BookishlyJewish: Night Owls was such a fun book, can you talk about the inspiration behind it?
A.R. Vishny: For me the starting point was place. I lived in the East Village in law school, at one point about a block over from the real-life cinema that inspired The Grand Dame, Village East by Angelika. That neighborhood (like all of New York City) has a lot of very interesting history that’s hiding in plain sight, it makes a great haunt for ghosts and supernatural creatures.
I started brainstorming in 2021 at the point when all the good things about NYC were still shuttered because of the pandemic. That setting was a natural choice because in that moment, I wanted to be enjoying the movie theaters, restaurants, bakeries, and other cultural life of that neighborhood, instead of being trapped in my apartment. That became the guiding philosophy of this project: I was going to center the things I love and the history I find interesting, and pack as much of that into the book as possible, so that the finished product would be the kind of YA book that I as a reader would have been obsessed with.
BookishlyJewish: Most people have never heard of an estrie before, when did you first encounter these mysterious owl women, and when did you know you would write a book about them?
A.R. Vishny: I first heard about them at a talk Rena Rossner gave at the Highlights Jewish Symposium, back in 2019. I was enamored with the idea of Jewish vampires as someone who came of age during the first wave of YA vampires. Specifically, the detail that caught my attention was the fact that for Estries, their power is literally tied up in their hair, and that they can fly when they let their hair down. A lot of my Jewish feelings are tied up in my hair (which is very thick and curly and kind of stereotypically what people imagine when they hear “Jewish hair”), so the idea that it might be a source of supernatural abilities was instantly appealing. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the idea then, so I filed that away until I could come back to it for the right project.
BoookishlyJewish: It’s clear you have a passion for Yiddish theater, even though you most definitely were not around for its glory days. How did that happen?
A.R. Vishny: Oh yeah…totally….err…wasn’t there for that…*tightens messy bun, hides bag of challah and salt*
In all seriousness though, I have always been a theater nerd, but my first encounters with Yiddish theater actually date back to a couple of courses I took in undergrad on the history of Jews in comic books and graphic novels. The professor I had for both courses emphasized the importance of Yiddish theater for understanding Jewish comic book history, that their histories and legacies were linked. In that class, we watched pieces of the Yiddish plays that were adapted to film and I loved them, particularly The Dybbuk and Yidl Mitn Fidl. Once I moved to NYC, I had access to and started taking advantage of the endless amount of live theater, including Yiddish theater and Yiddish-theater-adjacent work. I am a huge fan of the work of Folksbiene, the Yiddish theater company based out of the Museum of Jewish Heritage and which perhaps most notably was the company behind the recent Fiddler on the Roof Yiddish adaptation. I also am obsessed with Indecent, Paula Vogel’s play chronicling the history of Got Fun Nekome, or “God of Vengeance,” a Sholem Asch play that featured the first romantic same-sex kiss on a Broadway stage when it was performed there in 1922 (and immediately shut down on charges of “indecency”). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, there’s a lot of people doing really interesting work today in Yiddish live performance and I highly recommend seeking it out, supporting that work, and when possible seeing those performances live.
I think people who aren’t super familiar with it might hear “Yiddish theater” and think sentimental shtetl kitsch, but the actual Yiddish theater scene at its peak was large and as varied as Broadway is today, and seeing Yiddish performed makes that history come alive in a way that just reading about it can’t.
BookishlyJewish: I particularly enjoyed the brief flashbacks as well as the snippets focusing on the Grand Dame theater as a person. Were these always part of the story, or did they get added later?
A. R. Vishny: Very early on, I wrote out Clara’s interstitial, originally for myself because I needed to have a solid idea of what I considered the “rules” of Estries in the universe I was building. I quickly realized that I really liked what I wrote, and that including that piece would be one way I could convey and reinforce the world-building in the text, which I thought would be one of the hardest things to make work, because Estries are particularly obscure and most people don’t have any pre-existing context for them. The other interstitials soon followed, and each time I found it was a way to incorporate the history and context I needed without overwhelming readers with exposition and (I hope) gave the story an overall sense of rootedness.
BookishlyJewish: What’s it like having your debut book out in the world? Any surprises?
A.R. Vishny: It’s wild having a thing that just lived inside my head for so long out in the world and available for other people to read and interact with.
As a debut, it’s seriously delightful when anyone takes a chance on the book and buys it. I’ve loved getting to share it with readers, and seriously I’m always surprised and delighted when someone likes and responds well to what I’ve written (as someone…err…very prone to self-doubt and assuming the worst).
BookishlyJewish: Boaz in particular is hilarious (or at least he was to me), was there a challenge in writing these different POVs and finding the right voice for each?
A.R. VIshny: Making sure all the characters felt emotionally authentic, distinct, and readable was a challenge, as was keeping the “who knows what when” of it all straight. For Clara and Molly, the biggest challenge was the fact that they’re not human, finding the balance between conveying their age and hungers without making things weird wasn’t easy. Then, on top of it, there was a lot of history, Jewish cultural context, and other info I wanted to get across while not sacrificing pace, so in any given chapter there were a lot of different considerations to juggle.
For Boaz, the challenges were slightly different. Unlike Clara and Molly, he’s human and only has 18 years of life experience, not 150+. On the other hand, we’re different people, and among other things I’m not a teenage boy and I’m not Syrian. Some of the solution was to give him a lot of other things in common with me so that I’d still have natural pathways into his voice (that’s partly why, like me, he has an Israeli dad and an American mom) and some of it was drawing on other family members, research, and working with a sensitivity reader. Boaz probably changed the most dramatically between revisions as I tried to suss out exactly who he was and needed to be for the story to work (at one point, he was actively hunting Clara from the start and even had an older brother he was trying to avenge, he was a totally different character), but once I landed on his sense of humor and the right backstory, he became one of the easiest character voices for me to slip into.
BookishlyJewish: If Hila and the Dead was an actual reality TV show, would you watch it? And if not, what would you rather see on TV?
A.R. Vishny: Hah, on the one hand I’m a scaredy cat (especially when it comes to scary tv and movies, I’m more comfortable reading spooky stuff). On the other hand, I appreciate a great Bravo show and Hila is very cool. I’d maybe watch it in the middle of the day with all the lights on.
BookishlyJewish: Any advice for writers just starting out?
A.R. Vishny: I sometimes come across Jewish writers who see Jewish specificity and commercial viability as opposing goals. This always really upsets me, because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Publishing is hard and unfair and endlessly frustrating, but if you never even try to write the book because you think it’s “too Jewish” to sell, of course it’ll never sell. You only have a chance if you try.
Moreover, specificity is important. Specificity is how you tell a “universal” story, because every single person on the planet has a life defined by the endless specifics of their background and culture and circumstances, we all have specificity in common. I would suggest to all writers who are wondering whether they should sand down their edges to instead hone their craft and sharpen their voice, so that the manuscript they put out there is the absolute best version of itself and is wholly their own. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that it’s hard, or that antisemites exist, because it’s always going to be hard and there’ll always be antisemites, but a great book is always going to be a great book, and your job as a writer is just to write great books. And the people who want that rep and need it will be very glad you wrote it.
BookishlyJewish: I always end by asking if you have a favorite Jewish book to recommend.
A.R. Vishny: I have many! I am currently obsessed with The Forbidden Book by Sacha Lamb, Sorel and Clara are definitely kindred spirits (or at least solve their problems in similar, window-shaped ways). Readers who enjoyed all the Jewish folklore elements of Night Owls and my sense of humor will also really like Samara Shanker’s Naomi Teitelbaum Ends The World which among other things has a golem briefly wearing American Girl Doll clothes, one of the best golem moments in literature of all time if you ask me.
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