When author Mima Tipper began her writing career, the plan was to pen a young adult fantasy.
Instead, an advisor recommend she write something with a personal connection—leading to her new book, “Kat’s Greek Summer.”
In this Five by Five, Mima talks about the switch from fantasy to a memoir, her main character Kat and how writer and protagonist reflect one another and the theme of going back to your roots.
How did your own background help shape the story?
A year before I began writing the manuscript that would become “Kat’s Greek Summer,” I started an MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I went into that MFA ready to dive into a YA fantasy I’d been dreaming of writing for years. At the end of the semester, my advisor—though super kind about my dark faerie story—asked me if I’d consider writing something more personal.
At first, I was taken aback. I mean, I love fantasy, and those stories are the ones that got me writing. Something about her words stuck with me, and I began thinking of the Greek side of my family—my mother is Greek—and the many summers I spent in Greece during the first 16 or so years of my life. I didn’t want to write a memoir, and instead created a fictional main character—a girl as opposite to me at the age of 14 as possible—and began writing what I thought would be a fun, gripping, romantic, sun and sand-filled story.
As I wrote, a lot of my feelings about my family and heritage bubbled up, and soon my protagonist Kat Baker started saying and doing and asking things that I never had the courage to say or do or ask. These memories and feelings informed Kat’s story more and more, and the result of all that self-reflecting and imagining turned into “Kat’s Greek Summer.”
Does the story reflect much of your own youth?
Yes, like my main character Kat, I grew up between my two cultures, and never fully connected to my Greek half. When my Greek mother became an American, she wanted to be all American, so she didn’t speak Greek to me or my brother. That made spending summers in Greece fairly surreal. Though we loved my Greek grandparents, especially my yiayiá, my brother and I were expected simply to fit in with our Greek family without much help.
The real fishing village where we stayed is called Alepahori, though the place has changed quite a bit since my childhood. I loved capturing my memories of that place with the physical setting as well as the rustic cottage and relatives in “Kat’s Greek Summer.” Regarding the Greek characters and Kat’s relatives, most are compilations of my true family members and of Greeks I met during my Greek summers, especially my Yiayiá Sofia character. My own Yiayiá Kalomira passed away a bunch of years ago, and it was amazingly fun and personal to bring pieces of her back through my fiction. My character Kat’s story is fiction, but to be honest many, many aspects of her story hold the emotional truth I discovered exploring my own heritage growing up half Greek/half American.
Who is Theofilus and what makes him “off-limits”?
Theofilus is the young Greek fisherman my main character Kat falls for. There was a real Theofilus for me during one of my teen year Greek summers, and my Theofilus also did not speak English. We did have fun trying to communicate, and there were a lot of hand signals. The reason my character Theofilus is “off-limits” is because of his grandfather’s attitudes about how young girls should behave, and his very specific fear of all things American. No spoilers!
What is Kat’s experience going back to her roots?
Born and bred in New England, Kat hasn’t had much contact with her Greek family, so the foreignness of the language and culture is very alien to her. Also, the summer place is a tiny cottage located in a very rustic fishing village, and she finds herself cut off from her sport, her friends, her technology, and everything she knows. The food, the climate, the language are all foreign to her, making her question her Greek heritage, and feel more and more that she doesn’t belong.
What do you hope readers take away from this book?
When my readers turn the last page of “Kat’s Greek Summer,” I want them to take a big satisfied breath because they feel like they’ve gone along with Kat on her daring, swoony adventure in gorgeous Greece, and were rooting for her all the way. I want my readers to feel powerful and hopeful about their own possible choices and future. I want their takeaway from this reading experience to be the message that to belong anywhere or to anyone or anything, they must first belong to themselves.
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