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Moonlight In Odessa, the debut novel from Janet Skeslien Charles, is a warm and funny story of the bleak and deceptive world of mail-order brides. Its heroine and central figure is Daria, an intelligent, strong, and educated Odessan woman who finds a job working for a ‘matchmaking service,’ and ends up one of its clients, to her eventual sorrow. It’s a marvelous book, witty and subtle and affecting, and a page-turner on top of it. Published by Bloomsbury, Odessa has been reviewed positively by the New York Times, Bust, and BookPage. It was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of its top ten debut novels for fall of 2009, and was National Geographic Traveler’s September Book of the Month.

Janet Skeslien Charles grew up in a small town in Montana, and attended the University of Montana in Missoula. While in college, she did some translating of letters between lonely American men and their prospective Russian brides. After graduation, she spent two years in Odessa as a Soros Fellow. She has lived in Paris for the last ten years, teaching public school, and later starting a creative writing workshop at Shakespeare & Company. She now divides her time between France and the United States.

Here, she talks to Playtime about Moonlight In Odessa, her writing processes, and the grim phenomenon of mail-order brides.

Background and Influences

- Why on God’s Earth would you become a writer?

Janet Skeslien Charles: I was born a writer. Telling stories is what I have always wanted to do…

- What inspires you?

Skeslien Charles: My friends inspire me. American women in Paris inspire me. Tough Montanans inspire me. I love to listen to people.

- Do you have any favorite authors who you don’t believe have directly influenced your work? Or is that not possible?

Skeslien Charles: Everything I have ever read has inspired me in some way. There were books that I thought were terrible, but these are helpful, too. You can see what you don’t appreciate and hopefully not repeat it in your own work. That said, friends have adored books I have hated. Taste and love are subjective.

- What book have you read the most often?

Skeslien Charles: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

- What are you reading right now?

Skeslien Charles: I just finished The Priory by Dorothy Whipple, and I wish that I had written it myself. Persephone Press has brought out all these forgotten writers. I love them, love them, love them. A friend loaned me The Priory. Read it in a day. Don’t want to give it back. I will buy it, then return my friend’s copy to her. This is the sign of a good book. One that you buy after you read it because you don’t want to live without it.

- What have you learned as a creative writing teacher? How important has this been?

Skeslien Charles: A writer can see his story clearly, but often, only 20-70% of it ends up on the page. In a writing workshops, readers can tell the writer what hasn’t made it onto the page and the writer can see what needs to be clearer. I don’t want to change the writer’s vision. I just want the whole picture.

- What kinds of people take your workshops? For what reasons?

Skeslien Charles: At first, there were a lot of university students from American universities such as NYU and Columbia who were here in Paris on study abroad programs. Gradually, there was a shift to adults who had studied literature in college but went on to jobs in banking or management. They took the class because they wanted to read and write and discuss with like-minded people. That is why I started the workshop. I missed those passionate conversations. I wasn’t meeting people who loved books.

- How did this shift in the nature of the students occur?

Skeslien Charles: At first, I did a lot of advertising at NYU, Columbia, the British Institute here in Paris, then slowly but surely, through word of mouth, more and more Parisians learned about the workshop.

- What advice do you give in your workshops? Has this changed over time?

Skeslien Charles: The most important advice I can give is to write and to read. With practice, writers improve. If I were teaching in an MFA program, I would prepare students for the submission process and assign them to write a query letter and a synopsis for every assignment. Writing is a business and it is important to learn these steps.

- You wrote much of this book in Montana, and started your in-person promotions there; and there is a serious belief in Montana in the phenomenon of the Montana Writer. Do you consider yourself a Montana Writer? And if so, based on my own experiences taking creative writing classes in Montana, where are the deer in your novel?

Skeslien Charles: I do consider myself a Montana Writer. I wrote much of the book in Montana, rewrote the whole thing in the Prairie Peddler, a café where I listened to people talk. Much of what they say is in the book. The people in my hometown who read my novel said that they could relate to Daria’s isolation. I think that my themes and images are universal.

- How about a Parisian novelist? Are you one of those? What would that mean?

Skeslien Charles: A lot of people live in Paris part of the year. It is like a college town, a place people live for a few years, then move on. I don’t feel like I am part of any kind of movement here. I do appreciate Odile Hellier of the Village Voice Bookshop, Penelope Le Masson of the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop, and Sylvia Whitman of Shakespeare & Company. These three women are constants.

- How does living in a foreign country affect your writing?

Skeslien Charles: Living in a foreign language can improve your imagery. For example, in French, a kite is a cerf-volant, or a flying deer. (There’s the deer you asked me about…) In Russian, they say ‘Time will show’ rather than time will tell. You start to see and hear things in a different way. You also see your country and yourself in a very different way.

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