Photo by Karen Pike
Mima Tipper is the author of the new young adult novel Kat's Greek Summer. She lives in Vermont.
Q: What inspired you to write Kat’s Greek Summer, and how did you create your character Kat?
A: After spending the first semester of my MFA (at Vermont College of Fine Arts) working on a YA fantasy, my then advisor author Uma Krishnaswami asked me to consider writing something more personal.
I thought about her advice, and pretty immediately thought of writing something based on the many summers I spent in Greece during the first 16 or so years of my life.
Because I didn’t have any interest in writing a memoir, I decided to create a fictionalized main character—a girl as opposite to me at the age of 14 as possible—and planned to write a fun, gripping, romantic, sun and sand-filled contemporary YA story.
That decided, during my drafting process of the novel a lot of feelings about my family and my heritage surfaced. I found Kat Baker, my fictional character, was saying and doing and asking things that I never knew or had the courage to say and do and ask myself. A lot of my remembered feelings and experiences surfaced.
These feelings and experiences informed Kat’s story more and more, and the result of that process is Kat’s Greek Summer. Though Kat’s story is fiction, many, many aspects of her story hold the emotional truth I discovered exploring my own heritage growing up half Greek/half American.
Q: The writer Alison McGhee said of the book, “Mima Tipper excels at bringing to life the gentleness and fire of first love, as well as Kat’s dawning awareness that only she can stake her own claim in the world.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love it. When I read Alison’s blurb for my book—my first blurb ever!—I cried. She just really got my book, and it meant the world to me that a writer I respect deeply liked and understood my book.
This part of her blurb captures exactly the mood and tone of the novel I imagined in my head, and worked very hard to put to paper: a story of a young girl in major discovery-mode on many levels.
In the loveliest way, Alison’s words about Kat’s Greek Summer capture the essence of Kat’s story: of her new feelings of actual romantic love, of her growing connection to her larger family, and of the power of recognizing her self-truth.
Q: Did you need to do any research to write the novel, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: Most of my research for the book was spending hours and hours remembering my own summers in Greece as a child and then as a young teen.
I spoke with my siblings and my mother about those years, and enjoyed those conversations traveling down our mutual memory lanes. Talking with my mother was especially satisfying and fun, because as an adult I had a lot more empathy for choices she made during those summers.
I think the most surprising element of my hours of deep reflection was identifying and acknowledging how disconnected I felt to my Greek family during those years, and how that circumstance maybe didn’t need to be the case.
I’m not sure what could’ve been different for me, but I hope that Kat’s story will inspire readers who might have a similar two-culture background to think about their two cultures, and have conversations that might result in a deeper understanding and connection to their whole family.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I just signed a contract for my next book, which will come out in the summer of 2026, and it is a contemporary paranormal YA. I’m pretty focused on promoting Kat’s Greek Summer right now, of course, but I’ll be posting about my next book on my website and on social media soon, so stay tuned.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Only that I’m very appreciative of these very thoughtful questions and of your interest in Kat’s Greek Summer.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment