I dove into every book I randomly picked out with the same boundless curiosity and unquenchable desire … Kerime Nadir, Jules Verne, Oğuz Özdes, Kemal Tahir, Abdullah Ziya Kozanoğlu, Nihal Atsız, Emile Zola, John Steinbeck, Victor Hugo, Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Ömer Seyfettin, Tolstoy …

During my childhood and adolescence only two books were consciously (!) chosen for me and those were chosen by an elementary school graduate, a once farmer and then shopkeeper and soda maker, my dad Mevlüt. In fact the choices were made by an old book salesman in Kayseri:

The author of this one here won the Nobel prize this year. Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric; and this other one has sold a lot, the high school kids are always buying it, Red Cherry Tree Branches by Reşat Nuri, take that one too if you want .

Our lives are like balls of yarn we are forever winding, to quote Henri Bergson. Our experiences trailing behind, we are naturally gathering them up over time. For whatever we experience along the way remains with us.

What we call “today” is but a collection of the past and the future. In other words, the past isn’t a period of time that has slipped through our fingers or vanished into thin air. It is something seated in the present, waiting. Every time I sat down to write the stories in this book, I was startled to see this sustained past as a “consciousness” that simultaneously encased my “memories.”

As if I had opened up a trunk in the attic and I was writing down the memories each newfound object evoked. The more I rummaged through the trunk the more I seemed to find. And the truth is, the more I could remember of my past the more I learned about myself. Every time I read my memories of the past through the present, putting them down on the page in the form of a story, I would surprise myself again and again. My God, was I really the one who lived through all this?

It was as if I was making a video of the scenes as I wrote them down. My goal was to write stories that would fully expose the depth of my experience through powerful metaphor and objects that evoked universal themes of suffering; stories that would provoke a personal reckoning.

So I struggled to capture an immediacy in my language. I wanted the reader to “see” my stories, not just read them. Something similar to a cinematic narrative technique. I have always tried to show them the world and not simply tell them about it.

Whenever I started a story I would imagine a fellow traveler walking beside me on the journey as it unfolded. I would try to “show” him or her whatever it was that I was seeing or experiencing. And so my ideal reader is a friend who lends an avid ear as he watches the plight of my protagonists, a true “companion” in feeling what I feel.