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 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.”

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.