Writing
Essays and notes
Writing about language, literature, music, culture, travel, education, and learning — in English and in the languages I continue to study and use.
Bilingual Childhood · English
Words from a Bilingual Childhood
Four early words—MaPa, baba, bibika, and bookochka—and what they revealed about growing up between English and Russian.
English
Why Is My Last Name Popov?
Molokan ancestry, a Russian surname inherited without the language, and an unexpected encounter with another Popov family in Armenia.
Español
Hay que poder relatar
A reflection from a farm in Montevideo on storytelling, memory, and why words matter when almost everything else has been stripped away.
Français
Entre le russe et le français
A French essay from a Montana lake about language, writing, music, and the difficulty of learning to think inside another language.
Bilingual Childhood · English
Why We Speak Two Languages at Home
On childhood language, linguistic intimacy, and raising a daughter between English and Russian.
From the archive · Русский
Роман с исландским
An essay about learning Icelandic for the sake of reading, discovering Halldór Laxness, and finding an entire literary world through a small language.