Starting out the 2025 Author Interview series is author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, “a Ukrainian Canadian author acclaimed for her nonfiction and historical fiction.” In fact, she’s authored so many books, I had to pick and choose which to feature at the end of the interview (ultimately featuring a photo from her website). Her work has been praised by multiple outlets, including Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and The New York Times Book Review, which said, “Unflinching…Skrypuch handles difficult themes with intelligence and honesty…couldn’t be timelier today.” Those difficult themes and honest writing have led to an interesting repercussion: Marsha has been “banned for life by Russia for her writing.”

Welcome, Marsha!

Christina: Under Attack is the first novel of your new Kidnapped from Ukraine trilogy. The book stems from a request from your publisher, Scholastic, “to pivot” from a different project. Why did you accept the challenge? Did you ever have any doubts about writing the series?

Marsha: When Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, I had been in the midst of writing a companion novel to Winterkill, my 2022 novel set during the Holodomor, Stalin’s 1930s genocide of Ukrainians. The companion novel was set during the Stalin-terror years of the late 1930s, leading up to WWII. I did not have the stomach to continue the book when Putin launched his own genocide of Ukrainians in the present. I set that manuscript aside and went back to an old project set in the middle ages. In the meantime, I had been doing virtual presentations about how to talk to kids about the war in Ukraine. My publisher asked if I would write a trilogy about the current war. I initially said no, but they asked again. Readers also asked. It was at about this time that a lot of Russian disinformation was populating the book world. I realized I had a moral obligation to fill this space with historically accurate literature for young people, regardless of the emotional cost to me.

Christina: The book features 12-year-old Dariia and her twin sister Rada, who “struggle to survive the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.” How did you decide on these characters? Are Dariia and Rada inspired by anyone in particular?

Marsha: The girls are my creations, but their experiences and actions hinge on the real experiences of people in Mariupol when the war began. Mariupol was the most dangerous place on earth in February 2022. I wanted to plunge the reader into what it would be like to wake up one morning with war shattering your window.

Christina: Speaking of characters, you like to feature strong young women in your stories. I’m going to guess this is a conscious choice. What message do you hope to send to young women?

Marsha: It’s my natural inner voice. Girls need strong proactive role models. Boys also benefit from reading from the perspective of strong girls.

Christina: What about historical fiction is so appealing to you as a writer? How do you decide which time period to visit? What are your writing and researching processes like?

Marsha: I write about the people’s lived history that has hidden or propagandized into oblivion. The appeal is being a pioneer on topics in fiction and narrative non-fiction, for young people. If I can find a novel on a piece of lived history that I’m interested in, I’ll read it. If I can’t, I often write it. I was a research librarian for the Canadian government before I became a writer, and I consider myself a librarian-detective. I use first person accounts from a variety of reliable sources and perspectives and put that on a scaffold of documented chronology. That’s how I get the shape for my story and the inspiration for each character, and then I let my characters loose and follow behind them with my laptop, writing what they do. They’ll often take me to places that I didn’t expect, and then I have to stop and do more research. The manuscript that my publisher gets has footnoted references throughout, plus a bibliography. I don’t make it up; I look it up.

Christina: You’re a descendant of Ukrainian immigrants with “strong ties to your heritage and culture,” and it makes sense to write stories set in Ukraine. Have you tackled other settings? What other settings have you considered, if any? How much of your own background do you try to bring into your stories?

Marsha: My novels with Scholastic, which are all Ukrainian-themed, are by far my most popular but I’ve written more than two dozen books. Six of these are set during the Armenian Genocide, for which I’ve been honored by the Armenian community in Canada. I also wrote four books about Vietnamese war refugees. I don’t bring myself into my books. I try to be a blank slate for my story, to ensure that the real people get their voices heard.

Christina: In a previous interview, you mentioned that you’d like to be known for “honoring those who have been forgotten.” Why is that so important to you? What other ways, besides writing, do you do this? 

Marsha: What we forget, we’re bound to repeat. If we’ve never heard it, we can’t learn from it. I ask questions and I listen to the answers. Before I ever was a writer I was doing this because I was shy and I found it was a great way to have a conversation without having to say much. But a funny thing happened. I heard fascinating stories. I learned so much! Those things that people told me became the core of my writing.

Why is it so important to me? Because if we all asked questions and listened to the answers the world would be a better place. Too many people like the sound of their own voices the best.

I have run a private online critique group for writers for more than two decades.  There’s no cost involved. Writers give critiques to get them, and each participant is vetted by me. Those attracted to my group are often writing their own bit of hidden history.  Many have become successful authors. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than seeing a new writer bloom.

Christina: On your website, you state, “If you want to understand the Russian war against Ukraine, inform yourself about the treatment of Ukrainians by both Stalin and Hitler. Putin is channeling them both.” Can you comment on that?

Marsha: I’ve written two WWII trilogies about the treatment of Ukrainians by Hitler and Stalin. Both of these dictators wanted the land of Ukraine but not the people. Both of these dictators believed in a hierarchy of humans and killed the ones that they deemed to be at the bottom. Putin’s ideology emulates both. After WWII the world remembered some of the atrocities of Hitler, but forgot the atrocities of Stalin. That convenient forgetting is why we have dictatorships like Russia, North Korea, China. Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin all emulate Stalin, the dictator who got away with mass murder.

Christina: In-person and virtual author visits are something you do in both Canada and the United States. What do you like best about author visits? What’s the most memorable question you’ve been asked during an author visit? What do you hope to convey when you make a visit?

Marsha: In my presentations, I’m frank about my failures and how those experiences inform my writing. I am dyslexic and didn’t read until I was nine and failed fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher told my mother that I would never learn to read, would never be a success in life and that it was her fault, for being divorced from my father. Because no one seemed to be able to teach me how to read, I taught myself. I did this over the course of a year, by reading Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, painfully slowly but ultimately loving every minute. I realized how many things I shared with Oliver. It made me want to write books like Oliver Twist, but to leave out the boring parts. And I wanted to write about people like Oliver, like me, who had been written off by others. My first book—set during the Armenian Genocide—got 100 rejections, but that didn’t stop me, because I became an expert at failing and didn’t give up. I ultimately broke that book into six separate novels, that all became well-published and critically acclaimed.

I share this during my presentations because I want kids to know that there will always be others who will try to define them. I want them to find happiness in being who they really are and in seeing that what others perceive as weaknesses can really be their strength. The trick is to learn the art of failing and getting back up again.

At the end of an in-person presentation, if there’s time, I invite about a dozen students onto the stage to ask questions their questions directly to me and I give my response to everyone. I enjoy this because the questions are unscripted and often raw.

Once, in a theatre, where classes were bussed in from several schools, a student got up on stage, but she burst into tears when it was her turn to ask a question. She went to sit down, but thought better of it and stood last in line. This time, she didn’t ask a question, but made a statement. She said that her parents had recently split up, she was having trouble in school and was being bullied. She said that hearing my story empowered her. Think of her bravery—this is a 12-year-old kid who spoke like this in front of her fellow classmates plus several hundred strangers. Her action brought me to tears. I congratulated her for being able to get back up like that and to speak so profoundly. We hugged. The audience gave her a standing ovation.

Another time a 10-year-old told me that reading Making Bombs for Hitler made him realize how lucky he was. He said that he and his sister argued a lot but reading Bombs made him realize he’d be gutted if he lost her. He said that he would never complain about what his mom served for supper, because it was food, and Lida in the book was starving. He was so grateful to be in a loving family, with food to eat and a place to live. It was an honor for me to see the perspective he got from reading that novel.

It’s these individual connections, where kids tell me how my stories help them deal with challenges in their own life. This is why I write. This is why I love to meet readers face to face.

Christina: Over on Instagram, you have a few pictures of flowers, with one captioned, “Nothing better than flowers that grow themselves.” I completely agree! I take it, then, that you’re not a gardener? Do you enjoy gardening or have an interest in it? What hobbies do you find time for and enjoy? 

Marsha: I am an avid gardener. We live on the outskirts of town and I have a lot of gardens and I look after them all myself but I’m a messy sort of gardener, getting rid of weeds and planting flowering perennials, things people give me, things I can grow from seed. Digging around in dirt is my reward for a long writing session. I like to see flowers out my window as I write and I like something to be blooming all spring, summer and fall. When I pull a weed, I plant a seed in the hole that’s left behind. Sometimes they grow, sometimes they don’t. In the fall, I scatter harvested seeds all over my wild garden bed at the side of the house and wait for spring to see what happens. it’s always such a delight to see how this garden shapes itself.

I also create pysanky – Ukrainian Easter eggs. This is another gift to myself for long bouts of writing. Like my garden, I don’t plan but let the egg tell me what it wants to be. There are pictures of them on my website.

Other than that, I go on long fast walks and talks with friends, weight train, read voraciously, and travel.

Christina: What’s next for you?

Marsha: My imagination hasn’t told me yet. I may go back to my medieval novel, or continue with what’s happening now in Ukraine.

Marsha can be found in multiple places!
Website: https://www.calla.com/wordpress/
Goodreads: @Marsha_Forchuk_Skrypuch
Instagram: @skrypuch
Facebook: @marsha.skrypuch
X: @MarshaSkrypuch

Thanks to Marsha for agreeing to this interview! Feel to leave a comment!