As a boy I’d listened to my father and felt calm and safe, and twenty years later I wanted to feel that same way. I wanted people to listen and be moved by our tales, and to show them that Bulgarians are not all car thieves and prostitutes, though there are plenty of those, too.
How could I have forgotten it? Why was I not writing stories like these, packed with heroism, betrayal, courage and cowardice, freedom and death?Īnd so I began my book. I was mesmerized, the way I’d been as a child, by our own history. He asked me if I could translate a Bulgarian text for him. Taking a class in Western History, I was amazed to find out that the professor was writing his dissertation on janissaries in the Balkans. It became apparent, very quickly, that the fake American stories I wrote were unconvincing garbage. I did not like to be read to either, because repetition bored me and because my parents were really good storytellers-for years my mother told me about the adventures of two little hippos (brother and sister) who we’d send around the world and get into all sorts of trouble, while my father told me stories about Bulgarian history: khans, tsars, rebels fighting the Turks.Īs a college student in the U.S., I wrote stories of my own, pseudo-American stories influenced by my teenage love of Stephen King, a writer I still admire greatly. When I was a child, I did not much like to read, because I was lazy and preferred to play soccer outside. Listen to Penkov discuss that piece with Orion’s Managing Editor, here. Henry Prize Stories 2012, an annual collection of the year’s twenty best stories published in the U.S. We’re excited to hear that Miroslav Penkov’s short story, “East of the West,” in the May/June 2011 issue of Orion will appear in the PEN/O.
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