The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Whirl of Birds by Liana Vrăjitoru Andreasen

Episode Date: January 12, 2025

Whirl of Birds by Liana Vrăjitoru Andreasen Amazon.com This story collection is a journey into the human mind, from prehistory to our globalized times. One story follows a Neanderthal girl as she attempts to flee human tribes ("My Big Man"), while another offers a glimpse into the friendship of three girls during the Great Depression ("Painted Snails"). In one story, a boy disappears into a cloud (Stolen Light). In another, a boy's mother attempts to uncover the secret of his molestation ("Away from the Flock"). In one story, a horse lies dying at the outskirts of a modern city ("Valley of the Horse"), while in another, a strange bird formation foretells a woman reaching the end of her life ("Whirl of Birds"). One story addresses religious sects ("At Taft Point"), one peeks into the life of an animal hoarder ("The Return"), while another explores the seductive power of art ("Mahogany"). There is a fake Iraq veteran lying his way into a relationship with a single mother ("Drifters"), and an old man who paints the women with whom he has affairs ("Rabbit in the Hat"). Some stories have a slight element of magical realism ("Valley of the Horse" and "Whirl of Birds"), while in one story a telephone inside a radio station randomly produces a time travel event ("Sound Waves"). One story is a metaphor for communism in Eastern Europe ("Puppet Show"), while another is a political satire involving cats ("Prodigal").

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, that makes it official. Welcome to the show. For 16 years and over

22 and a half episodes, we bring you the Chris Voss Show live. And sometimes recorded, I think, in the past. But we're bringing it to you. Be sure to refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. We have an amazing young lady on the show today. We're going to be talking to her about her latest book that just came out, October 25th, 2024.

It is called Whirl of Birds. It's a collection of short stories that's out by Liana Andreessen. And we're going to be talking to her about her insights, her experience, and some of the things that led to the stories that she'll be telling us today she is an uprooted romanian who came to the u.s for grad school after the fall of communism and decided to stay probably because it's so lovely here i'm sure your remaining is nice as well but you know after that fall of communism we kind of we had more mcdonald's as a student she was bewitched by American literature and also by a few of the scholarly theories that were popular in English departments in the 90s.

Her fascination with such theories resulted in her first book, The Fall of Literacy Theory, or Literary Theory, I should correct that, with Brown Walker Press. Her love of writing, on the other hand, started in childhood. Over the last few decades, she's been publishing short stories and also teaching English at South Texas College in McAllen, Texas. She's published short fiction and academic articles in journals such as Fiction International, Rampike, Lumina, for some reason I can't say Lumina today, what's going on? Calliope, Texasxas for you and more in november 24th 18 or previously published stories were published as a short story collection we'll be talking about today called whirl of birds by finishing the press

finishing line press i should say i've got a big camera in front of me liana welcome to the show how are you hi i'm i'm very good i'm very excited about my book and about talking about my stories and what inspired them and things like that so congratulations getting that book out there so give us any dot coms or social media sites where do you want people to get to know you better on those interwebs? My website is lianavergitoru.com, which is my middle name, which is a Romanian name that means wizard. So in English, it doesn't really have the same catch. It's not as catchy as in Romanian, but it says L-I-A-N-A-V-R-A-G-I-T-O-R-U.com. But also my full name, Liana Andreessen or Liana Verstor Andreasen, is on Facebook.

I'm on Instagram and Twitter. I'm not there very often, but I've been there too. So give us the 30,000 overview. What's in your new book? So my new book is something that came about in about 10 years. So it's not as if I didn't write them 10 years ago and then put them in a book now. But I've written them over a period of several years. And each of them has been was first published in a journal. It's kind of it was like one by one, I was putting them in a journal. Then another one would come out and another one would come out. And finally, I decided to put

together the ones that I felt were the strongest. Then a couple of years ago, I started looking for a publisher. And luckily, Finishing Line Press has decided to publish it. With it, I'm going to go to conferences now. I'm going to AWP and have some book signings there. And I had just one event here in McAllen, but I'm planning to have more. So yeah, it's kind of the product of maybe about 10 years of my writing, but I consider it my top stories. But there are 18 stories in the book. And in terms of genres and things like that, if anybody's interested, what kind of stories they are, I have an eclectic collection,

meaning that they're not all the same kind. They don't all have the same character. They don't follow the same. They're not all in the same setting. Every story is different. So I have a couple of stories that are actually science fiction, which, you know, I, I grew up loving science fiction because long story short under communism, science fiction was a way to escape from harsh reality. So science fiction was also a place where people could write about what was going on in Romania without naming it. So it was a way to hide under a parable, you know, under communism. So anyway,

I have two science fiction stories. I have a couple magical, realistic stories inspired maybe a little bit by techniques like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's stories, but also I have two stories that are, sorry, I don't want to make a complete breakdown, but some stories are come from my experience

but very few are actually taken from my reality directly it's like you know that's really interesting you bring that up i did not know about that under communism so people were writing so people writing as a way of was it a way of protest maybe or escapism yeah it was very some people were persecuted. I mean, I had a friend in 11th grade who was killed by the communist police. And he was a poet, and his father was kind of an anti-communist activist. And so it was very scary many times to speak out. So people try to hide behind metaphors, symbols, parables. That's why,

you know, it was very popular genre science fiction, because you could say, you know, think of dystopias or things like animal farm or stuff like that. Those are hiding real realities. I mean, harsh realities from, of course, they were imagined in those books in the past. But yeah, it was an escape from from totalitarianism that's that's wild i never heard that before but it makes sense i mean because you can't openly protest you know it's interesting it's interesting to me that they would murder a poet a person who can influence the minds it funny. I don't think funny maybe is the right word there, but it's interesting how someone who can move the mind and influence opinion is more dangerous than

maybe the ideas themselves or what they're fighting against. I think that's kind of curious in human nature. They were targeting mostly people of ideas because they were the biggest. So, my friend was, his whole family was persecuted. His father was a poet and they were just considered, you know, the enemy, the inside enemy or the class enemy, they were calling them. So, yeah, the idea that or parables about communism inspired me to write one of the stories so i couldn't i can't really go back much to to those to to my past because it's it's still kind of painful to think about it and uh but one way i could deal with it was also a more parable a more parabolic story one of my stories is is, it's called Puppet Show,

and it's the only one that addresses communism. So my way of talking a little bit about that past was by creating a little parable of a puppeteer who has, you know, he controls the main actress in the show, and then he hires actors to play along with her and with puppets. But sooner or later, the actors who play along with her and with puppets but sooner or later the actors who play along with the the main actress die first they die on stage and then they die in reality and all three characters who die in in the story no actually only two die sorry and i shouldn't say much more as a spoiler

but anyway yes a couple of them have been inspired by people who have died during communism and one of them is this friend that is a little bit behind that story too so yeah it's it's a kind of a sad more symbolic story but also it ends obviously it ends with the fall of communism or not obviously but yeah it ends with the fall of communism, or not obviously, but yeah, it ends with the fall, the end of that puppet show. And everybody goes their own way. And some people, you know, make something of their life afterward, after the pieces are put back together. So, yeah, that's one of the stories. What an interesting thing.

I've often wondered or considered, you know, what it's like for people in repressive regime Governments like that do you know the people of North Korea? What do they do to keep their mind? Kind of free, you know, there's there's an old adage that that you can put me in prison, but you can't My you know, my mind can become a prison unto itself but you can you can put me in prison, but my mind can be free. And as long as my mind can be free and remember stuff and think maybe of being out in the sunlight, of running through fields, you can never really contain me, as it were. There's a few axioms about that. And so that's kind of interesting.

I've never heard that about that experience. In Hamlet, I teach Hamlet all the time. So one line that I like that Hamlet says to his friends, anyway, the friends would betray him, but he says, I can be put in a I imagine in North Korea is happening right now. People try to find connections outside. They circulate books that are illegal from the West, probably, or from South Korea. I imagine that they were precious items. In Romania, the books that were forbidden were the ones that everybody wanted to read so they probably look for art not just necessarily literature but but anything that that gives them a little door or a window to look outside so they can imagine themselves free when they're not that's what we did so arts and literature ways to to stay alive and to survive.

And that's why it became important to me to write, because it was a way to express myself without. And maybe that's why I don't like to be too personal to write about myself per se as a character, because I learned to hide behind characters, metaphors, you know, symbols, things like that. And only two of my stories are directly taken from something that happened to me. It's one story. If I, should I say, I don't want to spoil too much, but one story has to do with a student of mine as I was teaching here in McAllen, who sadly it's one of the saddest story because the student killed himself the summer that I taught a course, a summer course that he took. He was just right out of high school.

He was starting college, and he took an early summer course. Then I talked to his father who wanted to see his papers in my class. Talking to him, I realized that he had early onset of some kind of mental issue. He was hearing voices and his family thought it was the devil talking to him. They took him to an exorcism, but not to a doctor. So that's just kind of the premise of the story. It's called exorcism. And it's just that painful encounter with the father realizing that maybe the son, my student could have been saved. And he was such a brilliant kid.

And in class, he was always kind of happy and talking. And it was, of course, a shock. But, you know, that's what mental illness does. It can strike those you don't expect. It's not, you don't know who can be affected. Yeah. And it's really interesting all the more important is to get help if you're in those sort of situations rather than turning to something that isn't helpful tell us a

little bit about how you grew up but we've kind of gotten the feel for it in Romania when did you start kind of dabbling in writing and when did you kind of feel like you you kind of were you had a thing for writing when I was very little I was kind of singled out in elementary school for writing poems. They were kind of just imitating the poems that we were reading in school. And so the first ones, hilariously now, were very communist, because I didn't even know what the party was or anything like that. So one of my first poems was about, not the party, but the country under the party was or anything like that so my first one of my first poems was about not the party but the country under the party and and then you know when i started growing up i

i was horrified to realize that i was just a kid and didn't realize didn't understand what i was doing but we were brainwashed and that was part of my indoctrination, which I moved away from right after elementary school. But, I mean, even during elementary school, I realized what was happening very fast. But anyway, so I just liked to write. First, I wrote little poems, but then, funny enough, my first actual short stories were horror stories because me and my siblings like to scare each other this we didn't have a lot of tv and stuff like that so we were creating stories for for each other and

for ourselves and so we would just tell stories in the dark and like the creepiest stories of things you encounter in the basement and whatever but but that's that made me think i can create scenarios i can create characters. I can make stories up. So then I started writing so-called novels. And from that, I moved to, again, to short stories. And so I've been writing short stories a lot. But I started a few novels when I was in high school, never finished them because I didn't like where they were going.

So finally, now I am actually writing a Romanian novel. It takes place partly in Romania and partly in the United States. So a character that moves, that emigrates to the United States. And it's not exactly me because I like to hide. So it's not, except my family, every time they read a chapter from that novel, they say, so this is you, this is what happened to you. And I'm like, no, that's not me. It's hard for writers to be asked, is this real? Because most of it is not for me, at least I don't write creative nonfiction, I fictionalize everything. So yeah, I started writing pretty early, but I started taking it more seriously in college. And then after I started teaching here in McAllen in Texas, I came back to writing again and started publishing short stories.

And also at the same time, I was working on a middle grade fantasy book, which I'm still hoping to write more. I mean, the first book is finished, but I'm trying to find a publisher for it. But I want to write book two and three at this. I mean, in the meantime, short stories is still my, my first interest, because it's, to me, they're, I guess, a more stylized version of reality, because you have to compress it to a point you're making. So that's what I like about them. Just like poems, you tell, you know, you make a point very quickly. Novels tend to meander, right? You have to first expand and then come back together. But with a short story, it just goes directly to what you want to say. Of course, you have to have conflict, you have to have interesting characters,

you have to have some development of course but since i like to teach short stories i like to also write them because also students seem to like that quick feedback from the story right you don't have to wait to see what happens after 10 more chapters you basically find out very soon very quickly you can get right down to it i think i mean short stories are fun like you say there's kind of an economy of words that you're in size that you're dealing with right where you've got you've got to really you know utilize that economy to to narrow it down to where it can be concise but but also effective and also can tell a story as opposed to... And it makes you think, okay, I need to know for myself what I'm trying to say with it.

So, that's what I like also that it gives me, kind of confronts me with the topic much more directly. I can like, oh, I'll find out, I'll figure it out. I'll just write 10 more chapters and then figure out what I'm trying to say. With the short stories, I think first of what is it that I'm trying to address? For example, in reality, something like, for a while, I was very upset about, for example, child molestation in the Catholic Church. I don't know if just because it seemed like it was a topic that was always swept under the rug. So one story came just from that kind of preoccupation, like why are children so vulnerable to such events? And so one story

came from that. And I thought, okay, how do I build a story around it? So I have a mother who goes to confront a priest. And you don't really find out exactly if it's true or not, but, or, I mean, it becomes clear in a way, but the dialogue was what interested me, like kind of the power dynamic between the mother and the priest in that story. And to see how one tries to overpower the other, her, she is the mother of the child. Like he is still, I am trying to trying to direct him in the right direction. And the priest says, but I am a person whose word counts. So this is kind of the dynamic, mother versus mentor, that you don't know if he is evil or not. But yeah, that was an example.

You know, the great thing about short stories is how they tell parables and stuff. The story is kind of much greater than the story in and of itself, right? And the lesson it's trying to teach and maybe the story or message it's trying to convey, would you say that's an accurate portrayal of that? I mean, I don't like... It's true that every story contains some kind of parable or lesson. And I try not to think of, I don't want to be preachy, even though I talk about a preacher. But anyway, I like to, I like to be subtle, hopefully, but I hope that comes across too, that it's not beating you in

the head. But of course, things like, like a topic of this sensitivity level it has to be maybe shocking and maybe it does beat you over the head a little bit but i try to write it in a way that is not so blatant so that's more in the dialogue kind of like hemingway who was focusing more in dialogue than on what happens so to him the tensions between the characters gave kind of the meaning to the story rather than, okay, this happens because of this, and this is the lesson. So I, but other stories, I mean, this is one story about an issue that preoccupied me, but other stories, a couple of stories are written based on really terrible things I saw in the news, not terrible, but to me, they were puzzling.

How could such a thing happen? So I wrote two stories based on just a little piece of news I saw. And this is something that actually William Faulkner did, who's one of my influences. Faulkner is my favorite author in American literature, probably ever my favorite author in American literature, probably ever my favorite author. So he wrote a story called A Rose for Emily. I'm not sure how many people are familiar with it, but it's a story about a woman who

her whole life, she's basically single. But when she dies, it's discovered that she kept this skeleton in her bedroom, who was a man that she was hoping to marry, but she killed him and he disappeared. The town didn't know where he went, but it turns out that she kept him for herself. But anyway, it was a creepy story that Faulkner apparently saw in the news, and it inspired him to imagine the life of those characters. I saw a story about, I think it happened in California a lady who was it was discovered that she was driving in her car with a dead person next to her I think it was another woman I remember and the place I don't know if you remember maybe it was in the news a few years ago

and so they were very puzzled first of all how could you stand the the smell and she said oh I was used to it because my father I took care of my father when he was dying or something. And I just tried to picture what would drive a person to keep a dead person in the car. So what in my imagination, she actually thinks she's alive, the other person. And they talk, they have conversations. This is the story called Driving with Sarah. And Sarah is the person who she picked up as a homeless person. And then I think that was the case in reality, that it was a homeless person that she took in her car and somehow she may have been sick and died and she just kept her there.

So I imagine that she actually never realized she was dead and kept talking to her. And they were painting city walls together in my story. I kind of made up a kind of nice embellishment of maybe she needed company. Yeah. And to tell her life story to somebody. So that's why she's still communicating with her. That's kind of interesting. I mean, I talk to my dogs all the time.

And I think after 10 years, I had this epiphany one day and i'm like you know they've never talked back you're just the one talking to them so you might be the insane one i think we need we need to communicate and i mean maybe writing is a form of insanity too because you're you think you're communicating, but you're not sure who it reaches at all. So it's, I guess. I guess we're all insane if we're writing books then, too, on top of that. Dead bodies in the car. I mean, honestly, it could be. Those express lane fees, especially in California, are expensive.

You've got to have that second body in the car so that you can save on those cameras. Maybe that was the whole motivation. Carpooling with the dead. Carpooling with the dead. There's a title for your next short story. Carpooling with the Dead. Oh, I love it. But it's interesting how these stories, they kind of give us a reflection or a mirror onto human nature and both the greatness of human nature, the hope, you know, what was probably going on in, like we talked about with Romania and under communist rule in North Korea, etc., etc. You know, the great thing about human nature that is its enduring facet, because it helps it endure,

is hope. You know, as long as there's hope, we seem to be able to persevere. And once that hope dies, we tend to die inside. And so, we, you know, we have the ability to hold on to that. What were some of your favorite short story writers? Was there people that inspired you? I do. The one I mentioned, William Faulkner, he stands out more with his novel, not short story. So I do like the stories of James Joyce, who's from around the same period and may probably was an inspiration to Faulkner too but i also like tony morrison as my biggest inspiration not necessarily for her short stories but i do the style especially my favorite book is beloved which is where funny enough the main character is a ghost

that comes back to life so i'm talking about insanity and talking to the dead, but I also like the fact that she, There's a thing going on in the show today. It's interesting to expand our reality to more than just what we see and what we can touch, right? So to her too, her history, the history of slavery and things like that were intangibles. They were still around. Just that's why she created a character that was dead, was still alive, which she was symbolic of the past of slavery.

So I guess I liked the play with life and death and presence and absence and history and present and how the history, the past influences the present. That's kind of what I took out of Beloved. But I also like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which I mentioned before, because I like, again, this magical, realistic take, which is enhancing reality with some elements that are unexpected. And maybe, for example, one of my stories that is magical, realistic, I guess it has magical, realistic elements, is a story that came from a dream of mine.

It's called Valley of the Horse. And all of it has to do with a horse that is dying. And at the end, the owner of the horse picks up the horse and throws him into a valley. But that was in my dream and i tried to unpack my dream and and connected it to maybe some pains of relationships and how part of us dies when something goes badly but the horse kind of represented intense emotion that maybe we let go of so anyway that's kind of my play with symbolism but other writers that i love, I like many writers. James Baldwin is another inspiration who wrote a lot of short stories. Yeah. And Philip Roth. It's Mark Halperin.

These are some stories that I actually teach in class, but my students ask me, why do we read these sad stories? Not all short stories are sad, but a lot of them have a little bit of a darkness to them. And I think that it's harder to write completely happy stories because, you know, we learn from experiences that some of them are painful. And that's something that connects all of us is how we cope with pain. I don't, you know, it may appear that some of my stories have dark themes. I guess I have some, a little bit of Southern Gothic, like Flanny or Connor type or Faulkner

stories, like the one with driving with Sarah, but, but they're not, the message of these stories is not dark. I think, as you said, you know, it's where do we find the hope once something goes bad, when things start crumbling. So for example, I have stories of relationships that, where people lie to each other, and you think that that's going to break them apart. But, but what brings them back together is confronting the lies, right? So things that seem to be negative and bad in our lives, either we get rid of them and move on. And that's another way to hope is to just shift to another purpose that we're all different and we don't necessarily get along.

And that's another part of human growth or experiences is to learn that we have to either move away from people who hurt us or to accept some of each other's flaws to be able to live with each other. So it's complicated. Relationships are complicated. Life is complicated. So it comes with some pain, but I try to put a message that is hopeful in most of the stories,

but sometimes it's not that clear, that obvious where that hope comes from. But through the stories, hopefully it comes across the helpful aspect and you bring up an important point you know but not all not all stories are panaceas of utopia you know life isn't perfect and a lot of things we look for in stories we talk about this a lot on the show is the one thing one thing we can learn from stories is that we're all human, we're not alone, and usually those are the stories that help us get through cathartic

moments. If someone's having a challenge of childhood trauma and someone tells their story of how they had childhood trauma that was similar and how they overcame it and how they triumphed over adversity, these are the stories we love, the Phoenix from the Ashes stories. Exactly. The rise of how hope wins out in the end. And sometimes hope doesn't always pour out in the end. There are stories like the movie.

And that's part of life too, right? Yeah, and that's part of life too. Not only the good people don't always win, good doesn't always win. It's a fact of life. Which makes it all the more important to recognize that so that we can protect goodness from evil and stand up for it. Otherwise, we would probably let it fall over. But, you know, these are the elements that bring forth the best in human nature, help inspire us, help motivate us, help want us to do better. So that's the greatness of what you bring and share to everyone.

As we go out, give people a final pitch to pick up the book and any dot coms where they can find out more about you on the interwebs. Yeah, I'd love for anybody to visit my webpage. And I have not included it in the book itself, but go to Amazon and find the book. And I would suggest right now, it's my name is messed up on Amazon. So I'm going to take care of it.

It's just the middle name that is messed up. So if you just put Leanne Andresen or put the title Whirl of Birds, and people ask me why it's called Whirl of Birds, but that's the one single image that inspired a story that I made the center of the book which is about the passing of time so somehow being in texas introduced me to to new species of birds and their habits and it shocked me one day to see a big world of of i think they

were buzzards but there were like 50 of them or, and they were all kind of going in a little tornado of birds. And that image kind of stuck with me for a while until I decided, okay, this has to be the center of a story. And then it became the center of the book. So, yeah, World of Birds is the title. So, I do have this website that I encourage people to look up. That is lianafragitoro.com or www.lianafragitore.com. And find me on Facebook. I'm there too.

So yeah, I am on social media a lot. Thank you very much for coming on. We really appreciate it, Liana. I'm excited that you had me on and thank you for listening. And I hope somebody picks up the book and loves some of the stories or all of them order the book wherever fine books are sold folks it's called Whirl of Birds

October 25th 2024 it came out watch for future books coming out from Leona as we go along thanks for tuning in be good to each other, stay safe we'll see you guys next time and that should have a sound effect