Guest Post: Mima Tipper on Kat’s Greek Summer
Post curated by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk
When I began teaching at Vermont College in 2006, my hope was to show my students the gaps between their intentions and the words on the page. I wanted to offer a range of different ways to bridge those gaps, to point out where the draft words were pointing. Then the writer would find her way, would happen upon his own path, would craft the work they wanted to write. Whatever my students might have learned from all this, I’m convinced that reading their work and thinking about it taught me to hold my own work to standards at once generous and critical.
Mima Tipper was my student early in my teaching career. She was among those students who taught me how to teach. So I’m delighted to welcome Mima to Writing With a Broken Tusk to discuss her young YA novel, Kat’s Greek Summer, which PW/BookLife has described as “a coming-of-age story that explores themes of identity, family, and self-discovery with grace and insight..”
Writing Kat’s Greek Summer: Memory, Fiction and The Truth In-between
by Mima Tipper
When I started writing my Young Teen Lit novel Kat’s Greek Summer, the idea was to write a story of sun-soaked locales and colorful Greeks. Basing the story loosely on summers I spent as a young teen visiting the Greek side of my family, I was excited to delve into my personal wealth of unique material. While the finished book depicts much of my original inspiration, as soon as I put a “character” into my Greek summer memories, other memories surfaced—ones that were not so sun-soaked or all that colorful. My 14-year-old protagonist Kat Baker began asking questions about her experiences and her family that had my adult/writer mind asking questions about my own murky connection to my Greek heritage.
As my writer self asked these questions, I imagined kids and teens coming from a similar mixed heritage: not one of tangible trauma or overt and brutal racism, but one where ethnic roots were invisible or perhaps ignored. How that invisibility could result in a disconnect with the larger family, and maybe even a deep-seated sense of confusion, isolation and shame about that larger family. Growing up half American half Greek, I found myself often in that liminal space of not belonging in either of my cultures, and feelings of isolation, shame and hiding were certainly a big part of my childhood. I thought of these feelings as I wrote, and found my protagonist thinking of them as well.
Image courtesy of Mima Tipper
Through many revisions, I found that working on Kat’s Greek Summer helped me face my own long-held childhood feelings of shame and hiding about my family, because Kat’s experiences and conversations with her mother, her yiayiá and other Greeks brought adult-me not only deep self-reflection, but also self-forgiveness. From there sprang a wellspring of joy over my cache of happy Greek memories and a fresh sense of pride about my mixed heritage. Now, with finished book in hand, I think of readers relating closely to a story like Kat’s, and that maybe her story might inspire them to explore their own mixed heritage—invisible, or not. The prospect of sharing with those young readers makes me even prouder to have told my story of a half-Greek, half-American girl risking all for family, first love and self-truth over one sun-drenched Greek summer.
