Thirty Seconds for the BBC

A journalist was working the memorial camp, an older man with a flat cap and the patience of the profession, and his producer decided a foreign writer at the barrels was worth thirty seconds. The cube on the microphone said BBC, which is a strange thing to have pointed at you when you grew up listening to its shortwave sister half a continent away.

He asked why I had come. I said something about needing to see with my own eyes the places I had only seen through screens, and that writers owe their subjects at least their physical presence. He nodded the way professionals nod at usable quotes.

Whether it aired I will never know. But somewhere in an archive in London there are thirty seconds of a snow-dusted novelist from Bishkek explaining herself, and archives, as this page knows, are where I live.