Today’s special guest is women’s fiction author Kristin Vuković to chat with me about The Cheesemaker’s Daughter.
Bio:
Kristin Vuković has written for the New York Times, BBC Travel, Travel + Leisure, Coastal Living, Virtuoso, The Magazine, Hemispheres, the Daily Beast, AFAR, Connecticut Review, and Public Books, among others. An early excerpt of her novel was longlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue Inaugural Fiction Prize. She was named a “40 Under 40” honoree by the National Federation of Croatian Americans Cultural Foundation, and received a Zlatna Penkala (Golden Pen) award for her writing about Croatia. Kristin holds a BA in literature and writing and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and was Editor-in-Chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and currently resides in New York City with her husband and daughter. For more information, please visit kristinvukovic.com.
Welcome, Kristin. Please tell us about your current release.
The Cheesemaker’s Daughter is about a woman who returns to her Croatian island home to help her father with his struggling cheese factory, while reeling from an unraveling marriage and a heartbreaking loss. She finds herself facing divides—an unresolved relationship with the son of a rival cheesemaker, a brother who went with their father to war, friends whose lives continued in a place she left behind. The novel explores themes of displacement and belonging, history and tradition. My protagonist, Marina, has a divided Croatian-American identity, and she leaves one country as a refugee (Yugoslavia) and returns to a country of a different name (Croatia). Ultimately, it’s a novel about healing and embracing the past, and a woman striving to reconcile the two halves of herself—and in the process, becoming who she was always meant to be.
What inspired you to write this book?
The seed of the idea for this novel came to me in 2011, when I went to the island of Pag to report on a cheese festival for the now-defunct Croatian Chronicle newspaper. I immediately realized it was a unique island, and would be a great setting for a book. When I heard it is Croatia’s only divided island—divided between two counties—and that the division dates back to when two bishops divided the island centuries ago, I was hooked. I’ve been obsessed with Croatia for many years—an obsession fueled by my father’s interest in learning more about our family history. His parents never returned to their homeland, and I think I’ve traveled to Croatia more than two dozen times to try to connect with those roots they left behind.
What exciting project are you working on next?
I don’t want to say too much since it’s very nascent, but it also has immigrant characters (from Slovenia and India) and explores many of the same themes—identity, belonging, and home.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I wrote poems in high school, and started writing seriously in college—mostly stories and essays—but I have always loved writing and kept a journal growing up. I was lucky to attend an elementary school in Minnesota where we were all required to keep an annual school journal with stream-of-consciousness thoughts and bits of stories that our teacher would respond to with a weekly handwritten note, and we were also required to submit a story for an annual publication called The Torch, which really fueled my storytelling sensibilities—and introduced the concept of editing. After college and my MFA, I was a travel journalist before becoming a novelist.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Now that I have a young daughter, schedules are tricky. I used to like to write in the late afternoon or late at night, but now I find I’m better after school drop-offs in the morning when I have a clearer head. I try to make time to write something every day. I treat my writing like any job: You need to show up and put words on the page, even if you don’t feel like it. And deadlines help—which editors assign to me for my freelance writing work—but I make my own deadlines for my other creative work and set weekly and daily goals for myself. I usually work with word count goals instead of time goals. There’s a certain satisfaction about hitting a designated number of words that gives me a sense of accomplishment, even if I end up cutting them later.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Unlike writers who overwrite and need to cut huge swathes of text (I wish I had that problem!) I am a constipated writer. I wish I could just let it flow, but I tend to edit myself as I’m writing and write compactly—which is probably influenced by my nonfiction background, the shrinking word counts in print publications, and people’s diminished attention spans.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
An astronaut—until I realized I wasn’t that good at math!
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I hope anyone who has ever felt displaced, whether physically or emotionally, relates to this novel. Even my husband—who came to America from India for college—relates to aspects of Marina’s experience. Readers who want to be transported to Croatia and learn more about a culture and corner of the world that is not often featured in American literature will find this a satisfying read. And I hope people who love cheese will devour this book, too!
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Pre-order links (pub date August 6, 2024):
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