Russian-born artist now published author in English

Nataliya Bukhanova has come a long way. A long, long way indeed.

Born in Russia, she has been in Canada for only five of her 38 years but has not wasted any time in making this country her new home. The fine arts graduate from the Yekaterinburg College of Design has been a regular presence in local art shows, like the Whyte Avenue Art Walk, with her eastern European mythical and spiritual paintings.

Otherwise, she spends her days as a pharmacology researcher looking over top of the U of A Hospital, while also devoting herself to adopting English as her new language.

“It was a very interesting and a very exciting experience,” she stated, referring to her involvement with Writers Beyond Borders. She said that when she first came to Canada, she was afraid that she would never write in English. “It seemed very complicated and I made a lot of mistakes.”

For two or three years, she has been a member of this group of non-native English speakers. Together, they have spent most of their time working on their fluency in the language through creative writing, but now they have a new project coming out that demonstrates how proficient they really are.

Writing in the Margins is the name of a new anthology that showcases the creative writing skills of Bukhanova and several of her colleagues in the Grant Macewan University workshop. It contains 44 pages of short prose and poetry from Bukhanova and several others, including Edmonton’s former PEN Canada writer-in-exile Rita Espeschit.

Bukhanova calls them all very creative and she’s proud of the project for several reasons. She said that the workshop didn’t plan a public reading as usual last year but she still wanted some result at the end to signify the accomplishment.

“I said we needed to do some project together, not just study and then go the old ways, and probably meet next year. I wanted something material.”

“It was my idea to publish this book. I’m very happy that we could realize it and print it,” she said, clearly pleased to have this evidence that proves to herself and her fellow foreign-born writers that success is just a matter of sticking to it against the odds. “We showed them that they actually could – we could do it and they could do it, too.”

Her contribution to the book is the last one, a short story called A Magic Fern and a Palm Tree. It’s based on the Russian myth that a fern blooms every July 7 on the celebration of Ivan Kupala. The magical flower shows the way to a hidden treasure. Whoever finds the impossible blossom is lucky forever.

It is not luck that brings Bukhanova success in her life, just lots of hard work combined with a cheery attitude. This is an impressive combination that should serve her very well in all of her careers.