Authors In The Media With Sasha Vasilyuk 

Recently I did a Q&A with journalist & author of the historical fiction novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory Sasha Vasilyuk. In this edition of Authors In The Media, we are going to go more in depth about Sasha’s journalism career! 

Q: Sasha, what fascinated you about journalism that you chose that as your profession?

A: I wanted to be a writer but as an immigrant I also needed to be practical. Journalism seemed like a real job versus “writer”. I also had an ambition of specifically doing art journalism, writing reviews of art exhibits and dance. What I didn’t realize at the time was that art journalism was also quite impractical.

Q:  Did you have to go to school to get a journalism degree or did you apply for a position? Some authors who are or used to be journalists, told me they either went to school or they applied somewhere. 

A: I’d been writing for the college paper but didn’t feel like I was qualified to get a job right after college. I wanted to get a master’s in journalism first. There were only two programs in the U.S. that specifically focused on art and culture, and I was accepted into one of them: Cultural Reporting and Criticism at New York University. 

Q: In our Q&A recently, you spoke about how journalism writing has helped with writing historical fiction Your Presence Is Mandatory. You said that like many journalists, that you’re both fascinated and terrified of writing fiction. Why did writing fiction fascinate & terrify you? What are your favorite parts about journalism writing & fiction writing?

A: The main rule of journalism is Stick to the facts. You’re not supposed to make anything up and, unless you’re writing an op-ed, you’re not supposed to openly express any opinions. So, in a way, it’s the antithesis of fiction writing. Having been taught in the tradition of fact, I was afraid that I didn’t have the capacity to invent. And yet, it was novels that I most wanted to write. 

And yet, I think journalistic training can also be very helpful to creative writers because you’re taught how to quickly orient the reader in a story. I see fiction writers struggle a lot with that aspect, where they think the reader will understand who/what/when/where, but the reader is confused. Journalism is also helpful for that pesky background information that is often needed in narrative but that can get clunky. In journalism, you’re taught how to quickly weave background info into the news story because you have a very limited word count.

Q: What lessons have you learned in your journalism career would you want others to know and remember whether they go into journalism or any career for that matter?

A: What you think you want to do may not turn out to be what you want to do. When I graduated from my Masters, I got a journalism job doing partly what I wanted (writing cultural and human-interest stories), but then the financial world collapsed and the first journalism jobs to get cut were art and culture. So instead, I found myself writing general news stories for a local daily: city hall drama, fires, union negotiations. And I quickly realized that it was a terrible fit for my strengths and interests.

Q: Would you please give a list of some of the many interesting people you’ve interviewed and what those experiences were like? 

A: I’ve interviewed a clown in New York who seemed to be depressed. I followed around a comedy team of illegal immigrants from the former USSR until they won a national competition. I interviewed the founder of a kite festival in the Bay Area, which unfortunately got canceled with the pandemic. I interviewed a U.S. army officer for a story about how they were targeting immigrants to recruit. They were quite pissed at me for that story, and I got put on their “do not pick up” list. One of my favorite stories was about immigrants and the special things they grow in their backyards to remind them of home. More recently, I interviewed Ukrainian refugees running from the war and found myself crying during the interview because of the horrors they were describing. I also got to interview several debut authors like Ruth Madievsky and Jessie Ren Marshall, whose work is very different from mine and whose brains I found extremely fascinating.