I grew up in a self-subsistence village in Croatia—a place where life was defined by tradition, and a kind of rugged resilience. We had no running water or electricity, but we did have stories—passed down, and sometimes written down and shared by curious children like me.

I remember one fall when I was about eight years old, my parents brought a pig into our kitchen while they prepared its pen. Without hesitation or a real plan, I declared to my younger brothers that we could ride it like a horse. The chaos that followed left me sprawled in the muck on our dirt kitchen floor, unceremoniously introduced to humility and anger in equal measure.

I wrote about this incident in school, using words I probably shouldn’t have, but to my surprise, our stern communist teacher, Comrade Dinka, read it aloud in front of the class and said she loved it. She never read anyone’s piece out loud—and it was the first time I understood that my words could make someone pause and see a story—even in the messiest, most ordinary moments of life.

Since then, my path has taken me far from that small village. I earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from UC Berkeley and have received numerous research grants, including Fulbright for my dissertation research and Guggenheim for research on gendered violence, especially war rapes in Bosnia and Croatia. More recently, I was awarded a Hedgebrook Writer’s Residency, where I began to channel my experiences into creative work.

My memoir, Fields of Lavender, Rivers of Fire: A Memoir of War, Survival, and the Search for Peace, traces my return home to Croatia during the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia, when I served as Deputy Minister of Science and Technology and helped build a new nation. It is also the story of my journey through survival and loss—and my search for meaning in all that came after. At its heart, it is a story of finding my way back—through war and ruin—toward reconciliation, identity, and the search for meaning through the act of storytelling itself.