I have written all my life since when, as a little girl, I hid under our long velvet tablecloth in the dining room to draw and tell myself stories. I have many notebooks filled with short stories, potential book plots, and poems. But I never pursued publication. I suppose I believed what my grandmother told me when I declared I wanted to be both an artist and a writer. She said: “You can’t hold two watermelons under the same arm.” So, I chose to become a visual artist and remained a frustrated writer. I even made many artist’s books and chapbooks to relieve me (at least partially) of my unwritten books’ weight.

Until one day, I woke up and started writing my book “The Amalgam.” The words poured out of me, and I stayed up for days, writing. Then, the days turned into several years when I wrote feverishly in my office at the university during class breaks, on little notes torn from whatever paper was around, in the middle of the night when a passage or phrase came to mind. I wrote without being able to stop. And, after a lot of trial and error, three helpful writers’ groups, and a slow process that, not to my surprise, parallels that of the visual creative process, my book “The Amalgam” is ready, and will be published by

Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Publication Date: March 2026

 
Fiction

The Amalgam - Synopsis

Meta, a young Greek woman, devises a daring plan and leaves her homeland for America to escape her tyrannical father and the future he has chosen for her. As an immigrant struggling to make a new life in a new place, Meta shares the experience of displacement with her grandmother, Metaxia, a Greek Ottoman subject forced to become a refugee in Greece after Potamos, her hometown in Asia Minor, Turkey, is burned down during the historical events of World War I.
As the story alternates between past and present to unravel each woman’s path through personal and lesser-known historical events, Meta, who grew up with her grandmother’s memories, knows of Potamos through them. She dreams of someday returning to Potamos to bring back the mysterious relic her dying grandmother entrusted to her and discover the relic’s secret.

While the years go by, even with her preoccupation to establish herself in America, work through her father’s utter rejection, and recover from a miscarriage and the end of her marriage, Meta never relinquishes the promise she made to her grandmother. When she finds herself alone in America and increasingly alienated from a changing Greece as a new member of the European Union, Meta, jolted by a random incident that makes her question who she has become, pushes aside her professional and personal obligations. Carrying the relic, she finally embarks on a six-month-long pilgrimage that will take her back to Metaxia’s village, Potamos, in Turkey’s Sea of Marmara.

But as Meta attempts to fulfill her promise, the growing refugee crisis, political turmoil, and severe economic hardships in Greece threaten the last connection to what she still calls home: the house she grew up in. That is until, through the unfolding current events, loss, buried family secrets, and love, she begins coming to terms with who she really is—and where she fits in today’s shifting world.