Ukrainian poet finds sliver of home in Iowa City, International Writing Program

IOWA CITY — Two years ago — during an international writing symposium in Poland organized around the concept of a homeland as “something you somehow haven’t to deserve” — Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk met Christopher Merrill.

As the University of Iowa International Writing Program director for over two decades and an accomplished writer himself — having published, among other things, seven collections of poetry and six books of non-fiction — Merrill got to know Yakimchuk, who recently read her poem “Prayer” during John Legend’s performance of “Free” at the 2022 Grammy Awards, backdropped by images of Russia’s occupation of her homeland.

“Our daily bread, give to the hungry and let them stop devouring one another,” Yakimchuk said before an audience of millions. “And forgive us our destroyed cities, even though we do not forgive for them our enemies.”

Seven months later — during the Poland symposium supported by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State — Yakimchuk joined Merrill in panel discussions exploring “some of the possibilities, obligations, and forms of meaning intrinsic to any definition of home, which is by its very nature complicated.”

“It was about five days of talking and solving some problems,” Yakimchuk told The Gazette. “It was a really good experience.”

Merrill a short time later extended an invitation to keep the conversation going and the global literary universe growing by asking Yakimchuk to join the UI International Writing Program’s fall 2023 residency in Iowa City — in its 56th year.

Given the relatively recent translation of her book, “The Apricots of Donbas,” into English — and events across Europe tied to its promotion — Yakimchuk declined.

“And also it wasn't so easy for me to leave my country in that time,” she said. “After full-scale invasion, feelings for your family and for your country were changed. They became more sharp, more love, actually, more feeling like we feel united. This is my country, my state, and I want to be close, I want to be inside, I want to help with everything, and I want to understand what's going on.”

Reconsidering the invitation a year later, though, Yakimchuk this time accepted — given that the International Writing Program’s fall residency spans just 11 weeks, from Sept. 1 to Nov. 17.

“I cannot imagine I leave Ukraine forever, or even for a really long time,” she said, pointing to her rejection of a different invitation to a yearlong program in Chicago last year. “I refuse.”

‘Something dangerous’

Yakimchuk’s roots reach deep into the soil of the eastern Ukrainian city of Pervomaisk, black with nutrients and with the coal mines that have sustained both the region and her family — her father a coal miner and her mother a conveyor operator.

Sitting about 60 miles from the Russian border, the Luhansk region of her hometown was among the first to see Russian forces in early 2014 in the attack on Crimea, which later grew into a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“It was the end of April, and I saw Russian soldiers with guns,” Yakimchuk told The Gazette of her first experience with the Russian occupation. “My son was 3 years old, and he was with me. I didn't realize at the time, but it was something dangerous.”

Then 28 years old and living in Kyiv, Yakimchuk was home visiting her parents.

“I was afraid,” she said. “I just leave Luhansk and Pervomaisk early.”

And Yakimchuk asked her parents to do the same, but they wouldn’t and didn’t.

“I worked on this about a year and asked them to leave, and only after a huge strike, actually a strike on the city of Pervomaisk, they left,” she said.

But finding them a new place was difficult. “We tried to find something everywhere in the central part of Ukraine, and it was not so easy. They disliked everything. It was really tough.”

Living out the complicated concept of “home” she explores in her writing — including published collections of poetry, plays, screenplays and performance pieces — Yakimchuk said her parents eventually did resettle in a safer village, where they helped her organize a literature festival.

And, earning a spot in 2015 among the 100 most influential people of culture in Ukraine by Kyiv’s New Time magazine, Yakimchuk that year published her award-winning “Apricots of Donbas” book of poems based on the occupation of her community that turned her family into refugees and left her grappling with the disintegration of her childhood home.

It has since been translated into several languages — including Polish, Estonian and, in 2021, English — and Yakimchuk has continued to write, produce and perform content, like the 2017 documentary “Slovo House”; the 2021 film “Solvo House: Unfinished Novel”; British artist Mark Neville’s 2022 photo book featuring her short stories; and the 2022 Grammy Awards.

‘I’m in paradise’

It was her passion for the craft of writing — which has accompanied her through turbulence and trauma, emboldening Ukrainians and educating outsiders along the way — that compelled Yakimchuk this year to consider the UI invitation to join its International Writing Program’s fall 2024 residency.

“When you are endangered in society, you become really close,” she said about her national bond and hesitancy to leave Ukraine. “When I'm here, I do not feel I have control of the situation. When I'm in Ukraine, I understand what's going on.”

One day in late September, for example, Yakimchuk said she didn’t hear from her husband at the usual time. Although she knew it was 1 a.m. there, she found herself calling him and her son and checking the internet and social media for missile strikes or other news.

“I knew it was already morning in Ukraine, but I called him, and he said everything is OK,” she said. “He just slept, and everything was OK.”

Yakimchuk’s UI residency schedule is full of panel discussions, interviews, readings, events with other fellows and trips to “important and diverse American literary communities” like Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York City.

She’s also been writing — but feels a little like she’s on vacation.

“I feel here like I was dead, and I'm in paradise,” Yakimchuk said. “This is a really comfortable city for writers, actually, and beautiful.”

Although Iowa City is different in many ways from the Ukrainian home she’ll never leave for too long, she has found at least one sliver that transports her back — down along the Iowa River and the Stanley Hydraulics Laboratory.

“I love the part of the city where there is the river and a kind of dam, with an industrial building,” she said. “It really amazes me because I’m from an industrial region. And also the city is spacey and flat like Luhansk. Its really similar weather here … it’s really similar, and I feel really comfortable.”

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Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com