All artists are said to have a ‘creative birth’ in their life. An instigating moment which defines them. Multi-award-winning author Pete Papathanasiou has had two writing births in his life.

The first was at his Australian primary school in the mid-1980s, soon after his parents migrated Down Under.

“Just a kid at primary school, I found myself drawn to reading and then to writing,” he tells Neos Kosmos.

“I was soon penning longer and longer pieces, challenging myself to go further into a story, wondering how far off I was from a novel and hoping that one day, just one day, I might reach it.”

The local writer has recently joined a group of acclaimed artists for The Pigeonhole’s Letters from Greece series, which launches on 9 November, with a story from Florina, his birthplace.

When he was 10 years old in Grade Four, he can vividly remember competing with a classmate for who could write the longest story. He filled over 30 pages of an exercise book and won by a long way. At the age of 11, he wrote a story which featured characters based on all his classmates. At the time, the idea was revolutionary; no one in Pete’s class had done it. When his teacher read the story, she was flummoxed. She asked if she could read it out to the entire class during story time. It was the first time anything was read out during story time that wasn’t a published book. It was also the first time he faced the critics.

“To this day, I can still remember sitting and watching the expectant faces of my classmates, waiting for mention of their name, and then to hear what crazy scene I’d included them in,” he muses.

“I didn’t realise it at the time but it was also the first time they – my classmates – had ever appeared in ‘a book’. They felt famous, that someone had deemed them important enough to write about.

“The following year, due to overwhelming demand, requests from classmates, I wrote a sequel.”

Like most sequels, it was less successful. Unlike most sequels, Pete shelved the franchise before it got tired. High school and university followed.

Overwhelmed with studies in his chosen, non-literary field, he gradually wrote fewer creative pieces, but often found himself channelling his creativity into long letters to friends and pen-pals, which he believes was also a “form of therapy”.

His writing rebirth, as he loves to call it, came in 2006 and has neatly book-ended his writing career so far. After working as an academic in the US for a number of years, he felt the need for a break. At the end of a research fellowship at Stanford University, Pete enrolled in a writing course at The New School in Manhattan, where he tested himself against ‘real’ New York writers.

“The experience was a revelation and set me on a new course,” he explains, adding that it redirected him back onto an old course that “my subconscious brain had been yearning to reconnect with.”

Pete’s 1981 primary school class when he was in Year 1: “I am smack bang in the middle of the middle row in a fetching brown skivvy top and matching corduroy pants.”

Neos Kosmos (NK): What do you usually write about?

I usually write stories about the human condition – what it means to be human. These stories have themes like love, loss, birth, death, generations, isolation, children, maturation, culture and identity. I write literary fiction and crime. I feel crime is a particularly good genre where a writer can showcase the human condition through explorations of good and evil. In October 2013, I attended a fabulous residential crime writing course in West Yorkshire held in an 18th-century mill owner’s house. I also write nonfiction when something inspires me in my own life or the lives of others.

NK: What inspires you?

Inspiration can come from many places so I always have my antennae out in case it strikes. I’ve written pieces inspired by my family or by geography after visiting new locations. I’ve written after being inspired by something I heard on the news. I’ve written after conducting a radio interview with a studio guest who described a particularly compelling character, and then subsequently went on to make them the protagonist in a novel. I’m inspired by people and situations in my own life. In short, anything can inspire me, if it hits me at the right place and time.

NK: How has your blog helped you evolve?

The blog has been a great means by which to share my writing in short, easily-digestible formats that go direct to readers via readily-accessible technology. But blog entries need to be a certain length to have maximum impact, so writing the blog has helped me focus and restrict my writing to only the most important points through stringent self-editing. You need to work extra hard to keep people’s attention on the internet because there’s so much else available at the click of a button.

NK: Has your Greek background enhanced your writing in any way?

I am bilingual; my spoken Greek is fluent but my English is much better. Greek was the first language I spoke at home, although English quickly accelerated past. My Greek background has offered me a wealth of cultural experiences that I often use as inspiration for my writing. When I found out I was adopted as a baby, this offered a wealth of new material to explore, as you might imagine. The manuscript for my first novel detailed my biological family’s journey from Anatolia to northern Greece as part of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, their settlement in Florina, and then my adoptive family’s emigration to Australia.

NK: How did you become a part of the Letters from Greece project? How does this make you feel?

Athens-based literary agent Evangelia Avloniti curated and introduces the Letters from Greece series. Evangelia was impressed by the unpublished manuscript of one of my novels that she read in 2014, so in 2015 she asked me to write about Florina for the series.
In July 2015, Evangelia approached The Pigeonhole to do Letters from Greece during one of Greece’s moments of greatest limbo – at the very height of the post-referendum madness. Greece was everywhere in the news but very few stories being penned accurately reflected what it really meant to be living in Greece at that time. Of the 10 essays in the collection, my essay, Florina: Where Greece Begins, is the only essay from northern Greece.
It was an honour to be asked to write about Greece, the country of my birth, and especially Florina, the town in which I was born. Situated deep in the mountains of northern Greece, Florina is a relatively unknown part of the country. Unlike the idyllic islands or the busy capital in the south, the north sees very little tourist trade, but I think it is a hidden gem. It was humbling to be able to share stories from my family’s ancestral home, the place to which my refugee grandfather fled nearly 100 years ago to start a new life with his young family.

NK: Are you onto any new projects we should keep an eye out for?

I have a novel on submission to publishers through my literary agent Zoë Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge & White in London. This novel is very different to Letters from Greece but hopefully equally compelling. I’m now also writing a new novel which will probably take some time to complete. When inspiration strikes, I write short pieces that are published in hard copy and online in collections like Letters from Greece. And there’s also my blog which I post to at least once a month.

NK: Have you ever thought of writing in Greek?

I would love to write in Greek someday but I’m afraid my written Greek is quite rudimentary. I could perhaps write a children’s book – I imagine that would be a lot of fun! Until then, I’m limited to merely including Greek words (e.g. kafenion, polikatikeia, tiropita) when I write something inspired by the country of my birth. It would be absolutely wonderful to one day have my writing translated into Greek. I can then share it with my two brothers in Florina and my elderly parents who struggle to understand English. Actually, that is something I would treasure.

For more information head to www.fromtheplasticpen.wordpress.com and www.thepigeonhole.com/books/letters-from-greece