Oana Sanziana Marian. I attribute my first interest in words to Bea Harsia, my English tutor in Romania when I was 5. After she sat on a blueberry in our garden in Borsa (she was wearing a turquoise terri-cloth bikini) she said, “The only way to get this stain out is with a pair of scissors.”
My mother and I moved to America when I was 8, one year before the Revolution, which we watched on TV. I attended Westover High School, a private all-girls’ school that offered generous financial aid to a large percentage of its students and a first-class education in poetry. I have yet to hear of any other place like it.
I went to Yale to study studio art, but defected to the English major, graduating in December of 2002. As I was finishing the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 2004, I read somewhere that a contemporary filmmaker I admire very much had studied poetry before beginning (and never finishing) film school. I wanted to do something I didn’t go to school for. I also realized that I was prepared neither to teach nor publish.
To preempt starvation and a certain kind of death, I fled to former-Communist Romania, to eat real tomatoes and to work in films. That was 2004-2006. I came back and lived in Los Angeles, until 2009. Now I live and work in New York.
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