Poetry of the Here & Now: Ukrainian Creative, Olena Boryshpolets, Talks to LBP about Writing Poems, Crafting Prose, & Making Art in a Time of War
- Anna Febbraro
- Oct 14
- 4 min read
Olena Boryshpolets is a poet, writer, journalist, actress, and culture manager. Her chapbook-length poem, New Calypso, published by Lefty Blondie Press, is launching at City of Asylum on October 21, 2025. RSVP HERE
LBP: Where do you create? Do you have a dedicated writing space? What does your writing space look like?
Olena Boryshpolets: To work with prose texts, I need a bed with a comfortable mattress and a lot of pillows, morning and silence. Compared to the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who filled the upper drawer of the desk with rotten apples, and the great Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, who composed music only in a powdered wig, my writing set looks quite boring.
LBP: What does your current writing routine look like?
OB: Writing poems takes place here and now, a completely different process from how I write prose. I write most of the prose texts in my head. When I know what the story is about and who its characters are, and when I have the end of the story... is when I sit down to write. Of course, in the process of writing, I change and add some things. One of my favorite stories from the book, Ukrainian Detox, I wrote in my head for more than six months, and then sat down and recorded it in a few hours. This collection of short stories, Ukrainian Detox, has been translated into English and will be published next year by Harvard University. So my stories can be read by an American reader, it's a great joy.
LBP: What do you do in your non-generative times?
OB: Since I write mostly in my head, I don't have a non-creative period, it is continuous for me and it has been like that since childhood. The periods when I don't write physically, can last quite a long time. In these periods I read, listen to music and lectures on physics and neurobiology, fall in love, lose, watch a lot of art and movies, go to the theater, take part in performances, strikes, draw, and research topics of interest to me.
When I don't write literature, or when I write it, I work to make a living. In Ukraine, seven years before the Great War, I was engaged in journalism and cultural management: promotion and development of Ukrainian music, cinema, theater and writing.
LBP: How has your relationship to writing changed throughout your life?
OB: Big changes came with the big war. When, in 2022, there was a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which most of us naive Ukrainians could not believe, I stopped writing. And what is most terrible, I could not read anything but the news for almost two years. When missiles are flying at you, at your peaceful loved ones, at your home and garden, and you are forced to live in someone else's basement because you do not have a basement, and to bury children there, all the fiction in the world devalues in an instant. But the need to testify and convey to the world what happened to my people still outweighed despair and weakness, and somehow I found in myself the ability to write almost documentary poems, but not without metaphors and rhyme. This helped me a lot to psychologically cope with the fact of war, with the horror of reality. It is very difficult to be absolutely powerless against great evil.
LBP: What are you working on now?
OB: Last year, in Pittsburgh, I started writing a novel, wrote a rather large piece and realized that the story I wanted to tell was so interesting and colorful that it kept me at arm's length. So I surrendered to this feeling, which has never betrayed me in my life. I am slowly and carefully working on making this distance shorten naturally, but I have not touched the text for a year. In general, I am a big fan of short fiction and still reread with deep pleasure the collections of stories by Faulkner, Salinger, some stories by George Saunders and Lucia Berlin, I read them to the holes! And meanwhile, the fantastic collection of stories A Manual for Cleaning Women which is forever in my e-book reader, this collection brought Berlin real fame, after publication in 2015 with a foreword by Lydia Davis, when the writer was long gone from the living. My new collection of short stories and essays is already in my head, I hope it will be published while I am alive :)
LBP: How do you keep the fire going for an extended project?
OB: I am lucky, I don’t have to do any special exercises, squats, carry dumbbells, eat mushrooms, drugs, artificially inspire myself, stimulate myself. My life is much more interesting, brighter, more terrifying than any literature. I wrote the poem New Calypso for nine years, and its fire did not go out for a moment due to external circumstances, my task was only to understand exactly what kind of story I wanted to tell.
LBP: What can poetry do?
OB: I know for sure that poetry can be a testimony during war, a document of time, at least ours, mine, the time of my country, my people.
Olena Boryshpolets is originally from Odesa, Ukraine. They say you can leave Odesa, but Odesa will never leave you. Thus, Olena brought Odesa with her when she came to Pittsburgh and is ready to share this incredible city with all of us. Olena is a poet, writer, journalist, actress, cultural manager, and author of the short story book Ukrainian Detox and the book of poetry Orpheus and Eurydice in New York. Olena is also a member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, a co-founder of the public organization Creativity Without Borders, and a member of PEN America.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Olena traveled to Poland, where she spent a year acting in the Polish-Ukrainian play Life in Case of War. Since March 2023, she has been a Research Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and a Writer-in-Residence at the City of Asylum Fellowship for Ukrainian Writers.
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