing. He stopped practicing his printmaking and painting and so forth and teaching and started working for a construction company and then he started selling cars and trading cars and selling cameras and trading cameras and making silver jewelry. So he was really a jack of all trades.
Speaker 3:I love that, love that entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah, also such an interesting legacy. Like to have expertise in all those really diverse areas. I just love that entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah, also such an interesting legacy like to have expertise in all those really diverse areas. I just love that.
Speaker 4:I know, I know and I don't have that expertise. I think my daughters do um, but I certainly don't.
Speaker 2:I love that, but so we want to ask our famous question Do you consider yourself a rebel?
Speaker 4:A rebel? Well, interestingly enough, I was talking about that with a friend on the phone today who asked me if I was a rebel. And I have to say that in my own personal life I wasn't particularly. I kind of fell into painting and printmaking because that's what my parents did. And then I, I guess about 10 years ago, when I was well advanced into the crone stage of my life, I decided I really wanted to write and so I began to write. So that was, as I told my friend on the phone today, that was kind of a rebellion against what I'd been doing all my life and against what was almost expected of me. Although I don't think it was formally expected A rebel politically, I guess I could be considered a rebel politically too. My novella, the Orchid novella, is really kind of a screed against capitalism. So yeah, in that sense I am a rebel. I go against the dominant culture in many ways. What were you doing?
Speaker 3:before you were writing. I actually had no idea that you have only been writing for a short time.
Speaker 4:I was a painter.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, and I did a lot of community arts workshops as well with I guess most recently with Romani refugee women from Hungary and kids, and I'm part of a collective called Red Tree, and we did a lot of these kinds of workshops. In fact, we did do a workshop with women in which they told their stories and made linoleum block prints from stories from their lives. We made a small book and we got Hedina Siercic and I got curated into an exhibition at the Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. And so we did a sound installation there which consisted of her spoken poetry, mine and the stories of the Hungarian Roma women that they recorded and birdsong. So it was a four part sound installation along with the work of the women. So, yeah, we've done a number of different kinds of community arts workshops, because one of the things my father really impressed upon me was that art was for the people and that the people needed to have access to art, and everybody has an artist in them. Everybody has that capacity and and it's true?
Speaker 2:Well, that sounds really amazing and I wish I could have seen that.
Speaker 3:No, I want to go.
Speaker 2:What influences your storytelling and what does storytelling mean to you?
Speaker 4:What influences my storytelling? Well, when I was a child, I was brought up on a lot of folk tales, and the ones I really remember are the Russian fairy tales, and that really influenced me and stayed with me, because there was a sense of many things in those stories there was magic, there was beauty, there was love, there was hatred, there was horror, there was revenge. All of that segued into the kind of writing that I've started to do now, and what influenced my writing? Was that? The other part of the question.
Speaker 2:And what does storytelling mean to you?
Speaker 4:What does it mean to me? Oh, my goodness. To me it means a kind of salvation, and I'm not saying that in the religious sense. I'm saying that in the religious sense, I'm saying that in the personal or social sense. Salvation in a very hard, dark world that we're living in. The idea of storytelling also means agency, that we have power over our lives. We have power over our stories. So many people do not have that, they don't realize that perhaps they have that agency within them, and so that's what storytelling really does for me is it has given me agency in my own life, and I think that's the power and the beauty of telling stories, of sharing stories, of having your voice out there stories, of sharing stories, of having your voice out there.
Speaker 3:That is really beautiful. Yeah, that that really resonates with me. The idea of power and agency I really love too because we were talking before about how important it is for you know Roma, to tell stories and that's why Paulina and I love to do this and it fits in. It fits in in really tight. Well, we've really loved your work for a long time. We read your work in poetry anthologies. We adored this latest novella, origins of Desire and Orchid Fens, and it's a beautiful book. It's surprising. It's epistolary at times, with excerpts from botany texts and dialogue through text messages, and it also feels like there's a little fabulism or a little magical realism in there. But then we also, as Roma, are thinking about how magical realism is sometimes just realism, to raise Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So we would love to know more about how you would describe style or genre in this book. What kind of literary traditions or narrative were you mindful of while you were writing it? It's just such an interesting pastiche.
Speaker 4:I want to give away a secret here before I start. You mentioned the botanical texts. Of all the reviews, I've read only one, caught on to the fact that I wrote those myself. They're entirely fake.
Speaker 3:Wow, I didn't look it up, but I was just like these are kind of perfect.
Speaker 4:Exactly because they fit into that voice the description of the flora and fauna and so forth. And I love the idea of mixing different kinds of writing. As you tell a story, I guess I have the attention span of a hummingbird or a goldfish, so I don't stick around with one particular idea for too long. Stick around with one particular idea for too long and the idea of botanical texts, particularly fake botanical texts, which I hope wasn't going to fool anybody, but it did fool a few people. I felt that it was an integral part of it, because the botanical text pulls you out of the story and you get an overview and you see that perhaps this isn't just the tiny world of the story and you get an overview and you see that perhaps this isn't just the tiny world of the young woman orchid, or the tiny world of the, the, the flowers and the flora and fauna that she's talking about, but it actually has a much in our world.
Speaker 4:And as far as my writing goes, yeah, I'm going to hark back to the fairy stories, and the fairy stories that, to me, defy genre because they're about everything and they're essentially lessons about life. And when I wrote Orchid I wasn't deliberately referencing these fairy stories. But, um, you know, since you you did ask the question about where the where the novella came from, I would have to say directly that I was influenced by those fairy stories. Um, and a lot of them are. They're about everything they're about life, they're about death, they're about family, they're about betrayal, they're about revenge, they're about getting one over on somebody that has done you wrong, and they're about a very powerful and, I would say, pre-christian spirituality that really comes through so strong and we just, I mean, I fell in love with the book.
Speaker 2:I just really, really adored it. I was going to ask, I was going to be like off the record the book. I just really really adored it.
Speaker 3:I was going to ask, I was going to be like off the record and I so there was a phrase that you use that reviewers are using to like kind of try to name your work because it really doesn't fit into one genre.
Speaker 4:Well, it sort of defies genre.
Speaker 4:I think there's a kind of writing that defies genre and actually at a book launch in Hamilton the other night I was talking to the owner of a bookstore that was holding the book launch and we had the beginnings of a very interesting conversation about the whole idea of genre and how some writers will not be slotted into very small compartments to satisfy a particular reader.
Speaker 4:I guess one of the two-star reviews I got was I was looking for horror and there wasn't enough, which really is a very interesting contrast from the one, the review from nerdhorrorcom, which sort of you know, it was all horror and in a sense it is a horror story because we look at the horrors of what's going on in the world around us. We look at the horrors of of the destruction of the environment, of the poisoning of rivers and destruction of animals, the poisoning of people, the destruction of habitat, both human and non-human. It is a horror story. We're in a horror story. So in a sense what I'm trying to do by writing in these little horror segments is to make that sense of the horror that much more acute and that much more meaningful, because I don't believe in gratuitous horror.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was the quality that I really enjoyed sitting with in your book. Like it us to think about what a text can be as well, because it's so rooted in um in fairy lore, which is so cool that's right.
Speaker 4:and the other thing is also is that I admire writers and I think that I'm I've I'm learning how to do this myself is that, when you are writing about a very specific thing, you're my mind's going. This is the almost 80-year-old mind that you're dealing with here, so I sometimes zone out. We don't have an excuse.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we don't, it's just, don't worry.
Speaker 4:So what I was going to say is that I don't write to genre. Whatever the story needs, I will put it in, and so I feel that genre cannot really define the stuff I write, Because to me, what we experience is all around us. We experience scientific or botanical texts or reports from newspapers. We experience text messages. We experience people having written letters in dealing with the great pain of their lives. We experience love, we experience hate and revenge. We experience spirituality. So those are all the things that come together, that there's a confluence of all these influences in the novella and I think in a lot of very interesting novels and short stories as well.
Speaker 2:Is there anything about your writing that you would describe as distinctly Romani style?
Speaker 4:I don't know, I guess. Well, frances Roberts Riley said something very interesting when she wrote about the novella. Wrote about the novella and Francis said that it's very much the art of the Romani storyteller, much like the Arabian Thousand and One Nights stories, where the stories are fragmented and short and they move along in the direction that the storyteller wants them to move along in. I don't know if that is distinctly Romany. I've read Ron Lee. His writing is not like that. His novel, the Living Fire, jivindi Yag, was very much a, I guess, a typical novel structure, although of course the subject matter was very specific. And I read Hedina Siurcic. It was sort of a fictionalized autobiography called Rome Like Thunder, and that again was like auto fiction. She really told the story of growing up with her father, with her family and their experiences. So I don't know if there's a particular tradition that this book would adhere to.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was thinking a lot about the like what would the Romani canon look like? How do we describe what the Romani literary canon is? And I was circling themes in your book that I felt like came up in Romani life, which is maybe the circle in all of our art and our, you know, culture or folklore but, I, wouldn't necessarily pin it to a style, except I do feel that Roma have a distinctly poetic way of speaking.
Speaker 3:I don't know if it's the language, I don't know if it's like the tradition we're coming out of, but there and I even love that you included poetry in the book as part of the narrative at times, or things that felt like almost like poetry. So I'm still circling that idea myself of like what is distinctly Romani about anything but certain themes I feel like, of navigating, being an outsider, navigating duality and balance and life in different ways that might feel sometimes horrifying or sometimes harmonious, but yeah, there's just so much to dig into, and I really hope that people keep reading Romani literature and keep talking about it, because we're just so woefully underrepresented and we have such good books.
Speaker 4:Well, you know, what's also interesting is that I think there's a duality going on. You have a Romani writer from a very specific country, and the culture of that country is going to influence the writing, along with the Romani ethnicity, practices, language and so forth. I'm thinking also of Pupusa's poetry, which moved me very greatly when I read it. So, and and what part of of that her poetry is specifically Romani or has to do with with her life as a Polish writer. So, you know, there's there's really this hybrid that has coming into Romani writing, I think.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we have all of these influences. That's a good thing. I think Absolutely. Yeah, we have all of these influences, that's a good thing, I think. And we can't be categorized really easily. I don't think, and particularly when you think about it. In Canada, for instance, I think there are fewer than five writers of Romani descent in Canada, in, I think it's more, but nevertheless it's um, it's a very small number yeah, yeah, I love that.
Speaker 3:um, there's been a boom and anthologies to with rain and just Smith's anthology and Joe Clements like's. I think we hadn't had an anthology since roads of the Roma, and so it was nice to have have a few more coming out and hopefully more, because I think that we have stories and literature that people are curious about at the very least, and we just need, you know, more people to know that we exist and we're doing things and encourage others to write too. Others to tell their stories.
Speaker 4:That's right, exactly, exactly. I think that one of the things that literature does do, if it makes it into the dominant culture, into the mainstream literary world, is it really helps to smash stereotypes? Oh yeah, literary world is it really helps to smash stereotypes? Oh yeah, and I think that is one of the most important, along with all of the other very important qualities of Romani literature that one really does stand out. Not that you write in order to confront stereotypes, but it's going to be a natural component of the story that's being told. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4:When I submitted Orchid Around to quite a few publishers, I did make the point that it was a specifically Romani story about a Romani family, and that there were very few Romani writers in Canada with whom this story could be compared, because they're always asking for comps. Well, there aren't any. So that's another problem too. We really have to encourage young Romanies, and older Romani women in particular, to tell their stories and to begin writing. I think it's really, really important, yeah, not only to celebrate the culture but again, as I said, to deal with the stereotypes that invariably rise.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the best way for our representation to improve is for us to be, creating our representation, for sure, and it's it's also exciting to that. I think this will definitely encourage quite a few writers. Um, because it's just. It was so fun to read the book, even even the scary and upsetting parts.
Speaker 2:I was riveted um it was a lot emotionally it was an emotional roller coaster oh my goodness, it was really fun to talk about it with Polly we um yeah, like I still have some questions and you can cut them out if there's spoilers and we can ask our editor to cut them out. But I actually have just been wondering did Heron know who she was?
Speaker 4:That's really interesting. I've kind of left that out.
Speaker 2:I know, I know you left it out, I left it out.
Speaker 4:But in fact in the, in the before it was edited, I worked with my wonderful publisher, selena Middleton of Stelliform and I had written a whole lot of stuff about him and the family and the idea was that in fact he did know who she was. But we took that out because we wanted the question to be I wanted the question to be kind of out there in the air, like did he know or didn't he know? I mean, he was.
Speaker 2:I know now, that's all that matters.
Speaker 4:Yes, yes, yes, yeah. A charming monster, eh.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Yeah, we were talking about that. That, like such an interesting character, like I can't talk about what happens, but it was like I needed more, like I needed it was crazy.
Speaker 3:We should probably ask you to just like give your like little synopsis of the book for anyone who might not be familiar with it. But before I ask you to do that, and before we get into next question about water spirits, I just have to say on the topic of Heron, as soon as he came into the house and he like took off his shoes and washed yeah, I'm like that man was raised by a gypsy and yes, and it turns out that in fact, yeah yeah, right, tension, because it was like it didn't totally like it made it clear like that he has this cultural context that he shares with her and I was like it has to be him, right, it has to be him.
Speaker 3:So it was so interesting to like have that tension throughout.
Speaker 4:It was, yeah, masterful, so well done well, of course that was mother's influence, wasn't it? Yep, and he was raised by a romani mama yeah, yeah, yeah, and very sad that she that in order to uh look after the child of a, of a rich man, she had to abandon her own child, which is, I think, something that a lot of women do. Yep, it's a common story, it's a very common story and it's a tragic story, and we can sort of see the effects that it had on Orchid herself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I just. I really loved that exploration. How would you give a synopsis if a listener hadn't heard of this book yet? What would you want them to know about it?
Speaker 4:This is a story about love, gossip, betrayal, water spirits, capitalism, miners, unions, work, working class, revenge, mother-daughter relations, difficult marriages and orchids and orchid fins. So that's sort of all the different tag words you could use to describe it. But essentially it's the story of a young English Romany woman, romany Chell, called Orchid Lovell, who moves around Ontario with her mother who is rightfully, justly, nervous about having her identity discovered, and whenever she feels that that's close to happening, they pick up and leave. And I guess the last town before they lived in Carmontown, and I used words that related to the color red. They lived in Magenta Falls. Now they're in Carmontown, and in Magenta Falls Orchid, as a child, outed herself to a beloved teacher who shut her down and the mother lost her job and they left.
Speaker 4:They came to Carmontown looking for hope and a beautiful life and in fact it didn't turn out to be so beautiful and they took refuge in the fen. They visited the fen and they communed with the orchids and with the wildlife there, and it's there that orchid meets her mysterious and beautiful future husband, jack Byszynski. Is he human or not? Who is Queenie? Queenie comes to care for him and she is another otherworldly creature who is pulling him into a supernatural world, a ghostly world. So there is a very heavily spiritual element to the whole story, a very deeply spiritual element. But certainly, even though she herself is not a violent person or a person who is bent on revenge in a way emotionally, she is because of the horrendous things that, because of a horrendous betrayal and because of the horrendous things that she has seen that have been done to particularly one family by the family of the mine owners. This is the fire.
Speaker 3:It's such an interesting theme, this idea of revenge and justified revenge, and so I think that's a really good segue in that we are obsessed with the Paniraklis and the water spirits water spirits so so many different cultures, including ours, have revenant spirits of women who are often murdered or otherwise mistreated or meet their end um by men's hands or influence and haunt the waters and take revenge on the men who deserve it. And you represent that as well as your in your novel, which we love. That all the women from different backgrounds and cultures all have a name for them or a context for them. And, please, we would love to know more about why you wanted to write about water spirits, and was that lore part of your childhood? Tell us what you love about them. Go off.
Speaker 4:I remember water spirits from my childhood, and actually I grew up in a house on top of a cliff down which my father cut stairs out of the earth so we could reach a small stream, a very tiny river, and I spent a lot of time climbing down those stairs and sitting in the water and daydreaming and imagining. I always had a very strong, I guess, affinity for magic and for spirituality as a child and I think that that was a natural inclination for me because of all the folk tales and fairy tales I was fed about, of all the folk tales and fairy tales I was fed about, among other things, water spirits. So water spirits have sort of been lurking in the background for me for most of my life and I remember first thinking, writing about them one sentence in a piece of writing that a friend and I did years and years ago. And because then the water spirits entered my consciousness, I began to think about them more, and when I was developing the idea for the novella, I felt that water spirits were a natural way of expressing revenge. We can have vengeful thoughts and violent thoughts and we can express them through spiritual beings. We don't necessarily have to carry out these acts ourselves. But what's really interesting is there are a lot of that.
Speaker 4:Every culture has a water spirit and there are just so many very interesting details and variations that go along with these water spirits and their stories. I just read recently about a water spirit called Mama de Lowe from St Lucia, trinidad, tobago and Dominica from St Lucia, trinidad, tobago and Dominica and this water spirit. They're all depicted as being very beautiful, but this particular water spirit punishes men who commit crimes against nature poaching, polluting waterways, needlessly killing animals and so forth. So that's very interesting that there is an environmental sense of environmental revenge, eco-justice with Mama Delo.
Speaker 4:But a lot of the river spirits that I was dealing with particular story are kind of more, I would say, northern Eastern European in origin as well as Celtic, because I again, because I was raised on Russian folk tales and fairy stories that stayed with me. Those are really the primary influences with water spirits. But what's interesting is that the main purpose of all water spirits, from what I can gather, is to lure men who have betrayed, murdered, rejected in any way a young woman, and so she will lure him into water and deal with him as she sees fit. But what is interesting is that the water spirits in a lot of cultures are destined to live out the rest of their earthly lives as water spirits. So this isn't something that goes on for thousands and thousands of years, because there are so many little offshoots about water spirits that you could really get into, which I didn't want to, because I felt I really needed to streamline the story around the specific problems and concerns of the community yes, so I.
Speaker 2:I don't want to word it in a way that will give anything away, but did the water spirits appear differently to different people? Like did they appear differently to men?
Speaker 4:Oh, wow, I love that question.
Speaker 4:Well, when Orchid first brings her beloved Jack to see the water spirits because she's a bit of a prankster I think they both saw the same thing because he did recognize one of the young women.
Speaker 4:And now I'm having to go in another direction here, because I'm thinking that for a man who is not somebody like Jack Byszynski, who is, he's definitely not an enemy of the water spirits and they, I think they, they they feel fairly generously towards him. But for the enemies, I would say the water spirits would be much like the sirens of Greek myth that are very beautiful and alluring and they sing and that singing pulls men to the side of the river where they are caught and pulled under. So yeah, I think you've really hit on an important point there, paulina. I think they perhaps do appear differently to women than they do to men, because for women, as one of the characters says, these are the girls of our community community and we love them and we mourn them. So for them they are young women who are carrying out the revenge that the living women wish that they themselves could carry out against, against murderers or the men who abuse them.
Speaker 2:I also had another question, so thank you for clarifying that, because I was thinking like maybe, even though their true you know, even their true form may have been just so beautiful and sexy at the same time. You know what I mean, like you never know with men. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, anything that moves sometimes okay, so um the theme of pure novel.
Speaker 4:You should be writing a novel we, we will hopefully okay yes, yes, do um.
Speaker 2:The theme of pure and impure is so present in the novel and in some very complicated ways, from medical crisis to love and sex and even the character's name. We would love for you to speak about that tension in the book, kind of like muddy meh and stuff like that too.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah, book kind of like muddy meh and stuff like that too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I was brought up with a few very strict ideas and those were related to, I guess, leaving the the dirty world outside and the clean world inside. So there were certain things that were not done in our household. One was related specifically to animals. You don't kiss an animal, you don't let it eat from your dish, you don't let it walk across your kitchen table or your kitchen counters, you don't bring it into the bed with you. You wash your hands after you have touched the animal. No matter how much you love that animal, you wash your hands. And that's sort of how I grew up. And oh, food the other thing was food Don't drop food on the floor. If you drop food on the floor, you throw it out floor. If you drop food on the floor, you throw it out.
Speaker 4:And a whole lot of other little components, sort of offshoots of those particular practices which come. I mean, they're quite sensible practices because they come from a period of forest nomadism in which you had to keep the dirt on the outside and the cleanliness on the inside to avoid getting sick. You had to be very careful about animals, about what you touched about. You know whether food fell on the ground and became contaminated. So you know, even though today a lot of people may not follow those kinds of practices, practices they did have their roots in in, I think, very sound ideas about cleanliness.
Speaker 4:So for um, for orchid, yeah, she kind of extrapolates from this and she adopts her own purity codes and, and the purity codes are essentially things that really matter to her in terms of what she will bring into her life, what she will accept and what she will not accept.
Speaker 4:What is marimé, what is defiled, and to her the whole idea of defilement is about the destruction of the fen by the mining company, the attacks on women by violent men, and in terms of her life with Jack, even his wounds, when the attempt is made in his life, make him defiled for a period of time and I think she wants to recover that. She wants not recover, but she wants to pass through that so that again they can have this, what she considers to be a pure, untouched kind of love. But so there are those tensions and particularly socially you'll find those tensions between someone who practices purity codes and someone who doesn't. And how do you have that person in your life. So she actually does teach Jack how to be in the kitchen, how to be in the house, and that's one of the things that actually brings him closer to her mother, because her mother at one point says I can see that he's, he's uh, he's kind of like a proper Romany mush. He's in the kitchen, he's cleaning, he's behaving as he should.
Speaker 3:I loved that developing relationship between Jack and the mother and that part with him giving her the binoculars so she could draw the moon. I was crying, I was like that's so nice. He recognized her talent and interest. That's right, that's right, that's right. It was just really. It was really wholesome and sweet and it wasn't an easy relationship and I loved that, the way that they softened to each other. Um, and I loved his care about wanting to make her feel welcome and comfortable and seen that's right, that's right, and he and, and that's right, that's right.
Speaker 4:And I think you were mentioning something about the binoculars and encouraging her to draw the moon, and I think you know that's another way of having agency is to actually, when you see something, to interpret it through your own eye and your own work, and so I think he saw that in her and I think that really helped to bridge that gap between them. I think he had to do a lot of work and she, mother, had to do a lot of work too. Yeah, they met each other halfway.
Speaker 3:They met each other halfway, yeah, yeah we have a kind of heady question next what would you like to see happen for Romani literature moving forward?
Speaker 4:I would like to see.
Speaker 4:This is my kind of my utopian idea, which is I would like to see community organizations bring people together to start writing their stories and I would like to see not just writing their stories one mentor with a Romani writer who is a mentor. I think that would be the most ideal thing, because I think we have to start from the roots up. So that's one direction I would really like to see Romani literature going in, because that's how so many people in other cultures have gotten started with their writing. They haven't necessarily gone to university, they haven't necessarily had contact with writers, but I think there is a potential writer in everyone and in fact, when we did this a small book for the Biennale project, the Venice Biennale project the stories that those women wrote were very beautiful and very touching and, for them, very empowering. So I would like to to see something like that, um embedded somehow in a community organization yeah, beautiful idea I love, definitely you agree, I think that model was very successful in nigeria, and then there was this boom of Nigerian writers going really mainstream.
Speaker 3:So like, yeah, let's do, let's get that done.
Speaker 4:there is there. There is a prototype for developing this kind of practice. Well, you look at Paulo Freire I don't know if I've said his name right, oh God, I can't remember the name of his book but it's about writing for the dispossessed. I'll have to find the name of the book and I will send it to you. It's about education and about popular education and really educating from the body and from the experience rather than from an elevated academic perspective. Hello Bob, I think there are a lot of models like that. Yeah, he did it actually, I think. Theater of the Dispossessed. He did it mainly with theater, I think.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say do you think you can share a little bit with us about your upcoming novel Nightshade?
Speaker 4:Yes, I will. Nightshade started out as a story based on the experiences or inspired by the experiences of my dad's family. When they came to story and that got published in Room Magazine and a friend said, why don't you turn that into a novel? And I thought, okay, so I did. I expanded on it and turned it into a novel and so it's inspired by the women of my father's family my aunt, who was a very strange and eccentric healer of birds, and my grandmother and my other aunt.
Speaker 4:Nightshade came from a story of the same name based on the women of my dad's family, and it's also one of these stories that isn't specifically one kind of genre.
Speaker 4:It deals with the family of women who came to Canada and who have brought their puppets with them, their troop of puppets, and their puppets are large, they're the size of children. I could actually take this computer upstairs and show it to you, show them to you later, or the one puppet that I have left. But so in the story the puppets come to life. When the women put on these performances they tell the stories of the oppression that the women have faced, the beauty of their culture, the whole idea again of revenge, and so there's kind of a very supernatural element to the story, in which we have our real life of hardship working in the tobacco fields.
Speaker 4:The young woman who's the protagonist of the story works for the wife of the wealthy owner of a tobacco farm and she becomes very enchanted with the idea of leading a non-Romany life having blonde hair, having jewelry, having a life of luxury in a huge house and at the same time she begins to develop a very dark attraction to the husband, and this is in opposition to what her mother and her aunts believe, that the family really needs to be held together. So it's a struggle for her between her family life and her devotion to her family and the puppets and her desire to enter the world of the dominant culture, the non-romantic world that sounds fascinating.
Speaker 3:I can't wait. We also love to ask who is your Romani crush, a Romani person you really admire and you want the listeners to know about.
Speaker 4:Oh well, I can say there are a number of people, but one person who really comes to the forefront is Mihaela Dragan and her theater company, juvli Pen.
Speaker 3:We love her.
Speaker 4:They do such wonderful work. I think she's a brilliant writer, she's a brilliant actor, she's fearless, she's principled, she doesn't take shit, and I really admire that. She's just amazing. And the theater company does some pretty terrific work as well, and I would really like to see small theater groups like this springing up around different countries. Oh yeah, the work that they're doing is so valuable, yeah.
Speaker 3:It's truly remarkable. They're pioneering so much and she's a wonderful person. We're really happy. She was our second interview ever, so, listeners, you can go back and listen. We probably sounded a little bit scared because we really knew it, but she's just so great.
Speaker 4:Yeah, oh, I was just going to say also, another person that was really important in my life was Ron Lee no relation. I met him when I was, I guess, quite a few years ago and got involved through him with Roma Community Center and ended up on the board and we became very good friends. He was like a mentor for me and I really appreciated his, his perspective on everything. You know, he was not a sexist, he was a feminist. He he believed in inalienable human rights. For all that, human rights could not be cherry picked. He had an internationalist perspective. He was really an extraordinary person. So that's somebody that I still carry with me in my life and it was so sad to see him go. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:We lost such an important person and I remember thinking, even as he was old and getting very frail, that I thought what are we going to do without him? But I think he he left enough of a legacy of his own strength and his own incredible generosity that we are doing well and it's um.
Speaker 3:for many people it's thanks to him oh yeah, he continues to be an inspiration. I felt very fortunate that that we corresponded a little bit and I really loved the relationship that we had, mostly over email and Facebook.
Speaker 4:He was just so a true mentor, like just such a wonderful, generous, brilliant spirit really we had a lot of dinner parties here, and when he went to Toronto to do interpretation for refugee claims, he would stay here at the house and so we would be up until two in the morning talking. He had such energy, he's had such energy. I wish a lot of young people would have had that energy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, he's a special one.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So how can people best find you and support your work? You could go to my website, which is lynnhutchinsonleeca L-Y-N-N-H-U-T-C-H-I-N-S-O-Nca. You can go to Stelliform Press, which would be wwwstelliformpress, I guess com or ca. Stelliform is spelled S-T-E-L-L-I-F-O-R-M, and that's where you can find the novella Orchid.
Speaker 3:Wonderful. Yeah, we'll put links in the show notes and um, I can send you links.
Speaker 4:I can send you links and there's all yeah, but you'll find that information certainly on my website and I'll send you the stelliform link as well wonderful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, everyone. Go buy the book, request it at your library, request it at your library, request it at your favorite bookstore. That's the best way for writers to be supported is even if you can't buy it, ask for places to carry it. It really makes a difference.
Speaker 4:They do have an American distributor too, I believe. Oh, amazing.
Speaker 3:If you read it, leave a really good review. Wherever you know you can review books, it really makes a huge difference. Thank you so much, lynn, for speaking with us. It's just such a joy Like we love you. We love your book.
Speaker 2:Thank you for doing great. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 4:So lovely. I love you too, and I love Romanistan. I think you do wonderful work.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, thank you for listening to romanistan podcast you can find us on instagram t TikTok and Facebook at Romanistan Podcast and on Twitter at RomanistanPod. To support us, join our Patreon for extra content or just donate to our Ko-Fi fundraiser, ko-ficom backslash Romanistan, and please rate, review and subscribe. It helps people find our show. It helps us so much.
Speaker 2:You can follow Jez on Instagram at jasminavantila and Paulina at romaniholistic. You can get our book Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling online or wherever books are sold. Visit romanistanpodcastcom for events, educational resources and more. Email us at romanistanpodcast at gmailcom for inquiries.
Speaker 3:Romanistan is hosted by Jasmina Von Tila and Paulina Stevens, conceived of by Paulina Stevens, edited by Victor Pachas, with music by Victor Pachas and artwork by Elijah Bardo.