By Celia Konstantellou
December 4, 2017
I met Fay for the first time in an evening dinner in a friend’s house in Boston. What instantly triggered my attention was the fond way she was talking about what she was doing. She was discussing about writing with such enthusiasm and warmth; it was almost captivating. I remember staring at her and thinking that not a lot of people nowadays have this kind of zeal and intensity inside them. One thing she said to me, that first day I saw her, has stayed with me since; “I write to live and I live to write.” This short phrase encapsulates her great passion about the path she has chosen to pursue in her life, a path dedicated to creativity and expression.
Following Fay through the gloomy streets of her neighborhood in Brooklyn, one can instantly assume that she has devoted herself to some form of art. Her alternative style and her movements indicate the fact that she is a person who is an observer, always ready to utilize her perception of reality and eagerly transform it into art, the “art of writing”- as she distinctively claims. For her, writing is like “painting a portrait of the world, or even painting someone’s inner voices or thoughts.” As she wanders around the pavements of her region, heading to the grocery store, she particularly observes people; the way they talk, the way they interact, and she bizarrely focuses on their conversations. She then explains “A writer always pays attention to the world around.”
As she pushes the heavy, wooden door of her apartment building, in Stockholm Street she specifically points out the number hand carved on it, “162 is the name of my first short story; the one I composed on the 16th of February four years ago, I would love to say that I don’t believe in coincidence.” Her apartment is full of vibrant colors and abstract paintings. All her shelfs are packed with books and magazines. As she states, “Reading is like inhaling and writing is like exhaling; reading provides you with all the ideas your hand mechanically jots down.” A stack of papers and notebooks covers up her whole dining table, but apparently it does not bother her, “I love to live with all this intellectual mess; it helps me concentrate.”
Silence and concentration are key features of Fay’s daily life. As she states, “Writing is like rejecting silence, but you can’t write without it.” Noise comes only from her kitchen. For her, “cooking is a form of creation; it’s like writing, but it’s definitely noisier, it’s [her] number one hobby.”
“To what extent is it true that a writer’s life is lonely?” She pauses and thinks for a second. She then answers, “As Jerzy Kosinski once said, gatherings and simultaneously loneliness are the conditions of a writer’s life.” She goes on to describe that she enjoys the company of her good friends, but still, at the end of the day she is craving for some time with herself and her cat, Luna, a name that stands for moon. Her cat’s name is peculiarly related to her writing, “In almost every single one of my works, I use the moon and its phases either at the beginning or at the ending, it’s all about the sense of mystery and the idea of growth it conveys.”
It is already 11:07 am. She draws the curtains open and she sits down on her chair. She nonchalantly carries a huge cup of hot coffee with her, preparing herself to start a day at work, “See, I am working from my bedroom,” she points out laughing. Forty minutes have passed, and she is staring blankly at the wall in front of her. She has not moved; she has not written a single word. She suddenly starts scribbling something down on a yellow tinted paper. She then reads it out loud. It is apparently her piece’s introductory sentence, “This short piece is wholeheartedly dedicated to everyone who wonders if I am writing about them; I truly am.” “Does it always have to do with people in your life?” “Most of the times, yes.” She proceeds to describe how someone’s experiences have the tremendous power to shape that person and substantially influence the way of perceiving the world and discerning reality, “Most of my works are largely referring to incidents that somehow marked my life and altered me as a personality. I like applying this type of malleability to my writing. It makes it more human. All these experiences- that’s who I am and my writing has to do with it.”
The room is filled with silence again; the only noise comes from her computer’s keyboard. She is now working on her play script, “One Thousand and One Nights in Palermo.” As she explains, in a setting of absolute secrecy and enigma the play’s protagonist, Jess Cassidy, is striving to discover who are the enemies and who are the allies in her life, “don’t we always try to convince people that we are the good guys, the ones they should trust; it’s not always like that.” She goes on to describe how life can sometimes teach us valuable lessons, worth mentioning on a piece of paper, “It is a writer’s biggest challenge to accurately reflect the harshness and bitterness of the world on simple words.”
An album of old photographs stands on her bedside table. She picks it up and holds it tightly uttering that “these are fragments of [her] past; these are fragments of [her] stories.” She seems to be valuing a lot the role of her family to her upbringing. She feels that they had a lot to do with what she ended up doing, “They always gave me strength and encouraged me to follow my dreams, no matter how crazy these were; writers are by nature dreamers.” Her personality as a little girl was implying her dreamy nature, “My dad used to call me Wonderland, as everyone thought that I was living in a world of my own.” As a child growing up she was always curious about the unknown and she was always ready to explore the diverse aspects of reality, “I was obviously keeping a diary, otherwise I would have felt that I could not exist, jotting down my thoughts at any moment was essential.”
At 6:30 pm Fay has to visit Jonathan, an eleven-year-old boy who takes private lessons with her on essay writing every Thursday. Her decision to do this stems from her desire to teach young children how to love writing, from a young age. As she particularly states “I don’t really focus on its technical aspect, I am aiming to show him that people are always writing stories in their heads; everyone can be a writer on the inside.”
Fay’s way of finding a place in this world is to actually write one. As she unwraps her life around what she loves most, she is discovering a sense of sincere happiness and accomplishment on a daily basis. Though she has not reached her final destination yet, as she has not published any of her works, she proudly appreciates every single bit of her journey there, by firmly acknowledging that “[she was] created to create.”