An Interview with Janet Skeslien Charles

By Jenny Shank, 9-21-09

Janet Skeslien Charles grew up in Shelby, Montana and studied English, French, and Russian at the University of Montana, where she had a part time job translating letters from Montana men to their prospective Russian brides.  After graduation, she moved to Odessa, Ukraine as a Soros Fellow, where she taught English for two years and began to research the mail-order bride industry, which became the topic of her winning debut novel, Moonlight in Odessa.  The book follows Daria, a smart, ambitious Odessan woman whose English language skills earn her a coveted office job.  She moonlights as a translator for a matchmaking service, and then attempts to make an international love match of her own.  Since 1999, Skeslien Charles has worked and lived in Paris, where she has taught writing classes at Shakespeare & Company.  She will discuss and sign Moonlight in Odessa at Hastings in Great Falls on Sunday, September 20 (2-4 p.m.) and on the University of Montana campus in Missoula on Wednesday, September 23 from 12-1:30 p.m. (Tickets are available at Fact & Fiction.)

New West: One of the distinctive aspects of Moonlight in Odessa is a contrast between the book’s lighthearted subject matter and the darker themes it addresses throughout—it’s the story of Daria, a pretty, plucky young woman who wants to succeed in work and love, and the tone is often comic, but then she has to deal with things like anti-Semitism, murderous gangsters, poverty, and the deprivations that come with living in Odessa.  How did you balance these contrasting aspects of the book?  Did you know when you started writing it what tone you wanted to strike?

Janet Skeslien Charles: When I lived in Odessa, Ukraine, I was struck by the way Odessans used humor as a way of dealing with painful situations. When a coworker got an abortion, it was gossiped about and the other women joked, “She’s doing her part to keep the population down.” I thought they were barbarians. It was only much later that I realized that most of the women sitting at the table had had an abortion. It was the only option available to them in Soviet times. They joked about it to cover up their own sadness, and it was a form of bravado. When I set the book in Odessa, the humor capital of the former Soviet Union, I knew my characters had to have the same tough reactions. It was important to show the daily difficulties that people there encountered.

The topic of the book, email-order brides, is a dark one. Congress passed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 because of the “high incidence of violent abuse of foreign women brought to this country as fiancées or spouses by American men whom they meet through for-profit international marriage brokers (IMB).” An estimated 150,000 foreign women advertise themselves on IMB sites. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, one-third to one-half of all foreign fiancées admitted to the U.S. each year – 9,500 to 14,500 in 2004 – met their husbands through IMBs. Two of my Odessan friends married men from the West and it was an absolute disaster. I wanted to tell the story of women who chase the American Dream only to live a nightmare.

NW: It seems like many recent novels set in the countries of the former Soviet Union are at least in part comic or satirical, such as your novel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, and Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan.  Do you think the setting lends itself to a comic tone?

JSC: You are kind to compare Moonlight in Odessa to Everything is Illuminated and Absurdistan. Humor can grow from sad soil. It seems to me that if the humorous and the tragic are balanced, both become stronger. It is a matter of shading. It was my hope that the darker elements could be brought to light with humor and that humor could intensify the more sinister elements of the book.

It is frustrating that as a female writer who has chosen humor as a vehicle to tell a dark story, my novel has been called “chick lit,” a term I appreciate as much as I appreciate “chick marine” or “chick surgeon.” I look at the back of books and at literary sites and see descriptions like “Chick Lit,” “Jewish Interest,” “African-American Studies,” and “Asian Voices.” By using such labels, we eliminate anything that is not produced by a white male as literature, which brings us right back to the 1800’s when books were written predominately by well-to-do white males. 

NW: What was your process for writing Moonlight in Odessa—how long did it take, how many drafts did you work through, and how did you find a publisher when it was ready?

JSC: Upon returning to Montana from Odessa in 1996, I started writing stories about the people I had met there. It took a long time for my skill to catch up with the vision I had of the stories. For ten years, I worked on two different novels. When I could take the first no further, I set it aside and worked on the second and did research. When I could take the second no further, I returned to the first or worked on my collection of personal essays.

I spent three months crafting a query letter and synopsis, sent them out to five agents, and received contracts from three. My agent Laura Longrigg sent the manuscript out and sold it in ten days.

NW: You said that when you were in college, you had a job “translating letters from lonely Montanan men and desperate Russian women.” How did you get that job?  Was there a Montana-based matchmaking service?  And did you consider writing about this back then?

JSC: It was not a formal position. People heard that I was studying Russian and asked me to translate their correspondence. The letters were fascinating. What surprised me most was how business-like they were. “This is who I am, this is what I want. Can you provide it?” I did not think about writing about Russian brides back then. It wasn’t until the story became more personal that I became interested.

NW: For a state of its population, Montana seems to produce a lot of writers.  Were you aware of or influenced by the writing culture in Montana when you were growing up?

JSC: We are lucky to have so many strong writers in Montana. I remember holding Deirdre McNamer’s novel Rima in the Weeds and thinking, “Yes, it can be done. Someone from rural Montana can write books.”

Growing up in Montana was a gift. In my family, we were encouraged to read and use our imaginations. As children, my friends and I created our own games and activities. This background was vital to me as a writer. Creating stories and worlds is something that I have done since I was a child.

NW: You’ve said in an interview that it might be easier to write in Montana than the other places you’ve lived, because it offers less distraction.  Do you think you might return to Montana some day?

JSC: I love Montana and would love to live here. It would be a dream to teach writing at the college level in the West.

What I like about Montana is the inner peace one can find. The quiet beauty of the plains calms and inspires me. Paris is a rich, inspiring city. Like most Parisians, my husband and I live in an apartment, which means we hear everything our neighbors do and much of what goes on in the city. It can be challenging to write in an agitated environment. 

NW: Is Moonlight in Odessa your first published work of fiction?  Have you set your other writing in the different countries you’ve lived in, or have you ever set something in Montana?

JSC: My poetry and prose has been published in literary journals. One of my short stories is in the fall issue of Slice magazine. Mainly, I’ve spent a decade receiving very kind rejection letters.

Many of my personal essays are set in France. I have a lot of shorter pieces set in Montana.  I have three projects that I am working on. After they are completed, I’ll turn to life in Montana.

NW: You’ve said your next novel will also be set in Odessa.  Do any of the characters carry over into it?

JSC: Yes, several of the characters from Moonlight in Odessa will be in the second novel as well. One of my goals is to show the same events from different perspectives. For example, Daria, the main character of Moonlight in Odessa, is accepting of the mail-order bride business. She wants to get married and have a family. In the second novel, we’ll see socials from her American friend’s point of view. Jane is not at all ready for marriage and is disgusted by the advertisements for socials that tout the “diamond-shaped calves” of Ukrainian women who walk in high heels.

It was tempting to denounce international marriage brokers in Moonlight in Odessa. It would have been very easy to let my stance on the business creep into the text. But Daria is not a Western feminist. She was raised to believe that marriage is the best thing that can happen to a girl. Her grandmother pushes her to marry a stranger. I had to stay true to Daria. My agenda as an author was secondary. I would never want to preach or judge.

Living in Odessa from 1994-6, I saw for myself how young women were judged when they did not get married right away. When people learned I wasn’t married at 23, they asked, completely puzzled, “What’s wrong with you?”

NW: What kinds of people take your writer’s workshop in Paris?  What is your favorite bit of advice to give them?

JSC: Many of my students were college professors and administrators, journalists, and published nonfiction writers. One student was the curator of a major museum in Paris. What they had in common was that they wanted to write in a different way. The PhDs wanted to write in a more natural, carefree style. The journalists and nonfiction writers were dying to try fiction but felt inhibited. They had stuck to the facts for so long that it was hard for them to write stories they invented. I also had many American and French university students – for example, NYU and Colombia have study abroad programs in Paris. We always had a mix of ages, backgrounds, and nationalities. My advice then and now is to write, to keep going, and to see where the story takes you.

Janet Skeslien Charles will discuss and sign Moonlight in Odessa at Hastings in Great Falls on Sunday, September 20 (2-4 p.m.) and on the University of Montana campus in Missoula on Wednesday, September 23 from 12-1:30 p.m. (Tickets are available at Fact & Fiction.)