I was pleased to sit down this month with Laura Spinney, the author of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, a new book about Proto-Indo-European. Spinney is a Paris-based British and French science journalist best known for Pale Rider, a global history of the 1918 influenza, which has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global traces the story of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of languages spoken by nearly half of humanity, including English, Latin and Irish in western Europe, Sanskrit and Hindi in India, and even the lost Tocharian languages of western China. Starting in its Black-Sea cradle 6,000 years ago, Spinney blends historical linguistics, mythology, archaeology and genetics with travel stories and personal encounters. Kirkus called the result “a smart, dense, detailed account,” while Publishers Weekly concluded that “this rivets.”

As a former student of Latin, Greek and a little Hittite, I was eager to read the book and interview the author. I was excited to find that archaeology and genetics have transformed the field in recent years. We spoke about the DNA revolution, her favorite language and—of course—her books and reading life!

Tim: What made you want to write about Proto-Indo-European?

Laura Spinney: Because it’s a subject that people get passionate and very grumpy about, that matters to them out of all proportion; because getting at the truth requires real detective work, gathering clues in at least three scientific domains; and because the ancient DNA revolution has pretty much rewritten the Indo-European story in the last decade – to the extent that even people working in those three fields will tell you that nobody has an overview. When I heard that, I realised that there was a useful service that I could provide as a journalist, because I could interview people in the three fields and weave a narrative out of what they told me – a sort of state of the union of the Indo-European question, at this moment in history.

Tim: Starting from hundreds or thousands of original speakers, the descendants of Proto-Indo-European now outpace all other language families in numbers and geographic spread. Why?

Laura Spinney: Something was very successful about that particular language family, no doubt about it. But I think a lot of it comes down to historical accident, or accidents. Proto-Indo-European happened to be the language of a group of people who invented a new way of life – nomadic pastoralism – that allowed them to exploit the vast energy reserves of the Eurasian steppe better than anyone had before them. The inevitable result was a population explosion, and as they spread out, those nomads’ descendants carried their languages with them. But Proto-Indo-European itself eventually died out, and so did many of its offspring. About 400 Indo-European languages and dialects are spoken today, and none of them would have been intelligible to the original Proto-Indo-European-speakers, so it’s not as if the family stood still. Its success, if you want to call it that, has been due to (some of) its speakers’ ability to adapt to a changing context.

Tim: After covering the Yamnaya, the likely first speakers, you move onto chapters about the many branches of Proto-Indo-European. What did you most enjoy learning and writing about?

Laura Spinney: I love them all. I would say that, like a good parent. But it’s true that the Tocharian story was one of the ones I took most pleasure in writing, because of the suggestion that the language was seeded by prehistoric people who were on some kind of crusade – looking for their own utopia. People have set off in search of that non-existent paradise throughout history, and now we know they were doing it in prehistory too. The human imagination is a powerful thing.

Tim: The German translation is titled Der Urknall unserer Sprache, “The Big Bang of Our Language.” Maybe that’s because Germans self-centeredly call it “Indo-Germanic.” But is understanding the origin of our language and people also a sort of self discovery?

Laura Spinney: It certainly has been for me. What have I learned? I’ll keep my list to three things. One, that language is unbelievably malleable, and that languages are time capsules that store their own history within them. If we are clever, we can unravel them like old scrolls and discover that history. Two, that there are deep connections between languages spoken very far apart in the world, and between the stories that their speakers tell. This fact seems to me to explain much about us, but it was previously absent from my education. And three, that migration has been a constant throughout human (pre-)history, and that the paths those migrants took are, to a very large extent, preserved in the branchings of our linguistic family trees.

Tim: Tell us about your library.

Laura Spinney: I love to read but unfortunately I’m a slow reader. If I could change one thing about myself, it would be that. I prefer to read physical books, though I’m not dogmatic about it. I live in Paris where apartments are relatively small so there isn’t an enormous amount of space for books and very annoyingly, mine are not organised according to any known system. My solution has been to carve out two emergency areas. One, on the floor, is books relevant to my current project. The other – suitably elevated – is books that have been important to me at various times and that remain close to my heart. They include works by Camus, Kundera, Faulkner, Jeanette Winterson and Italo Calvino. The shelf dedicated to them is always the closest to where I work, so that their good literary vibes can wash over me.

Tim: What have you been reading lately?

Laura Spinney: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I loved it. I copied out these lines into my diary: “‘Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small,’ said Lee. ‘Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they’re becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses – the whole world over his fence.'”

LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with novelist Nancy Kricorian, whose work explores the experiences of the post-genocide Armenian diaspora. Her debut novel, Zabelle, published in 1998, has been translated into seven languages and adapted as a play. Her essays and poems have appeared in journals like The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, and The Mississippi Review. Kricorian has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, as well as with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools, and she has been a mentor with We Are Not Numbers. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Award. Her newest book, The Burning Heart of the World, follows the story of an Armenian family caught up in the Lebanese Civil War, and was recently published by Red Hen Press. Kricorian sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about her new book.

The Burning Heart of the World was published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War and the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, events which are central to the book’s story. How did the idea for linking these events, and the more recent trauma of 9/11 come to you? What insights can be gained from thinking about these terrible episodes of history in relation to one another?

I am interested in the way that mass trauma events inform and shape people’s life trajectories, and in the Armenian case the way that the genocide haunts families across generations. That haunting is often a silent or unspoken one, and all the more powerful for being so. In making these connections visible I hope to open spaces for repair and renewal. Sometimes going back to imagine and give shape to our forebears’ traumas is also a way of building strength to deal with our present ones.

This new book, and your work as a whole addresses the experiences of the Armenian diaspora, of which you are a part. How has your own personal and familial history influenced your storytelling? Are there parts of The Burning Heart of the World that are based upon that history?

My first novel, Zabelle, was a fictionalized account of my grandmother’s life as a genocide survivor and immigrant bride. My next book, All the Light There Was, told the story of someone of my generation growing up in my hometown under the shadow of the unspoken familial and community experience of the Armenian genocide. All the Light There Was, which is set in Paris during World War II, went far beyond the scope of my personal and family history in a way that required extensive research, as did The Burning Heart of the World, but there are small details in both of those novels that are drawn from personal history as well as different elements of my main characters’ temperaments that are similar to mine.

Your story is told from the perspective of a young person living through these events, but chronicles their effect on multiple generations. Is this significant? Are there things that a youthful perspective allows you to do, that a more mature outlook might not?

I have had a long fascination with the bildungsroman, the novel of formation, which in its classical form is the story of the growth and character development of a young man. In college I took a course on the “female bildungsroman” in which we read The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre, among other texts, and learned that the novel of development for women traditionally ended in either death or marriage. In all four of my novels, I write from the point of view of girls as they make their way towards adulthood. With Vera in The Burning Heart of the World, I wanted to show the Lebanese Civil War from a young girl’s perspective as she moves through adolescence. I am interested in centering the experience of girls and women in my work, with a particular focus on the way they manage and care for their families in times of great violence.

Did you have to do any research, when writing your book? If so, what were some of the most interesting and/or memorable things you learned?

I want the reader to be immersed from the first page in the time and place I am writing about—to be able to see, smell, and hear the world that the characters inhabit. It takes deep research and knowledge to build that world, and my favorite part of that work is listening to people who lived through the time I’m writing about tell their stories. I collect anecdotes and details in the way that a magpie gathers material to build a nest. So, for The Burning Heart of the World, I read over 80 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and interviewed upwards of 40 people. I also made three trips to Beirut so that I could become familiar with the city and the neighborhood that Vera lived in.

Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Do you have a particular place you prefer to write, a specific way of mapping out your story? Does your work as a teacher influence how you yourself write?

My writing process varies from project to project. For the last two novels, I have sat cross-legged in my favorite armchair with my laptop. Sometimes I make up rules for myself—such as I have to write one page a day, or if I’m busy with other commitments, I tell myself I must write for fifteen minutes a day. If I sit down for fifteen minutes, it will often turn into an hour or two, and if it’s only fifteen minutes, the piece I’m working on will stay in the front of my mind as I’m walking the dog or going to the subway. I have not been teaching formal university classes much in the past ten years but have moved to a one-on-one mentoring model that I enjoy a great deal. The careful attention that I pay to my mentees’ writing has made me more attentive to my own.

What is next for you? Are there other books in the works that you can share with us?

I’m currently working on a series of essays about my family that I think will be a memoir in pieces. I have written one essay about my relationship to the Armenian language and my grandmother that’s called Language Lessons, and one about my father’s relationship to motor vehicles called His Driving Life. Next up is a piece about my Uncle Leo, who was an amazing character—as a teenager he was the Junior Yo-Yo Champion of New England and for many decades was a guitar player in an Irish wedding band, the only Armenian in the band but quite a rock star in Boston’s Irish community.

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

In my study, I have shelves filled with books about Armenian history, culture, and literature. I particularly love and collect books of Armenian folk tales and proverbs. In the bedroom, we have all our novels, memoirs, and literary biographies. There is one shelf devoted to Marcel Proust, and another to Virginia Woolf. Poetry collections, photo and art books, and books about the history of New York City are in the living room.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I recently read and loved a collection of Etel Adnan’s essays entitled Voyage, War, Exile. I’m currently reading my friend Patricia Kaishian’s new book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, which blends nature writing with memoir. And for poetry, I recommend Mosab Abu Toha’s beautiful and devastating collection Forest of Noise.

LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with screenwriter, playwright and novelist Blair Fell, two-time winner of the Doris Lippman Prize in Creative Writing from the City University of New York for his novels, The Sign for Home (2022) and the brand new Disco Witches of Fire Island (2025). The Sign for Home, his debut, was both an Indies Next and Indies Introduce book, as well as being selected for library community reads, and long-listed for the Center For Fiction’s First Book Prize. Fell has written for television and theater, winning the Shine Award for his work on the television program Queer As Folk, and a Golden Mic award for his segment on the public television series California Connected. He is the author of dozens of plays, and has won the HX Camp comedy award, seven Dramalogue awards, and The Robbie Award. His essays have appeared in magazines and on websites such as Huffington Post, Out Magazine, New York Daily News, and Fiction Southeast. In addition to his career as a writer, actor and director, he has been an ASL interpreter for the Deaf since 1993. His second novel, Disco Witches of Fire Island, an LGBTQ+ fantasy romance featuring a coven of witches on Fire Island, is due out from Alcove Press in early May. Fell sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about his new book.

Disco Witches of Fire Island opens in 1989, and features a young hero who has recently lost his boyfriend to the HIV/AIDs epidemic, and who goes to spend the summer on New York’s Fire Island. How did the story first come to you? Did the character of Joe appear first, was it the idea of a young man who had recently lost his boyfriend, or was it something else?

Oddly enough, the character of Joe came to me last, since he is the one that mirrors me, but isn’t really me. He was definitely the most difficult character to create. It’s hard to fully see oneself, so I created a character that experiences much of what I had experienced at that age but probably is a bit more likable than me and slightly taller. (Haha)

As far as the rest of the characters, so many of them are amalgams of people I met during the height of the AIDS Crisis. My first partner died from complications due to the HIV virus while we were both still in our twenties. To complicate matters he had broken up with me two years prior, and I was still very much in love with him. Needless to say this was an extremely difficult thing to get over. In its aftermath, there was a series of life-altering events, including getting fired from a job, and then a whirlwind last-minute trip to China where I decided to be a writer. It was just after that trip when I moved to Fire Island Pines and landed a job as a bartender, and moved into the attic of those quirky “old” gay men (just as Joe, the main character, does). They were a hoot, and there was lots of drama. They’d play old disco all day, cook illicit substances on the stove, and (one of them) would make huge ornate hats to go out dancing in the wee hours. These men became like witches in my mind. So really the witches, and some other characters came to me first, because I had people to model them after.

Your book unfolds during a period of historic significance for the LGBTQ+ community. How did this inform the way you told the story, and what do you think readers of today can learn from these events?

I moved to NYC around 1988, and was trying to figure out my life, and get over that broken heart. It felt like everyone was dying or sick at the time (and a huge percentage of them were), and I had a sense of absolute helplessness. At that point I attended my first gay pride parade and saw ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) marching. I couldn’t believe there were people trying to fight the disease and government inaction. I left the sidelines of the parade and joined. (It was also at that parade I coincidentally saw my first lover for the last time – he is the person who would become “Elliot” in the novel.) Getting involved in activism completely changed my life.

I wanted to capture that shift from victim to actor in the fight. I also wanted younger people to know what it was like at that moment of history, when looking for love could be so fraught. Sadly, we are at another terrible moment in our history, and the book, despite being an historical romance of sorts, very much speaks to what we as a nation – and more specifically – what we as members of the queer community are facing now. It names the Great Darkness of hatred, and suggests that when a malevolent force like our current government is working against you, sitting in the despair of the oppression is not the solution… action is, whether that means protesting, donating, volunteering, making art and most importantly banding together. As several of the manifesto quotes in the book suggest, when confronted with the Great Darkness, the only solution is collective action… and to keep dancing.

Did you always know your story was going to feature witches? What does magic allow you to do, from a storytelling perspective, that couldn’t be accomplished otherwise?

One of the first inspirations for the book were those older roommates of mine on Fire Island, and how they suggested these lovable, quirky witches — cooking mysterious things on the stove, dressing in outlandish costumes, whimsical and sometimes mysterious references to things I didn’t understand. The other reason for the magic is to underline all those magical beings we lost due to the AIDS crisis and government inaction.

The world was very dark – and it feels that way again. The book is about getting one’s magic back in the face of that darkness. The magic in the book isn’t the wave-a-wand-and-go-poof sort of magic. It’s a type of magic rooted in the connection between lovers and friends – it’s a collective magic, that only comes from group effort. The use of magic allowed me to emphasize the other worldly quality of connection and put a button on the “otherness” of being queer.

Another inspiration for the book was from a late friend, Stephen Gendin, whom I met in ACT UP. He had once told me that he had a hope to create a “religion” based on the transcendence he experienced on the dance floors of gay dance clubs. This always stuck with me. So, yes, the witches in the book do have some limited magical abilities – especially when they are in unity with their fellows – but their practice is more of a spiritual nature and comes with its own “bible” of sorts, The Disco Witch Manifesto, which is quoted at the beginning of every chapter.

What made you choose Fire Island as the setting for your story? Have you spent time there yourself?

Like I mentioned, I had spent that one summer working in Fire Island Pines as a bartender in the early 1990s. I also did visit for several summers after that. Though I tend to be much more of a Ptown sort of guy these days – I like biking and the ability to leave without the benefit of a boat. Though P-Town has become more and more unaffordable. We need NEW gay meccas where the queer artists, writers and witches can afford to go.

You write in a number of different genres, from essays to plays. What distinguishes the process of writing novels? Are there particular challenges or rewards?

I never even dreamed of writing a novel when I first started writing. That was way too big for me. But now looking back, I probably should have started much earlier. My first go at a full-length play was a serialized story where the audience would have to come back to the theater twelve times to see the whole thing. You read that right – twelve times. I think I always wanted to take my time with a story. I also thought I needed actors to make my writing good. With novels I arrived very, very late to the game and sort of accidentally found my way to my first novel. What happened was, I had an idea for a play and sat down to write it, but it just didn’t want to be a play. It wanted to be a novel. I was at a point in my life where I had nothing to lose, and I just faked it, one chapter after the next. I’d bring it into my writing group, and then after a few years, finished it, sent it to an agent, and then after a few revisions, he took it and sold it. It appeared I was able to write novels, and now I don’t want to do much else. I love the long journey of them, the surprises, the creation of worlds, and multiple characters.

A play or a TV show is inherently a collaborative process, and you also need to wait around for others to bring the project to fruition. With a novel, I get to say when and where the important work happens, and that’s a more comfortable place for me – especially since I’m not at all patient.

What is next for you? Are you working on more novels, or more plays? Do you think Disco Witches of Fire Island will ever be adapted in film?

Well, I certainly would love to see Disco Witches of Fire Island get adapted. I think it would be a great limited series as well. I do love writing essays and memoir, but I still have the novel-writing bug, so I’m probably sticking with that for the time being. We shall see. I don’t think there will be more plays or TV anytime soon, but I’ll never say never.

As far as books go, I’m currently working on two new novels, one of which, a pansexual Elizabethan romance, is out there being read by editors as we speak, while the fourth is just starting to make an appearance in my Scrivner software, but I’m torn about which of two ideas I want to live with for the next few years. Starting something new is never easy, especially with the distractions of this messed up world in which we’re living, but I’m willing to knuckle down and do the grind. It’s all about throwing down words and separating the shit from the sparkles.

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

Nearby on my shelves are books by some newer writers I love, like James Hannaham, Tim Murphy, David Ciminello, Sidney Karger, Daniel Meltz as well as some of the gay classics like Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, everything Isherwood wrote, and Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance. I also have non-gay classics like Salinger, Toni Morrison, John Irving.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I’m currently reading Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, which I am really enjoying. I just finished reading Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and liked the heck out of it. I loved Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Some other books that changed my life are The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, George Saunders’ short stories, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman (I know he can be controversial since he isn’t gay, but I truly loved it. The sequel… ugh. Not so much. That seemed to be a book he was forced to write.) One last one is almost a cliché, but Letters To A Young Poet by Rilke holds an extra special place. I know I’m forgetting other authors that have changed my life, but they’ll all have to forgive me. I’ve been known to forget really important things.