Dear World

I wrote everything I could about the war back in 2014-16. It was poetry.

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Poet, author and translator Maya Dimerli was born in Odessa, Ukraine. She is currently head of the ‘Odessa UNESCO City of Literature’ Office. Dimerli spoke to Vineetha Mokkil about life during wartime and helping others to write while war rages on in Ukraine. Excerpts

You write both poetry and prose. Do you see writing as an act of resistance?

Since poets have a highly developed imagination, it is not necessary to experience what can be easily imagined. And so, as the war moved towards us, it became clear that what was written earlier surprisingly coincided with the impending reality…I have been writing almost nothing about the war lately. I write about things that are important to me and to my fellow citizens, and I do this mainly on Facebook. I also think that for now I can focus on helping others write, helping children write. Last year, together with the poet Ilya Kaminsky (USA)—an Odessa native who, since the full-scale Russian invasion, began to support Odessa writers, museums, wounded defenders and internally displaced persons—we decided to create a poetry competition and literary studio for children. The editor-in-chief of the local newspaper Evening Odessa Oleg Suslov joined us, as did the administration of the centralised library network for children. At first, we positioned ourselves as a competition for Odessans and children who came to Odessa from other Ukrainian cities as refugees. However, a couple of days before the deadline for accepting competition entries, children from outside Odessa began to send us poems. Those cities were subjected to even more powerful shelling than Odessa. We decided to accept everyone.