A Tale Woven from the Threads of Friendship, Magic, and Slavic Lore
Every so often, a book comes along that feels like a revelation, a window into worlds unknown yet strangely familiar. Naomi Novik’s Uprooted is one such rare gem. It’s a story steeped in Slavic folklore, infused with a magic that’s both exhilarating and terrifying.
For me, it was more than just a read; it re-ignited and validated a passion for Polish and Slavic fantasy that I had ignored for far too long.
Uprooted whisks us away to a world where magic is as real as the earth underfoot, and danger lurks in the malevolent Wood bordering a quiet village. Every ten years, the Dragon, a powerful wizard, takes a young woman from the village as payment for protecting them.
The story unfolds through the eyes of Agnieszka, an unlikely heroine chosen by the Dragon. But this is no simple tale of heroism; it’s a complex weave of friendship, loyalty, and the battle against an encroaching, corrupting evil.
Novik’s narrative is a masterpiece of storytelling, blending a rich, character-driven plot with a vividly realized magical world. The Slavic myths of dragons, haunted forests, walking trees, and Baba Yagas woven into the story sparked a new appreciation and hunger for this genre in me, much like discovering a hidden path in a well-trodden forest.
For readers who like a little romance in their fantasy, there is definitely some enemies-to-lovers sexual tension going on between Agnieszka and the Dragon. (There is some sexual content, so this book is probably for adults.)
However, one of my favorite parts of the book was the deep, loyal friendship between Agnieszka and her best friend Kasia. Their loyalty and support for each other, in a world that’s falling apart, resonated deeply with me. As a writer and reader who cherishes strong, complex female relationships in literature, Uprooted felt like a treasure trove.
Novik’s skill lies in her ability to create a world that’s immersive and fully realized, and in creating female characters that are heroic, practical, and full of heart. Her writing is clever, masterful, and imbued with compassion that’s often missing in high-concept fantasy.
For those of us who have followed her work, Uprooted stands out as a testament to her prowess as a storyteller. Her exploration of Slavic mythology is not just a backdrop but an integral part of the narrative, making the story rich and authentically grounded in folklore.
In Uprooted, Novik has crafted a narrative that feels both timeless and timely. The infusion of Slavic lore into the fantasy genre provides a fresh perspective, filling a gap many of us didn’t know existed. It’s a reminder of the power of stories to transcend boundaries, offering a glimpse into a rich cultural tapestry that’s often overlooked in mainstream fantasy.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik is more than just a fantasy novel; it’s a journey into the heart of folklore, friendship, and the fight against darkness. Its blend of Slavic mythology with compelling characters makes it a must-read for fans of the genre.
If you, like me, are captivated by stories that weave magic with realism and bring folklore to life, then Uprooted will not disappoint.
If you want to learn about more books like this, don’t forget to sign up for my VIP Reader’s Club for more book reviews, articles about slavic lore, and updates on my current works in progress. As a Thank You for signing up for my Reader’s Club, you will receive a FREE short story from me, showcasing my own work in this slavic fantasy world.
Welcome to the beginning of 2024! Hurray! I’m still alive! And if you are reading this, then you are still alive too!
I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on some of my milestones and accomplishments of last year.
I’m not a full-time writer, so the writing I do is mostly woven in and out of my other responsibilities. But I have identified as a writer and storyteller since I was 9 years old, and I have been working steadily towards that passion ever since then.
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse…coming January 30, 2024!
I drew illustrations for my forthcoming short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About The Apocalypse. You can read about my artistic process and view some of the drawings in this blog post here. I loved the process of illustrating my short stories, and I think that I definitely plan on continuing to incorporate art into my future works somehow.
My manuscript for What We Talk About is finally finished!
Here is a photo of me holding a sample copy, which arrived just in time for Christmas. I have a few little proofreading edits to make, but the book will live and be ready for sale on Amazon, January 30, 2024.
It’s very exciting to finally have a publication date! This collection has been a labor of love, encompassing the last 17 years of my work, and it’s so exciting to have all my stories from a particular era of my life collected in one spot.
One of the short stories from that collection, “Prove It” was published online at Club Chixculub. You can read or listen to me reading the story here, on their website, along with many other wonderful short stories. I have to say, I love the spooky music the editors have behind the audio-recordings of the short stories.
Experiments with ChatGPT
I was interviewed for “The Imaginary Possible” podcast about my experiences with ChatGPT. You can read my blog post about it and find a link to listen to the interview.
I have to say, the more I play around with ChatGPT, the more excited I get about its potential. I have been experimenting with integrating it more into my workflow, in various different aspects of my writing. (Although this blog post was written completely by me.)
As part of my son’s 4th grade schoolwork, he and I co-wrote a middle grade fantasy chapter book with ChatGPT4. This is part of the California Common Core requirements to take a piece of writing from concept to publication — but it was also a wonderful opportunity for us to learn how to blend our human skills with this new technology.
This project was really interesting, because I have never co-written a book with anyone before. (My only co-writing experiences are from school, where I ended up doing all the work and the bums I was partnered with took half the credit.) It was interesting to co-write with my own child and with an AI. It was delightful!
The majority of the credit for this project belongs to my son. He was the director, the creative engineer, the final decision-maker. It was his story idea, his vision. My role was basically to act as a typist, and as a facilitator, guiding my son through asking ChatGPT the right questions.
We told Chat our concept and asked it to create an outline for us. We edited the outline until we liked the story. Then, we drafted the book, one scene at a time, by adding our ideas to our day’s scene, and then asking Chat to fill in the rest.
The results were surprisingly good! Definitely on par with some of the Scholastic chapter books my son has checked out from the library.
After the first draft was done, we took the book through several editing passes, and multiple Beta readers to get their feedback. We are considering adding illustrations to the book and hoping to publish it in 2024.
I can absolutely see what a major disruptive technology Large Language Models like ChatGPT are going to be for creativity and education. For certain types of work, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between what was written by a human and what was written by a computer.
In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a book I read a few years ago called The Most Human Human: What Talking to Computers Teaches Us About What It Means To Be Alive, by Brian Christian. I read this book many years ago, but it feels incredibly prescient. In this non-fiction book, the author talks about the Turing test and how it is inevitable that computers would pass it (which AI has) and that his personal challenge in taking the test in 2009 was to come across as more human than the computers.
We humans liked to separate ourselves from other animals by saying that we could “reason” better than they could. Where do we fit now that we have created machines that can reason better than us?
I’m definitely thinking about revisiting this book.
In the past few months of playing with ChatGPT, it’s definitely clear that it’s going to replace some jobs — probably a lot of jobs. And that’s scary.
I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m hoping that AI will help create more new opportunities than it will destroy.
I think I’d be more freaked out if wasn’t so darn helpful.
For example, I’m really excited about ChatGPT’s illustration function that it can do. I’m a passable artist, but I can definitely see myself using illustrations in places where I wouldn’t have used illustrations before. I’ve asked ChatGPT to help me with my fiction writing by helping me outline a new series I’m noodling on. I’ve asked it to help edit my scenes. I’ve asked it for help in generating marketing material. It’s just so useful. The more I play with it, the better I get asking it the right questions so that I get the result I want.
I have been planning my own “career pivot” with my fiction writing.
My 17-Year Creative Pivot
For years, I’ve been struggling to define myself as a writer and to make a specific decision about my audience and my voice. I waffled between literary, contemporary, fantasy, horror, and romance.
During the past two years of working on my short story collection, I have been doing some soul-searching on what my personal “Id list” is. The term “Id list” is based on Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s lecture to the romance Writers Association about finding what sparks joy for you and writing that. (Fans of Marie Kondo’s Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up will also be familiar with the “sparks joy” concept.)
Going through my bookshelves in 2021, I found out that a lot of the books I read did not spark joy. Most of them felt like homework. So I donated them all, and started only reading books that excite me.
And you know what? I read so many more books once I started picking books that gave me pleasure rather than books I felt like I was supposed to read in order to seem smart and writerly. In 2022 I read more than 140 books, and in 2023, I read more than 120 books. That’s more than double than what I previously read each year!
I also created a master list of all my story ideas — more than 500 of them! I held each idea, and started asking myself if I actually wanted to write this, or if it was just a fleeting thought that appealed to me intellectually, but which had no passion connected with it.
The more I interrogated my own ideas — particularly by trying out some concepts in the form of outlining, or scenes, or as short stories — the better I got at determining which ideas really thrilled me, and which ideas I was ready to let go of.
I had been holding on to some of those project ideas for a long time. Years.
And I’ll be honest: it felt really liberating to quit some of them.
The fastest way to finish a project is to quit it.
I know some people feel tremendous sadness at the thought of quitting a project—especially if it’s one they’ve nurtured for a long time. But for me, quitting most of these ideas felt like a huge relief. I was no longer shackled to the brain-children of my twenty-year-old self. I am a vastly different woman now than I was then. At last, I’m free to pursue the things that excite me now, today.
I think part of my easy-come, easy-go attitude comes from the fact that I have so many ideas. There’s more where that came from. Ideas are limitless. It’s time that is limited.
I still wanted to pay honor my past. And that is where my collection What We Talk About comes in. This book is an homage to past experiences and anxieties. This is the best of what 20-37-year-old me could come up with. These are the finest gems. The darkest, most haunting tales. And I’m so proud of that project.
But I’m also looking forward to what I will be doing next.
During NaNoWriMo, I started writing a new collection of short stories, tentatively titled Beads of Amber. These stories are Polish-inspired fairy tales, historical fantasy, and speculative fantasy stories inspired by some of the bedtime stories I remember being told by my mother and grandmother.
I’m reluctant to give it a publication deadline, but this is definitely the direction I see myself going in the future.
I’ve also started brainstorming a fairy tale romance series set in this Central European fantasy world, specifically having to do with the local legends of certain cities. The Dragon of Krakow. The Mermaid of Warsaw. That type of thing.
To keep you readers in the loop of my changing focus, I’ve been doing my best to blog a little more regularly. I’ve been blogging almost weekly since October, and this is a habit I hope to continue.
I hope to provide more book reviews of books that have a similar focus to what I’m working on, so that while you wait for me to write my next book, you can find a sampling of other works that I find inspiring, and which have a similar focus to the projects I’m working on.
I’m also toying around with doing a sort of “Monster Guide” blog series of all the fantastic Slavic fairy creatures I’m learning about. I’m tentatively planning on titling it Slavic Spirits, and it’s a project I hope to launch in 2024.
If you are interested in following along on my journey, please consider signing up for my Reader’s Club newsletter. As a Thank You, I’ll send you a free copy of one of the short stories that will be included in my Beads of Amber collection.
I hope your new year holds many wonderful things for you.
Are fairy creatures really aliens from another universe?
Imagine a world where fairy creatures aren’t just myths, but hostile aliens from a parallel universe. This is the brilliantly bizarre reality of Mercedes Lackey’s “Hunter Trilogy,” a page-turning blend of fantasy and young adult post-apocalyptic fiction. This concept of fairies, elves, mages, and other magical creatures being from the “Otherlands” should be familiar to anyone who is a fan of portal fantasy and multiverse parallel universe fantasy. Mercedes Lackey adds an interesting spin to it by setting her story in post-apocalyptic America.
This series would especially appeal readers who liked Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games and Victoria Aveyard’s Red Queen series, as it has a similar dystopian flavor.
In the Hunter series, which includes Hunter, Elite, and Apex, Lackey introduces us to a dystopian Earth where the boundaries between worlds have thinned, unleashing a horde of mythological creatures intent on eating humans and kidnapping their children.
In this chaos, Hunters, elite warriors with magical abilities, are humanity’s last line of defense in protecting the dwindling human population from invading magical beasts.
The protagonist, Joyeaux Charmand, is a teenage Hunter who navigates this dangerous new world with a mix of bravery, practicality, and wisdom. Through her eyes, we experience the thrill and terror of combating otherworldly beings, while also grappling with the backstabbing politics of her ratings-driven society.
For readers who aren’t yet familiar with Mercedes Lackey’s work, I definitely recommend the Hunter series as an entry-point.
Diving into Mercedes Lackey’s extensive bibliography, it’s clear why she has been called one of the most prolific fantasy authors of all time.
As I perused her backlist, I was surprised to find a bunch of books I had read as a teenager, including Elvenbane, which was co-written with Andre Norton, and Lackey’s hugely popular Valdemar universe, which is a cornerstone of the fantasy genre. Lackey’s ability to continuously produce compelling, diverse narratives is a testament to her unwavering creativity and dedication to the fantasy genre.
Even though Mercedes Lackey will write many books in a fantasy world, she will often write in trilogies, so you can dip your toe into one of her worlds, enjoy a complete series arc in three books, and if you decide you like it there are plenty more in that world to enjoy.
One of her series that I’m looking forward to reading more of is her Elemental Masters series, which are historical fantasy re-telling of fairy tales, but set during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
For those interested in exploring more of her imaginative universe, a visit to her website offers a gateway to her literary world.
If you would like more book recommendations like this, consider signing up for my Reader’s Club. As a thank you gift, you will receive a free short story from me, along with updates on my works in progress every month or so.
When I was a child, my dad was vegetarian, so as a default, our whole family was vegetarian. Back in the ye olde days of the 1980s and 1990s, being vegetarian was considered weird. Getting take out food was a challenge, but luckily my mother was a fantastic cook. At home, she would make vegetable soups, broccoli sautéed in butter, and delicious salads.
A Meaty Detour
When my parents got divorced, I stopped being vegetarian. My first taste of meat was when I was twelve years old. It was a star-shaped chicken nugget from a drive-through fast food restaurant. It tasted like a deep-fried kitchen sponge, but it was fascinating to find out what all fuss was about meat. From then on, I did eat meat, but I never lost my preference for vegetable dishes.
In my opinion, what makes meat taste good is actually the sauces and marinades, which are made out of vegetables—usually some variation of tomato and garlic. Once you’ve chewed out the sauce, what’s left pretty flavorless.
However, I liked the social capital of not being the “weird vegetarian” that other people had to accommodate. It made things easier when I went over to friends’ houses.
The Wake-Up Call
Everything changed in 2019 when I was diagnosed with vasculitis and prediabetes. My doctor at Kaiser suggested two nutrition classes: a meat-based ‘Pre-diabetes and Me’ class and a plant-based nutrition class. The former felt like a slide into despair, while the latter, led by an inspiring teacher, presented a hopeful path toward reversing chronic diseases. You can read more about my health journey here. The stark contrast between the nihilism of the prediabetes class and the optimism of the plant-based diet class made going vegan the obvious choice.
Making the Switch
On May 5, 2019, I cleared out my kitchen of all animal products. The following books and resources were incredibly help to me in making the transition:
The biggest help of all was the Forks Over Knives Meal Planner because it basically takes out all the mental labor for what to cook and what to buy. The weekly recipes helped me switch from someone who dreaded cooking, to someone who actually enjoys it.
Whole-food, plant-based diets are way cheaper than meat-heavy and processed food diets. An annual subscription to the meal planner more than pays for itself with how much we are saving on groceries and not spending on medical bills. (Note: I’m not sponsored by Forks Over Knives in any way. I keep recommending them, because I love their food.)
Transitioning Tips
I went vegan overnight, but most people usually need to ease into it more slowly. I recommend signing up for the Forks Over Knives meal planner, and start by switching one meal a week over the course of a month. (Week 1: Vegan breakfasts; Week 2: Vegan breakfasts and lunches; Week 3: All meals vegan!)
Remember, just because something is labeled “vegan” doesn’t mean it is healthy. Oreos are vegan. Potato chips are vegan. A healthy vegan meal is built around the four food groups — whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits — in as close to their original form as you can get. This is why people sometimes refer to this as a “plant-based, whole-food diet” rather than a “vegan diet.” This means the majority of your shopping happens in the produce section.
A whole food, plant based diet has a lot more fiber than most people on the standard American diet are used to. This means that your microbiome will need to change to help you digest all this fiber. A slow transition over the course of several weeks or months will help you avoid surprising gut issues.
A varied diet of whole grains, legumes, nuts, and vegetables has all the protein you need. But I generally build at least one meal a day around legumes, for the protein and iron. Eating legumes legumes has been shown to increase lifespan. Bean burrito lunches are my favorite, but I also like vegetable soups with lentils, quinoa, chickpeas, and peas. I also make my own hummus and blended sauces using chickpeas as a base.
In order to avoid all the salt in canned beans, I usually batch-cook my week’s legumes in an instant pot during the weekend.
What about B12?(And vitamin D, and iron, etc.)
Surprisingly, people who eat meat and dairy are also low on B12. This is because this essential nutrient is made from bacteria in healthy water and soil — which we no longer have in many places. Animals in the livestock industry get their B12 from nutrition supplements in their feed. Vegans need to get their B12 from multivitamins and fortified foods.
During the covid pandemic, many of us discovered how important Vitamin D is for healthy immune systems. Your body can make Vitamin D when exposed to sunshine, or you can take a supplement.
Iron is also important for immune system function, and menstruating women are sometimes at risk for being anemic. I make sure there is plenty of iron in my diet by pairing legumes with a vitamin C source — or example: beans and tomatoes, lentils and peppers, chickpeas and lemon — because the vitamin C helps the body absorb more of the iron than the body would otherwise.
When making any dietary switch, it’s important to check in with your doctor and get all of your blood levels checked to see if you have any specific needs you need to address. You should also get a doctor’s check-up every year to ensure your blood levels are healthy.
Beyond Diet: Ethics and Environment
My primary motivation for going vegan was selfish self-preservation.
However, the ethical and environmental aspects are important to me as well.
Books like Eating Animal by Jonathan Safran Foer and Mind if I Order the Cheeseburger by Sherry F. Colb, and the documentary Dominion really broadened my understanding of the ethical treatment of animals. (Content Warning: Dominion shows animal slaughter and animal cruelty in graphic detail. Do not watch with kids!)
The documentaries Cowspiracy and Before the Flood make a strong case that what we choose to eat every day has a tremendous impact on our environment.
I think that eating meat made sense, back in the old days when the global population was half a billion people, and when peak life expectancy was 35. Back then, animal flesh was basically a walking savings account for calories to keep us humans from starving to death when the only food available was snow-covered grass.
But we live in a different world now. There are more than 8 billion people and industrial food production has come a long way. As a species, we face different challenges than our ancestors did, and the best thing for our survival is to change our habits and evolve—rather than continue to cling to some romanticized, macho version of the past.
We’re witnessing a paradigm shift in awareness about the health, social, and environmental consequences of eating animals.
For me, veganism a positive and pro-active way to not just be healthier by avoiding chronic disease, it’s also a way for me to live my values by being kind to animals and in doing my part to solve world hunger and lower my environmental impact. Everything about it feels good to me. It is one simple choice that has tremendous benefit to myself and others.
My only regret is that I didn’t go vegan sooner.
Navigating Social Settings
Dealing with social settings as a vegan can be challenging sometimes, but over the years I’ve developed some strategies.
I let people know I’m vegan, but I don’t go into detail about it unless they want to know more. I wrote this blog post to answer some of the frequently asked questions I get about being vegan.
I eat beforehand. When hanging out with friends, it’s not a given that there will be vegan options available. If my family or friends give me the option of choosing the restaurant, I like to check HappyCow.net for restaurants with vegan options.
I bring my own food … plus plenty extra to share. If I’m going over to a friend or family member’s house, I usually bring my own food and enough food to feed everybody else.
If all else fails, I chose the best available option—which sometimes means ordering a baked potato and doing my best to scrape out the butter and pick out the bacon bits. 😝
When I was a child, I would always hear my mom and grandmother speak Polish together, but since their husbands were both monolingual English speakers, they mostly spoke English when their husbands were around so that nobody would feel excluded.
Me, age 10, wearing traditional Polish dress.
The way they tell it, I was bilingual as a small child, but since English was the dominant language at home, my vocabulary never really expanded beyond that of a toddler’s. The fact that I never really learned how to speak Polish has always felt like something of a family shame.
In fact, it’s not unusual for the children of immigrants to lose their heritage language, unless tremendous efforts are made to preserve it and pass it on. My experience is pretty similar to that of Marissa Blaszko of Relearn A Language, who grew up speaking Polish but who lost her native language when she started attending her English-only public school. (If anyone else is in the situation of wanting to relearn their heritage language, I highly recommend her website and her YouTube channel @Relearnalanguage!)
“I had no idea that the language could be so easily lost,” my mom said. “For some reason, I thought it was just going to be transferred to you in utero. I thought that because I spoke Polish, you would also speak Polish.”
It’s hard to explain how deeply I yearned to speak Polish. The sound of the language is like poetry to my ears. It is the sound of love, of my mother, of laughter, of warm food, of soft hugs and kisses, and of being cared for. For me, the language of love is Polish.
I would have dreams in Polish where I could fluently speak and understand the language. And then when I would wake up and feel so disappointed, because the language-barrier was back. Not being able to speak Polish felt like there was a wall cutting me off from a whole section of myself. Not having access to this beautiful romantic, cherished language was like not having access to a piece of my own soul.
Multiple times throughout my childhood, I would try to learn Polish. But we didn’t live in a place with a large enough Polish community to offer external support. There were no Polish Saturday schools in our area. Polish is such a minority language that it was really hard to acquire study materials. Polish was not one of the foreign languages taught at my high school. (Or at my college, or at my graduate school.)
So we’d start at square-one—over and over again. Just naming things around the house. Bread; chleb. Tea; herbate. Food; jedzenie.
We never got very far.
The amount of times I would need vocabulary repeated far outstripped everybody’s patience. We didn’t know it then, but what I needed was a spaced repetition system (SRS). Spaced repetition is a learning technique where you basically get reminded of something at ever-increasing intervals until it moves into long-term memory. But we didn’t have these tools then. It was just me and my mom and my grandma, walking around the house naming things. Within a few days, all efforts would be abandoned. I would feel stupid, and everyone would feel frustrated.
When I was in college, I decided to study abroad to learn more about my Polish roots. Unfortunately, my school didn’t have a direct relationship with any universities in Poland. The closest I could get was Charles University in Prague—which is in the Czech Republic. (Not Poland, but at least on the same continent!)
Before my semester began, I spent a month traveling in Poland. My grandmother had a couple of contacts in Warsaw and Krakow, and these two women were my hosts. They took me all over: Warsaw, Malbork castle, Gdansk, Krakow, the Wieliczka salt mines, Zakopane, and the Tatra Mountains.
Me, WarsawMe, Malbork Castle
Getting to visit Poland for a month was an incredibly meaningful experience to me. It touched a deep place in my heart to hear the language surrounding me, spoken everywhere. And I even started to pick it up, because the sounds and grammar were so familiar to me from when I was a baby.
And it was exciting to me to see modern Poland. It is sometimes said that people know more about Mars than about Poland. Poland is a medium-sized country of 41 million people. It has a larger population than Greece, Canada, Taiwan, Sweden, and Australia—and yet few Americans could find it on a map. The Western perception of Poland is frozen time with black-and-white photos of World War II rubble and communist block housing.
But then my semester started. I had to go to Prague—which was a wonderful experience, but it didn’t bring me any closer to learning Polish. When I returned to America a few months later, I was glad to be reunited with my family, but I also felt tremendously sad at leaving Europe. I felt like my time there was not yet finished.
When I was a graduate student earning my MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State, I made another attempt to learn Polish. And this time I got further than ever before. I studied the Pimsleur audio recordings, which used an audio-only spaced repetition system. That year, I was finally able to have rudimentary conversations in Polish with my mother and grandmother.
This was a good start, but the Pimsleur language course only stopped after only 30 lessons, and then I was stuck again.
Occasionally, I would try to write letters and translate recipes, using Google Translate, but at the time (in the early 2010s) it was a terrible translator.
It would be another ten years before I studied Polish again.
So what changed?
Firstly, I underwent a series of traumatic health issues. You can read more about that here, but the upshot was that I became much more pro-active and intentional about my health and well-being.
One of the things that was especially transformative for me was strength training. This was something I never thought I would do, and yet week after week I was constantly surprising myself by doing things I never thought my body could do. I saw amazing benefits applying consistent pressure over a long period of time.
It was incredibly empowering. My body felt transformed, but I was also noticing inner benefits.
“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
A. A. Milne
I was two years into my strength-training journey, when the thought occurred to me, If I can do this, what else can I do?
There is a saying that the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today. The same can be said of language learning. So I dug in my heels and decided that this time, I was finally going to learn Polish and I wasn’t going to stop until I could speak it fluently.
My 40th birthday was a few years away, and this was a gift I wanted to give my future 40-year-old self.
(I also committed to finally following through with all my paperwork to confirm my Polish citizenship and get my Polish passport. My son and I both qualify for dual-citizenship, but the paperwork is a multi-step, multi-year process…and I’ll leave that for another blog post.)
It was around this time that I saw this Kurzgesagt video: “Changing Your Life—One Step at a Time.” There is a moment in the video that talks about becoming the person you want to be with daily habits to shorten the distance between who you are and who you want to be. One of the examples they give is of learning a language while doing push-ups. And I thought, I could do that.
Thankfully, language learning technology has come a long way since the last time I attempted to learn Polish.
I started with the Duolingo, which had finally created a Polish course.
Duolingo is an excellent, free language learning program that gives you quick 3-minute immersive language lessons that are in a gamified format. Duolingo is so good that students can actually learn a language faster with Duolingo than if they were taking a college class. The sentences are funny, the courses are built around spaced repetition, so that they remind you of a word just when you are about to forget. And you can look up words if you need to: no judgement.
I love Duolingo and I’ve even gotten the rest of my family hooked. My husband is learning Spanish. My mom is learning Italian. As of this writing, my son has a Duolingo streak that is more than 460 days long in Polish and Spanish!
Starting in July 2022, I studied like a mad woman, fueled by 30+ years of existential frustration. For an entire month, I was working at a pace of one whole unit a day. I was studying three hours a day at least, sometimes more. I studied until my brain felt like mush.
I completed the entire Polish Duolingo course less than 100 days. There were only 42 units in the Polish course (as opposed to 400 units in Spanish) but this was enough to finally get me over the hump!
In language, learning terms, getting to the end of Duolingo, plus having studied Pimsleur probably put me at the late beginner, CEFR A2 level. If you want to know what the CEFR levels are, you can watch this helpful video by Olly Richards. When I went to spend Christmas with my mother and grandmother that year, I was able to have full on conversations with them in Polish, and start reading simple graphic novels.
After completing Duolingo, I started doing a whole bunch of research about what to do next. Marissa Blaszko at Relearning a Language has a great resource for putting together your own language-learning plan. I found a whole host of amazing resources for learning polish, which I will link down below.
This is my current learning strategy:
Learn 10 new words a day from a frequency dictionary using the Anki mobile app.
According to Paul Pimsleur’s book How to Learn a Foreign Language, the slowest part of language acquisition is learning new vocabulary and moving that vocabulary from short term memory to long term memory. He recommends aiming to learn about 10 new words a day. It’s possible to do more, but given that language learning usually takes a few years, most people can sustainably do about new 10 words say. That has been the most comfortable pace for me.
One of the best way to get those new words into long-term memory is to used a spaced-repetition system. I like using Anki, which is basically a flashcard app, favored by language learners and medical students.
I put a lot of effort into making high-quality flashcards, but once I have them all set up, the daily practice of studying new words usually takes less than 30 minutes, spread out in short bursts throughout the day.
Choosing which words study is incredibly important for making progress because not all words are used equally. As Nathaniel Drew explains in this video, it’s best to focus on an essential core of vocabulary and then extend that in widening circles.
I’ve been putting my flashcards together using this series of Polish Frequency Dictionaries:
As of December 2023, I’m currently about two-thirds of the way through studying this book and I have been astonished at how effective it has been in expanding my vocabulary.
By the time I finish studying this book, my vocabulary will be big enough to know 92% of spoken Polish, and 82% of written Polish.
Polish grammar is different than English grammar. It has seven grammatical cases, and it doesn’t have a lot of articles. Instead, the beginnings and endings of the words themselves change to indicate what is happening in the sentence. Basically this means that it is complicated enough to warrant getting grammar books and just slowly plugging through them, one lesson at a time.
– Marissa Blaszko recommends the Krok po Kroku textbook series. However, this book is written all in Polish, which is great in some ways…but also intimidating.
Polish grammar resources I have found helpful…
Basic Polish Grammar by Dana Bielec—Has English explanations of Polish grammar rules, along with plenty of exercises, exceptions, and an answer key in the back.
Polish for Dummies by Daria Gabryanczyk—Really breaks down basics of Polish grammar and provides a list of common phrases a person might use while traveling.
I also like the Course of Polish YouTube channel because the teacher draws helpful charts and comes up with cute mnemonic devices to help remember the rules.
The biggest help of all has been asking ChatGPT to be my Polish language tutor. This video by Bri Does AI has some helpful tips for how to go about this. My strategy has basically been to ask it things like:
“Can you explain the nominative grammatical case to me?”
“Can you give me 25 example sentences of the genitive case, with the words in that case written in bold?”
“I’m going to write 10 Polish sentences in the present tense. Could you rewrite these sentences in the past tense and future tense, and show me in bold what you changed about my sentence to change verb tenses?”
Immersion in 5 main areas
Reading—Years ago, I was really inspired by this blog post on LinguaTrek, which was about the author’s experience of learning Polish by reading Harry Potter. I really love the idea of this method.
Round 1: Get the gist of the passage. Underline words you don’t know, but don’t look them up. Just see if you can figure out what the passage is about. It’s really great to have the audiobook as well, so that you can learn the pronunciation and inflection of what you are reading.
Round 2: Slow, detailed read where you look up every single word you don’t know, and make a list to add to your SRS system.
Round 3: Once you’ve learned all the new words, read it again.
Round 4: Read aloud, either along with an audiobook or with a native speaker. Your aim is for speed and fluency.
I love reading, and I’ve been working up to being able to do more of this. This year I only managed to read five books in Polish (mostly graphic novels or audiobooks), but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to transition to middle grade and young adult novels in this upcoming year. It’s rather difficult to find Polish books in America, so I’ve been ordering them online from The Polish Bookstore online and the Apple Bookstore, which seems to have a wider selection of books in Polish than Amazon or Audible. There are also a handful of public domain Polish classics on LibroVox and the Project Gutenberg.
I’ve also had the language on my phone set to Polish for about a year.
Writing—I’ve been writing weekly letters to my mother and grandmother in Polish, with the help of Google Translate. I’ve also been Bullet Journaling in Polish since September 2022.
Listening— Linsdey Does Languages has a helpful tutorial for setting up your Netflix account to show films in your target language. I’ve set up multiple language accounts for both our family’s Netflix and DisneyPlus accounts. Truthfully, though, I don’t watch much TV so most of my Polish listening has been YouTube channels like Dave z Ameryki, podcasts, music playlists, and audiobooks.
I asked ChatGPT to create a music playlist for me based on the music I like. You can listen to that playlist here. What’s neat about YouTube Music is that it will also show the lyrics, so occasionally I will translate the lyrics, if I can’t figure out what the song is about just based on listening.
I found a really cool app (that I haven’t made much use of yet) called LingoClip, which is basically an app that helps you learn language through singing karaoke. Awesome!
Speaking—This is my weakest area. I could be doing so much more, but I’m still quite shy. My mother and grandmother are absolutely thrilled every time I speak to them in Polish, so I aspire to do it more often. This year, I did recently have a conversation with my mom that lasted 30 minutes, all in Polish.
Culture and History—I found this wonderful website called Culture.PL which has excellent articles on Polish history and culture. I subscribe to their newsletter.
Since I’m a writer, I’ve also been reading as much as I can about Polish history, literature, mythology, and about slavic culture for some wonderful books I’m planning on writing at some point in the future.
I have begun writing historical fantasy short stories set in Poland. I hope to collect these interconnected short stories into a book, tentatively called Beads of Amber. I’ll keep you all posted on my progress.
I’m also considering writing an illustrated collection of Polish fairy tales and myths, tentatively titled Slavic Spirits, similar in style to D’Aulaire’s books of Greek and Norse myths.
The first time I saw these books was when I was about 12 or 13 years old, in a Barnes & Noble.
Going to a Barnes & Noble was a major treat for me. I would head straight to the back shelf to the fantasy and science fiction section. I was super into witches and sword and sorcery fantasy back then. (I still am.)
I remember distinctly the cover with the red dragon, and the two hooded witches riding their horses. I opened the book and fell in love from the very first paragraph, where we learn about Isabeau, the young apprentice witch growing up talking to animals in her hidden valley. She had to learn witchcraft in secret because magic has been made illegal in the Scots-inspired alternate universe of Eileanan.
The concept behind the magical world of Eileanan is that the witches, fairies, and other mystical creatures of Celtic Scotland had magically created a portal through space and time and landed in a world with two moons, which happened to have its own tribes of indigenous fairies and mer-folk.
The book is written using a lot of Scottish idioms like “augh!” and “ken” and the characters swagger about wearing kilts and tam-o-shanters. The Scottish dialect is a little bit silly at first, but you quickly get used to it.
When I was a teenager, I absolutely fell in love with this world. For years, whenever I would go to a bookstore, I would race to the back shelves to see if there was another book in the series.
Back in the ye-olde-days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was hard for brick-and-mortar stores to carry an entire fantasy series. Alas, I never finished the series as a teenager because the books never seemed to be on the shelf. (I think I was only ever able to find the first three books: The Witches of Eileanan, The Pool of Two Moons, and The Cursed Towers.)
Even so, the world that Kate Forsyth built had a huge impact on my worldview because it was so feminist.
I loved that the female characters were fully-developed, major players in this world. I loved that much of the book was built around female relationships—friendships, mentor-mentees, colleagues.
And there were so many different types of women: old, young, power-hungry, naive, athletic, femme, tom-boyish, motherly…it felt like there was a huge spectrum of the female experience that got represented in this book.
It really mattered to me that I was getting to see a representation of women that was as complex as all the women I knew in real life.
Fast forward fifteen years later and I was a mother in my late twenties up in the middle of the night nursing a little baby. My mind started to wander and all of the sudden I remembered Kate Forsyth’s name.
I looked her up on Amazon and OMG, the entire series was available!
Book 1: The Witches of Eileanan (The title in America. Outside the USA, the book was titled Dragonclaw.
I downloaded the entire series and immediately started binge-reading every spare moment I had, thumbing through the pages on the Kindle app on my phone. I read while pushing my son in a swing. I read while nursing. I read in the middle of the night, with the white text glowing against the black background.
What a delight it was to finally find out what happened to Isabeau. After more than a decade of waiting, I finally got to complete the series!
Now I’m in my late thirties, and my son has recently begun to fall in love with sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy books. His love of fantasy started with the Dragon Masters series of chapter books by Tracey West, and has continued with the Eragon, Inheritance Cycle series by Christopher Paolini.
I recently downloaded the audiobook editions of the Witches of Eileanan series, and I have begun re-listening to the books to remind myself of the story before I introduce the series to my son.
I love listening to the audiobook-version of this series, because I’m actually hearing the Scottish pronunciation and noting how it differed from the other two times I read this series and I only had my mind to sound out the words.
It is incredibly rare to find a series of books that holds up over time—a world you can enjoy in multiple decades of your life. I loved the The Witches of Eileanan series as a teenager, as a young mother, and now as a grown woman nearing my forties.
This is my third time through and Eileanan is still one of my top favorite fantasy worlds. I love how feminist the world is. I love all of the folklore, and the magic system, and the relationships between the characters are still solid. These books pass the Bechtel test over and over again.
I definitely recommend the series to anyone who loves sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy. I’m so glad that Kate Forsyth wrote it. I can’t wait to read some of her other books, which re-imagine fairy tales from a feminist perspective.
