Interviews

Guest Author: Kay Mouradian and A Gift in the Sunlight

Long-time visitors may remember my brief profile of Kay Mouradian in May of 2010. Besides her current novel she has also written books on yoga and meditation. (Wow! I want the brand new copy!) Please welcome today's Guest Author, Kay Mouradian.

I wish I had known more about my mother Flora. She was 18 when she came to America in 1920 to marry my father, a man she knew only from a photograph. Becoming an orphan after losing her family in the Armenian genocide, my mother took a chance that the man in the picture would take care of her and I am a witness to say that he did.

When I was a kid growing up in Boston, Mom would tell me stories about her tragic life in Turkey, but those stories went in one ear and out the other. I was too busy trying to be an American kid, like my Irish and Italian friends, so I never really knew what happened to my mother during World War I. All that changed when she nearly died at the age of 83. That’s when I started to read about Ottoman Turkey during the Great War and became overwhelmed with the depth of cruelty inflicted on the Turkish Armenians in 1915. I then learned how that catastrophe had broken my mother’s heart and changed her life forever and I knew her story needed to be told.

Witness to Genocide by Jake Armstrong

How one survivor of the Armenian Genocide made peace with the past, and why the United States has yet to do likewise

For 400 miles Flora Munushian Mouradian and her family marched, the dead and dying underfoot as nearly an entire nation inched closer to oblivion.

This forced exodus from Turkey was filled with horrors, and by its end the 14-year-old Mouradian would see her share of them — Turkish soldiers trying to abduct her and her sister, the disappearance of her brother at the hands of the same soldiers, the death of her grandmother during the march to Syria, and camps filled with tens of thousands of Armenians on the brink of starvation.

Pasadena Daily Photo - Kay Mouradian

I love writers of all kinds. I love journalists, novelists, humorists, essayists and anyone who works hard to make the words meaningful when they put pen to paper or fingers to keys.

And Kay Mouradian is particularly easy to like, because she's Kay.

This photo of her with a fan at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is typical of her because it shows how intently she listens. Kay was signing her book, A Gift in the Sunlight, An Armenian Story, at the Abril Armenian Book Store booth. A Gift in the Sunlight is Kay's novel based on her mother's experiences in the Armenian Genocide.

Welcome, Kay.

A Gift in the Sunlight was inspired by actual events that happened to your mother. How were you able to distance yourself emotionally from that traumatic history and craft a novel out of historical fact?

It was tough at times. I went through a lot of Kleenex and wrote a lot in a meditative state where the scenes would just come to me so I could write them. The driving force for me was a sense of responsibility to history. Some say I was too easy on the Turks in my novel, but that was intentional. I did not want to write something inflammatory or too painful to read. I just wanted to educate people about what really happened.

What sparked your interest in writing this book? You’ve remarked that you used to be uninterested in the story; what changed your attitude?