In late February 2025, shortly after the three-year mark of russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, I had the great privilege to speak on air with the authors of two remarkable books that bring home this devastating war in gripping novels that are hard to put down. 
Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger is an American author now living in Austria who has written Swimming With Spies, a middle-grade novel set in Crimea, based on the true story of the sad fate of therapy dolphins in a dolphinarium in the port city of Sevastopol at the hands of the russian invaders.
Marsha Skrypuch is a multi-published Canadian author of Ukrainian descent who has written a trilogy called Kidnapped From Ukraine which is set in the early days of the attack on Mariupol. The second book of the trilogy has just been released, but at the time of this recording we discussed the first, called Kidnapped From Ukraine: Under Attack.
Click on the player to hear the voices. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below:
Pawlina: Our special guests are Ukrainian-Canadian author Marsha Skrypuk from Brantford, Ontario, and Ukrainian-American author Chrystyna Lutsyk Berger from Austria.
So welcome both of you, Marsha and Chrystyna!
Chrystyna: Thank you.
Marsha: Thank you very much for having us.
Pawlina: First of all, I want to tell you that I’ve read both of your books, and Marsha, your book, Kidnapped from Ukraine: Under Attack, is set in 2022 Mariupol, in the first days of the invasion, and Chrystyna, your book is Swimming with Spies, and set in 2014 Crimea, in the port city of Sevastopol.
So I read both of them, and they were both really hard to put down. Marsha, I read yours first, and I have to admit I was a bit reluctant to start, just to avoid more emotional pain from covering, following this war.
I saw the film 20 Days in Mariupol and found it absolutely devastating to watch. Your book starts at that same time, so it was hard to open it. But once I did, I couldn’t put it down.
And Chrystyna, kind of the same thing with yours. I read yours right after Marsha’s, and because it was set like 11 years ago, the emotional trauma wasn’t quite so raw. So as soon as I got it, I ripped open the Amazon package and I started reading.
And also it’s about dolphins.
So Marsha, your book took me into a world that the film only skimmed the surface of. The film is an outstanding journalistic chronicle of the horrific attack on Mariupol just before it fell. But your story brings the war home to the reader on a much more personal level.
Chrystyna, your book is like stepping back in time, although it’s only 11 years. But it was a time of shock and disbelief, of the sudden disruption and destruction of normal life in a modern progressive civilization. And it foreshadowed what we witnessed over the next eight years before it all blew up in our faces in 2022.
So before I go any further about my impressions of your book, and I could go on and on, why don’t I get each of you to give us a synopsis of your book?
Marsha: Sure. So this is Marsha, and I wrote Kidnapped from Ukraine: Under Attack, and it’s book one of a trilogy. And so book one is from the perspective of Dariia, who is a 12-year-old twin to Rada.
And she and her mother are separated from her father and sister on the first day of the attacks of Ukraine in an apartment in Mariupol.
They’re separated. They shelter in a basement for a while. Then they’re put through a filtration camp and separated again. So the mother and the daughter are separated.
And Dariia is put through a re-education camp in Russia, and then placed in a Russian home. And her mother needs to find her and get her back. They still don’t know what’s really happening to the other half of their family, which is what happens in [Kidnapped from Ukraine:] Standoff, the next book.
But that’s what Under Attack is about. I can understand why it was hard for you to read all that. It was excruciating for me to do the research. I did watch the documentary, and it was very helpful. It helped me with about 5% of the research that I did. Because to be able to do day-to-day, hour-by-hour scenes of a war that’s happening now with also keeping the people that really are in it safe and putting a sheen of fiction over it to keep people safe who are currently suffering under this was a big challenge.
Pawlina: Yeah. Chrystyna?
Chrystyna: Very much like Marsha, I was glued to my screen on February 24th, 2022, and absolutely brokenhearted. My story is, however, based on the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
And my protagonist is Sophia. She’s a 12-year-old. She’s a marine biologist in the making. And identifies herself as mostly Ukrainian after her Russian mother abandons her and her father.
Sophia gets paid for doing the homework of her archenemy, Ilya. But they have a huge fight, and the school disciplines both of them. And Sophia’s father comes up with this project that pairs Ilya and Sophia together.
And Sophia hates this so much, mostly because Ilya gets in the way, and also because she has a special connection to the dolphin pod, especially to the oldest dolphin, Colin.
And when Ilya’s father shows up, Sophia learns that Colin was once a military marine mammal, which is a dolphin spy, basically, who is assigned to protect the harbor or to sabotage enemy boats. So at the same time as Sophia begins learning that her family and Ilya have a dark past together, something that has to do with her mother’s disappearance, actually.
Just as she’s doing that, the Russians hold this sham referendum that leads Russia to annex Crimea. And Sophia is horrified to discover that the Russian Navy plans to take over the Dolphinarium and her dolphin pod to create them or to repurpose them into military marine mammals.
This is a true story, the part about the dolphins. But Sophia and her family are not. And the story is then about how Sophia fights to make sure that that does not happen.
Pawlina: That was amazing, because I read, I remember reading about the dolphins vaguely, there was something in the news about dolphins. So yeah, the fact that it’s based, also based on a true story, it brought me, like Marsha’s book, it brought me closer, it made it personal.
So why did you write these books? Because I know probably you didn’t want to.
Marsha: So it’s interesting, because both Chrystyna and I kind of wrote them for the same reason. And that was, in my situation, Scholastic approached me, and when the war in Ukraine started, and they wanted me to write a trilogy set during the war. And the reason is that I have, you know, a readership. And in the book fairs, they were saying, my readership was actually asking for these books from me.
And I initially said, no, I was too triggered and traumatized by the war to think about writing about this war. They came to me a few times, and I finally said yes. And the reason that I said yes is because there was disinformation, very slick disinformation being targeted at young people.
And I felt that it was my moral responsibility. No matter how much it was horrible for me, it’s nothing compared to what people are going through. So this was a contribution that I could make. It’s something that I could do.
And so I did.
But by the time I said yes, they wanted the trilogy really quickly. And so I’ve been doing, you know, I did seven hours a day writing seven days a week, almost 18 months straight to get a trilogy written. And normally it would do three hours a day, five days a week, you know, in the same amount of time to get a book finished. So but you do what you need to do when there’s a war.
Chrystyna: Absolutely.
Not only, but for getting the books out that need to be out there right now. My story is very similar to Marsha’s, except that I was writing World War Two novels or historical fiction novels for adults. And I one day I have a very, very personal story that I’m not going to go into, but one day because of this personal situation that I have, I decided that it was time to do something for kids.
And I had been thinking about writing for kids for years. I mean, like decades, long, long time ago, but never really pursued it. And on that very same day, it was just too coincidental. I couldn’t believe it. I got an email from Scholastic.
Now I teach English here in Austria, and I got this email and I get a lot of solicitations for ESL books, which I know Scholastic also publishes. And I got the email and I saw, would you be interested? And I thought, no.
And I deleted at the very same time as I finished reading the subject line, would you be interested in writing a middle grade novel set in Ukraine, in modern day Ukraine?
And I went, where did that email go? So I fished it out of the trash immediately and I read it. And then I thought, this is just too strange of a coincidence.
So I started researching the person who wrote it. I researched the email address and Siri knows way too much sometimes. And so I really checked it out. And five minutes later, I went back and I said, very, you know, my heart’s racing, but very soberly.
I said, yeah, sure. What you got? Tell me what you wanted me to do.
And then immediately I got a concept back and it was 12-year-old Sophia, which I kept because I love the name. Dad’s a Ukrainian dolphin trainer, dolphins repurposed for military marine mammal after the Russians seized it. Would you be interested in hooking the story on that?
And I just went, oh my God, yeah.And we had a telephone conversation that day. No, actually, sorry, a couple of days later.
And I sent the first three chapters. And I have to say, I was tremendously honored because everybody knows Scholastic. Everybody does.
And I thought this is a huge game changer for me because I have been struggling to get interest in the Ukrainian story through my World War II novels. I published three of them based on my family’s experiences and on the experiences of the diaspora in World War II Ukraine.
And for once I was able to do something that was for kids. And I thought, I don’t know how much better it can get. Seriously.
Marsha: I think that Scholastic needs huge compliments in the fact that they reached out to two authors and asked them to write about contemporary Ukraine. I think it shows tremendous social responsibility, especially in this world right now. I don’t know of another situation like this.
And Scholastic has been very encouraging to me, too. I’ve been publishing with Scholastic Canada since 2008. And Scholastic Inc., which is the biggest children’s publisher in the world, since 2017. And with Scholastic Inc.’s encouragement, I wrote two World War II trilogies. Plus, they asked me to write Winterkill, which was set during the Holodomor.
They asked me.
To put it into context, most people wouldn’t touch Ukrainian topics for children with a 10-foot pole. And even when books are published that have even a slight reference to Ukraine, they’re usually historically inaccurate because there’s no social responsibility for most publishers to deal with this in any kind of honest way.
And so I have deep respect for Scholastic and what they’re doing. I was so thrilled when I found out that Chrystyna was writing Swimming with Spies. We had a Zoom about this way early didn’t we. And I tell everybody … when I do presentations, I tell that Chrystyna has written the prequel to my trilogy because her book is just so fantastic.
Chrystyna: It’s my turn to gush a little bit about Marsha as well Please…
Pawlina: Yeah.
Chrystyna: I actually knew Marsha long before this project came to fruition. We’ve been in touch over the years. And just kind of brushing past each other all the time. Because she publishes works on Ukraine, I thought, well, she’s like the icebreaker, the ship that just goes through the Arctic ice. She made the pathway possible.
So I’m very, very grateful to you as well, Marsha.
Pawlina: I’ve known Marsha a lot longer than I’ve known you. And I’m glad that I know both of you. You’re very inspiring.
Marsha, you started writing in 1996. I remember you came to Vancouver and you did a presentation. And I think it had just been published.
Marsha: Yes, Silver Threads, 1996. And that was the first storybook to ever have been written about internment of Ukrainians in World War I.
Every book that I have written, and I don’t just write on Ukrainian topics, but every single book that I’ve written has been the first work of fiction or narrative non-fiction on that topic published.
And it’s crazy.
Like I’m talking about in my genre. So if it’s narrative non-fiction or if it’s fiction, because there will be academic studies on these things. But I just keep on doing this.
And sometimes it’s not a great thing … because I’m banned by Russia for what I write. I’ve had hate mail, death threats. I’ve been banned by Amazon. They won’t let me post reviews. They pulled all my reviews.
And this is what happens when you are the icebreaker.
But it’s really important. And if you’re the icebreaker and no one’s following behind, it doesn’t do much good. And so that’s why I’m just so thrilled because Chrystyna, what you have done with Swimming with Spies is you have just opened the door to so many more people because most people who have been writing for young people on Ukrainian topics have been writing with really small presses. And it doesn’t have the same kind of impact.
And the thing about Scholastic is that the bulk of their book sales are at book fairs, which is like a pop-up store in schools. And so this means that kids have to pick them themselves. And the books are also really inexpensive because they want kids to be able to afford them themselves.
So to think that we have two authors now writing for the biggest children’s publisher in the world, books that kids themselves go in and choose on purpose. And I’m thrilled to be a part of this.
Chrystyna: And it’s brilliant because the story with Swimming with Spies, I mean, as soon as you hook it up with animals, my God, you know, you’ve opened it up. You’ve just opened it up to cross-genre marketing here.
Pawlina: Yeah. Chrystyna, was this your first book with Scholastic?
Chrystyna: This is my first book with Scholastic. Yeah, it was my first middle grade novel, too.
Pawlina: Right, of course. So it would be. Yeah, Scholastic specializes in kids’ books, right? And you had written several novels that in World War II. Woman at the Gates has been reviewed here on Nash Holos as well.
Marsha: Chrystyna’s adult fiction is phenomenal. And your first book was published in 1995, wasn’t it?
Chrystyna: Ninety-eight, I think it was. Ninety-eight… No, you’re right. Marsha, you’re right. It was ninety-five. Oh, my goodness.
Marsha: I like being right. On radio.
Pawlina: It’s great to be right on radio, for sure.
Chrystyna: It was. It was ninety-five, yeah.
Pawlina: Yeah. Why did you decide to write about Ukraine in the first place?
Chrystyna: If I may, I’m going to go first on this one because since we’re already talking about the 1995 novel, that was my first attempt, actually. And it was actually before historical fiction was a huge thing. Memoirs was a big, big genre. And what I ended up doing was I wrote about the women in my family before I realized I really need to bring in the male voices as well. And I interviewed my family. They were from Lviv and from Lutsk.
And after I published that attempt at a novel, I’m going to say first, I learned a lot from that experience. I realized that, OK, I still hadn’t done it justice. I really wanted it to go mass market, actually.
And I got very lucky in 2020. I sent in a book about the Sudetenland, actually. The Girl from the Mountains is what it’s called.
And my editor really, really believed in this vision of creating a second book with me based in Ukraine or set in Ukraine in World War II. And I went back to that first novel and I completely rewrote it. And I really fictionalized it. And I took stories that I hadn’t implemented yet.
And at the same time, I was also winning awards for my short stories based on World War II Ukraine, which is now a compilation.
Souvenirs from Kyiv also picked up by Bookatour to actually raise money for charity. So that book is out there and the money goes to Ukraine, to the United 24.
So, yeah, I was doing this because I had been defending myself my entire life.
I am not Russian.
I don’t speak Russian.
No, Ukrainians are not Russian.
Spanish is not Italian and Italians are not Spanish.
I mean, this is the whole story that I was coming across.
And the other thing, my brother put it very well. He said, you know, we never got to eat bread without a story about how we even earned to eat that bread … came to the table as well.
You know, like it was so present for us what our grandparents, what my parents had to go through in order to give us the kind of life they wished for themselves in Ukraine, but had to come to America or to Canada or to any other diaspora in order to get freedom.
And I have been the voice for the underdogs since.
This is every story I write is about the underdogs. And Ukraine is just a natural yes for me, you know.
Marsha: And that’s exactly the same. This is why I love you, Chrystyna.
I mean, this is like a fan club because Paulette, I have such admiration for you. And, you know, we’re kindred spirits, but it was the same for me.
But I came about it differently because I wasn’t raised Ukrainian. I am of Ukrainian heritage. My husband, his first language was Ukrainian. And his both parents escaped World War Two. They were displaced people. They met in a DP camp.
But I didn’t know because my grandfather came to Canada before World War One. And my father, living on a homestead out west, had the Ukrainian beaten out of him by his teacher. And so he was traumatized by wanting to be white, by wanting to be English. And he didn’t want his kids to identify as Ukrainian because he thought it would be too painful for them and they’d never get ahead.
And my parents divorced and my mother, who is of Irish heritage, potato famine Irish heritage, is the one who really instilled Ukrainian in me. And she actually came to Ukraine with me the first time I went. My father never went to Ukraine.
But she really encouraged me to know about my Ukrainian heritage. And when I was trying to learn, because I wasn’t part of the Ukrainian community in Brantford, I even couldn’t find any books or stories or anything. And I just had this hole in my heart wanting to know. And my dad did tell me some stories. I mean, that was the impetus of writing Silver Threads about his father. But it was about the pain that he had and about why he was distanced from his Ukrainian heritage, the way that it was taken from him.
And my grandfather, too, because he escaped the internment camp and he always felt like he was in hiding because he thought if he was arrested for something he didn’t do the first time, just because of who he was rather than anything he did, it could happen at any time.
And so it was that that brought me. It was wanting to know more about my own heritage. But also because I am, and I think that anyone who is a writer is essentially an introvert. And the way that we deal with conversations is to ask questions rather than to talk.
And my in-laws shared with me so much of what they went through in World War II that they never shared with my husband or my brother-in-law, not at all. It was actually deeply painful for both boys to realize how much I knew that they didn’t know.
But I kept notes and I shared it with them all. But they felt comfortable talking to me because I asked questions and then I asked more questions and then I broke it down and asked questions again.
But Making Bombs for Hitler and Stolen Girl, my first two World War II novels with Scholastic, Scholastic Canada first and then Scholastic Ink, were inspired by my mother-in-law’s experiences in World War II.
And then other ones were inspired by what happened to my father-in-law. My mother-in-law lost half of her classmates to the Liebensborn program in World War II. She wasn’t taken. That was when they took fair-haired blue-eyed kids and tried to make them think they’re German and forget who they were and place them into Nazi homes.
Chrystyna: Sound familiar, Marsha? … Which is your book…
Marsha: I know! And this is what I was just about to say. So when they wanted me to write this, like when Scholastic asked me to write the trilogy, how could I not?
Like once I finally got my head around it and realized I had to write it, I had to write about the kidnapped kids now because it’s the same thing we’re doing in World War II with the Liebensborn program.
This is exactly what the Russians are doing. They’re stealing hundreds of thousands of children. They’re making them into orphans. They’re taking them, and then they’re changing them into Russians where the boys will be soldiers and the girls will be mothers of Russians.
Chrystyna: Yes.
Pawlina: I mean, listening is, asking questions is what I do as well. And that’s how you get the story out. And you have done a wonderful job with your two books.
Marsha: Well, I hope that…
Chrystyna: What about you though, Paulette?
Marsha: Yes, your book because…
Chrystyna: Hello?
Pawlina: Okay. Okay. We’ll talk…
Marsha: Paulette is also an author and she has written Ukrainian Food Flair, which I actually have bought six copies of.
Pawlina: Thank you.
Marsha: And it’s authentic recipes from Canada’s West Coast. And just before this whole session was starting, I was looking up desserts. So … there.
Pawlina: Okay, we’ll come back to that…
Marsha: And apple cake in particular, because my mother-in-law made both of those.
Pawlina: That’s wonderful. Well, we’ll come back to that shortly. But we do have to take a station break now.
So if you’re just joining us, I’m speaking with children’s authors, Marsha Skrypuch and Chrystyna Lutsyk Berger about their young adult novels set in today’s Ukraine and the real-life consequences on families and children of Russia’s aggression against them.
So both of you did a lot of research. Marsha, you said 20 Days of Mariupol helped you, the film. And Chrystyna, you had done a lot of some interesting research as well with dolphins and about dolphins. Because did you start out knowing anything about dolphins?
Chrystyna: Besides what everybody else knows about them? No, I mean, I was shocked and awed. I think for me, the research was twofold because I was trying to create a normal Ukrainian family in Crimea in modern-day Ukraine, which was totally different from the research I’ve done for World War II Ukraine.
And I think making a discovery about modern Ukrainians and Ukraine was just a sheer joy. I can’t describe it any other way. It was beautiful.
I read as many books as I could, incredible books, literature and nonfiction, to kind of get that voice, you know, that zeitgeist. I was trying to capture that authentic, what do people talk about? How do they talk about it? What is that voice that you hear?
Pawlina: And you got it! You captured it. Because I’m from the West Coast. I traveled… I had the great good fortune to visit Crimea. I didn’t go to Sevastopol, but I was in Yalta, actually. And it was …2008 was a different world. And it was really interesting to read your depiction of life in 2014 Crimea and compare it to what I had.
And it also has like a coastal feel.
Chrystyna: I was very lucky that I had people from the diaspora who are from Crimea here. So I was able to also interview them.
But let’s look at those dolphins again. The second part of that research was amazing. I mean, I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was growing up. And then I wanted to be a zoologist.
And what I realized in the end is that being a writer, you can do everything, everything you’ve ever dreamt of doing. This is how you get to play around with those different areas.
Pawlina: Yes, vicariously!
Chrystyna: And so I found a woman who was willing to talk to me. She’s the head of the dolphinarium in a European dolphinarium.
And we talked. And the first call that we had was pretty funny because the very first thing she said is look, Chrystyna, I’m willing to help you. And I’ll point you in all the right directions. I’ll get the contacts that you need for your research. But I’m telling you right now, I will only talk to you if you promise me that you are not going to do a free willy ending.
And I said, no, no, of course I would never do that! And I’m thinking to myself, why, why not? It’s like such a classic ending. Everybody knows how popular free willy was. Of course I was planning to do a free willy ending.
Pawlina: But you did it. You did it well. It was great.
Chrystyna: And I said, no, no, of course I wouldn’t. And she goes, OK, I’m going to tell you why you cannot. Because even if you weren’t thinking about it, I don’t want you to even contemplate it.
And she said to me, she goes, do you have any pets? And I said, yes, I have dogs and cats. She goes, OK, I want you to imagine putting all your pets into the car, driving out into the Alps and leaving them there and going home.
And she goes, that’s what it would be like if your protagonist lets the dolphins out into the wild. And I said, all right, I get you. I understand. So of course, I did not do a free willy ending.
But she did give me a darn good idea of how I could end the book. And I’m not telling anybody who hasn’t read it what it is.
Pawlina: No, no spoilers. You have to read that book! It’s amazing.
Chrystyna: And I think, so I learned an awful lot about dolphins, an awful lot. And they were so generous, these people, so, so generous. They let me take my son and my godsons behind the scenes. And they were playing with dolphins, like up close and personal.
Pawlina: Where?
Chrystyna: And we got to get a sneak peek of their new baby that they had not shown to the public yet.
Pawlina: Sorry, Chrystyna, where?
Chrystyna: I’m not allowed to say.
Pawlina: Oh, OK.
Chrystyna: Because of the controversy about captured dolphins or non-captured dolphins. I have to tell you this all now, right now. Since 1968, there have been no-captive dolphins. So dolphinariums that belong to a particular association, they do not have captured wild dolphins any longer. They are breeding them. But there is still a lot of controversy about holding those dolphins. So I’m not allowed to divulge my sources.
Pawlina: OK, fair enough. Sure, sure. But yeah, wow. And Marsha?
Marsha: So I did a lot of different kinds of research. This was the first contemporary book I’d written in 20 years. And so I couldn’t read books about what was going on because I was writing it as the war was unfolding. So I used a lot of different newspaper sources, including The Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post. The New York Times was really good. Documentaries, like 20 Days in Mariupol. And videos.
But also, I did meet with a lot of refugees who had just come to Canada because we do have a lot of Ukrainian refugees. And in particular, kids. And a lot of the kids, when they first came over … I helped with an art project where they could share their feelings. I would ask questions and they would share their feelings in response with drawings.
And then I met with some of them and spoke through a translator just to find out what their first days were like. And so it really informed me.
And, you know, Chrystyna and I were talking about how Ukrainians now don’t dance around and wear embroidered shirts all the time…
Pawlina: Right.
Chrystyna: Although I do now!
Pawlina:, Fashion ….
Marsha: So I asked them what they left behind. What you left behind, what you took with you. And so that really informed me because the things that Dariia and her mother take with her as they’re running, because they didn’t know that they’d never be back. So you have to stay true to that. And just that abject fear that they had.
But using the newspaper accounts and all that kind of thing, what that was for was a structure of the novel because I wanted to have each day the things that were really happening there to be the same as what was in my novel.
I didn’t change that because this is in some ways a documentary account, even though it’s a novel, but it’s too close, too easy to find out. So why wouldn’t I just stick to the absolute reality of what was happening day to day to day?
So even in terms of weaponry that was being used against Ukrainians, change transformed as the days went on. And I kept even that as closely as I could, as closely as documentary accounts would let me. So, you know, it was a matter of immersing myself in it.
The other thing that I really wanted to use was Putin was quite blatant about being proud of what he was doing. And as was Maria Lvova-Bolova, the woman who coordinated the capturing of kids. And so I wanted to have them both have walk-in parts in the book. And so there is a scene based on what really happened with the kidnapped kids being on a train. And it was filmed for TV in Russia where they’re coming off the train, feeling totally dazed, feeling almost drugged, but also despondent because they’ve been taken from everything that’s familiar.
And the way that it was on the TV thing and you can see it on YouTube and all that kind of thing is like they were being saved. And, you know, so to show that, but from a child’s point of view and then have Maria Lvova-Bolova as a character.
And, you know, and the same thing, Putin trotted out real kidnapped kids onto the stage at a rally in Moscow. And so that was a scene too. I wanted to use it because those two are infamous. They’re both war criminals and they’re the only non-fiction characters. They’re totally not fictionalized. And it’s because they’re both war criminals and they deserve the notoriety and the light on what they have done.
Pawlina: Yeah, yeah. And you use, you were saying the way you write these books is you take actual events that have been documented and then…
Marsha: Yeah, so the brainwashing camp that she was taken to, it is a brainwashing camp that’s used. So there’s, why make anything up if you can just look it up?
Pawlina: Right.
Marsha: And the reason that she ended up in the oblast, the Russian oblast that she did end up in is because there were families who adopted kids in that Russian oblast. So why would I make anything up?
And then I knew that the Russian soldiers from that area where they were stationed. So it was documented, it was available and I knew where they sent all the stolen goods, how they managed to do that. And so that’s why it was coming in back to the wife to sell all this pilfered Ukrainian goods because that’s the way that it was.
I don’t really have to be a creative mind because I just have to document what’s really there. The only creativity that I use in the book is in terms of making the composites of characters to protect the actual identity of the people who are going through it now.
Pawlina: So how do you do that? How do you create these characters?
Marsha: So when I create a character, I think of what does this person want? What did they need and what did they love? And in some ways, most characters start out to be me and then they change because they tell me. So I always start out with want, need, love and then they tell me, I try not to tell a character who they are.
And then it’s just, I don’t even know how it happens. And I’m sure, Chrystyna, you have the same thing where you have to let the character tell you. It’s like inspiration coming in rather than if you’re too prescriptive with the characters, they don’t ring true.
Chrystyna: That’s right. My first job is to find the voice. And I very often just go and start writing by hand. I go into a completely different area, a different environment, I should say. And I just start writing and I wait for that character. I have found, actually, that if the name is not correct, I won’t hear the voice.
Names are very, very important. And I actually had a story with a protagonist or with an antagonist. And when it was time to write him, I couldn’t and I was completely stuck. I knew what I needed to happen, but I was completely stuck.
And then somebody suggested changing his name. He said, well, what’s his name? And I said, Pietro.
And he said, it doesn’t sound like a stone. Peter is the rock. Why don’t you change his name based on his character? And I changed it to Angelo. And then all of a sudden, no problems. Then it was absolutely clear.
And this is why I picked Sophia. Scholastic suggested the name. They said I could do anything I wanted with the story. This was just … the Dolphins was the hook. And I ended up keeping the name because it spoke so much to me, just this name. And the very first moment that I sat down with pen and paper, she just started talking and she did not stop.
And I’ve said this before to other people as well. I never look at those notes again. I just start writing. Then I type the book into the computer.
But I’ve got it. I hear her and she’s alive. And then I go through that prescription. Then I go into the prescription. I’m like, OK, what do you love? What do you need? What’s going to be your hurdle?
And then I decide, OK, what are the blockades that I’m going to put in front of her? And she has to overcome those things.
Marsha: And see, I don’t even know what they’re going to be. They just happen. Because I know the wants, needs and loves. And the way that I choose names is the names that are in that place at that time. So I actually look at birth, death records, newspaper articles about people of the time.
I will only choose names that are actually in common usage of the era and time and place that I’m writing in.
Chrystyna: That’s why I go to cemeteries for my World War II novels.
Pawlina: There you go. That makes sense.
Ladies, it’s been lovely chatting with you. I wish we had more time. And unfortunately, it is running out. Just wanted to find out, first of all, very quickly what’s next for you. And also, where can we get your books?
Marsha: So the books are available in any bookstore. And in North America, they’re available…and probably even worldwide. You’d be able to get Chrystyna’s books or mine anywhere. Online or in bricks and mortar bookstores. If they’re not right there, then you can just order them.
Chrystyna: Go to your favorite bookstore shop. Bookstore, bookstore first.
Pawlina: Yes. And if it’s not there, you can order it, right? All right.
Chrystyna: I’m working on the next novel, a middle grade novel. But it’s going to be with the Kakhovka Dam as the setting.
Pawlina: Wow. OK.
Chrystyna: With my protagonist’s parents running a shelter for animals.
Pawlina: You make sure you let me know when that’s out!
Chrystyna: Yeah.
Pawlina: We’ll talk again. And Marsha?
Marsha: And my next one is coming out on October the 7th. And it’s set in the Azov Steel plant. And it’s about the standoff. It’s called Kidnapped From Ukraine: Standoff.
And it’s about the standoff where they hold the Russians off from the entire city. It’s the last stand in Mariupol.
Chrystyna: I read it already. And it’s fantastic.
Marsha: And book three comes out in January of 2026.
Pawlina: Thank you so much, Marsha and Christina, for your time telling us about your stories and the stories behind your stories. And thank you for writing them for us to read.
I just want to express my admiration to both of you for the skill in which you’ve highlighted the humanity that gets buried in news reports and social media, comments on war.
You both created characters, settings, and circumstances that any reader can relate to and imagine themselves in. War is not an easy topic to discuss, let alone write about. And you both managed to convey the grim reality of war. And yet, keep alive the hope in the ultimate goodness of humanity in the midst of it.
Well done, ladies.
Chrystyna: Thank you so much.
Marsha: Thank you so much.
Pawlina: It’s so important…
Marsha: And thank you for writing your cookbook, Paulette, available on Amazon.
Pawlina:Yes, thank you! And also, there are signed copies here at the station, if you’re local.
So it’s important that these stories are told, especially fake news and propaganda ramping up fiercely, not just in Russia, but also in the corporate media in the U.S. and beyond.
So thank you for writing your books when you had the choice not to.
Marsha: Thank you, Paulette.
Chrystyna: Thank you.
