Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sharon Krasny. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Sharon, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

A valuable risk I took was to say no. I said no to someone else’s demands on my time and said yes to taking my writing seriously. As a result, i finished not just one book, but three. In order to get the ending right for the second novel, I took another risk. That is the risk of greater import, but it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t said no in the first place.
I am a historical fiction writer. Specifically, I wrote two books about Ötzi the Iceman. He is the mummy they found frozen on the Italian Alps in 1991. He was murdered over 5000 years ago. My research into Ötzi’s world opened my own to opportunities I hadn’t imagined. Book one, Iceman Awakens, tells the tale of Ötzi’s coming of age. I call him Gaspare. We do not know his real name. Ötzi is simply the name of the mountain region he was found frozen on. Ötzi was murdered in a crime of passion. My logic said that someone knew him well enough to hate him and who loves to hate you more than family and people in your town. To establish his back story, I began his tale at age 11. That’s not why he’s famous though. He was murdered. He was shot in the back with an arrow, clubbed on the back of the head and left to die in the waters of a glacier. To get to that point in his story, I needed to take a big risk. I needed to climb the Ötzal mountain in the Southern Tyrol region known as Similaun. At almost 10,000 feet above sea level, this is the mountain Ötzi died on. I’m not a hiker. I’m a walker, but this mountain called to me.
At 8:10 am on July 24, 2023, we began our hike. It drizzled all day, but that was expected. The weather forecast had been storming for the three weeks prior to our trip. We had everything on our backs. This was a one way trip over the mountain. By 2pm we were quite soaked and we stopped at the only place to get some soup. We were above the tree line and the hardest part of the slope awaited. At the big rock that showed the way to the murder spot or the way to the hutte we would stay at, we made the decision to go first to the hutte to unload and get some food. That was the best decision because the mountain had other plans for me.
The drizzle of rain became a furious storm. The wind blew heavy rain into my mouth and nose. The waters of mountain springs poured over my boots. What little remained of the glacial snow seemed preferable to walk on instead of the slippery rocks. That’s all we saw: rocks. With 200 yards to get to the hutte, all we could do was to walk from one blaze to the next. Twenty feet and then stop to take a moment before heading to the next orange blaze another twenty feet away. Hyperthermia was beginning to set in.
The storm on the mountain showed me the dangers Ötzi had faced. He knew this mountain. He purposely chose to take the hardest path over the mountain, but why? He had a reason that drove him to take desperate measures. The next morning, we ate breakfast to snow. When the sun came out we moved as fast as we could down the other side of the mountain. The murder place where Ötzi was found would have to wait for another trip. I wanted off that mountain.
As we got closer to the tree line, I began to feel his story. I could see what might have happened. It was real to me and I knew what I needed to do to make the story ring true. By not having the luxury to say no, I climbed that mountain, I found the ending I sought, and I had an opportunity to present a Tedx Talk on the experience. I find it amazing what saying the word no in the right time can really do to change a life. It’s actually okay to say yes to those mountains in our lives.

Sharon, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I taught English for over 22 years. First I taught overseas in Hungary and Czech. Second, I taught in Virginia. While living overseas I found the value of story telling. My students, who needed to practice English, would get excited to explain to me pieces of their history. Through pantomime and group efforts, I learned about Dracula, the death of Good King Wenceslas, and the ever changing borders of nations in the role of oppressor or the oppressed. This is where I learned that storytellers write the song of a people’s identity and show them the hope for something more. Storytellers shape civilizations. They hold the values of a growing society. This depth of connection to the soil of a person intrigued me.
As a teacher in Virginia, I taught literature, mostly classical literature. In the stories and poems from hundreds of years ago, I found myself again and again. I watched the authors, who had earned a place in our cannon for taking risks and showing a side of society that others had shied away from and I took notes. At some point, I remember wondering, why not me? Why couldn’t I be the one to write a book instead of always discussing someone else’s writing? This gave me courage to try and begin my path as a writer. It’s actually harder than it looks. Just reading doesn’t mean I can write. But it was through finding myself in someone else’s writing that I wanted to experience that special union of minds between a reader and an author from the author’s side. If someone asked me to explain my style of writing, I would say it’s a slow burn. I want to invite the reader to come in, sit down, and talk with me. I am not the type of writer that starts off by slapping the reader awake with action. I tell a story. Typically, the stories I tell try to find the beauty in what is seen as ugly. It’s that part of historical fiction that allows me to give a voice to the one silenced by history.
I think what I am most proud of is working together with my writing group to finish our friend’s story. Our writing group, The Lavender Ink Society, began with four founding members three years ago. All of us were teachers at the time, but our one friend had a burning need to tell her parent’s love story. Her father had been a Jew and her mother had been the daughter of a Nazi, but they found love. It is a wonderful tale of strength and overcoming different challenges and perspectives. It is a tale much needed today. Unfortunately, our dear friend suddenly died with only 20,000 words written. As a group, we pledged to finish her book. It was hard. There were so many times we wanted to quit. We really wanted to give up. That’s when we felt our friend’s love that she had always freely shared with others, and we picked ourselves up and kept going. Just this past August, we met with the family and handed over a novel of over 70,000 words. That’s just enough to go to print. It’s a good story. It really is. And I think it is the story I am the most proud of.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Writers often find themselves creating in isolation. Even in a writing group, sometimes people just do not know how to give or receive constructive criticism. Having someone to really say, “I like this, but this just needs to go” is what I craved. The only person who came alongside and offered some tough criticism was my daughter. She was brutal at times. That may have been in payment for getting in trouble when she was younger, who knows, but because she loved me, she was honest. I needed that honesty. Did we always agree? Not at all, but her honesty was something I learned to lean into.
Now that I have gone through this process of a complete story from beginning to end, I have started helping friends with developmental editing. I am terribly slow because I do still work and have my own novel that I am working on. Yet each time I sit to work on someone else’s story, I say to myself, I wish someone had done this for me. I am honest, but not cruel. I tell the parts that I really like. I ask the questions that are unclear. And I give clear feedback at how to make a scene work better. I believe the best resource any writer needs is an honest writer willing to take the risk of not just saying positive, empty compliments. That kind of feedback didn’t help my students grow and it certainly didn’t help me.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I mentioned this briefly, but my goal is to restore a voice to those silenced by history. The books we all read in school highlight the main characters that history chose to spotlight. Out of the billions that have walked this earth, only a handful get the attention of being heard. The first character I wrote about impacted our world in a dramatic way, but we do not even know his name. He’s one of the greatest archeological finds of the 2oth century. He moved the timeline of when we believed the Copper Era began back 1000 years, but we do not know his dreams, his family, who he loved. We know what he carried and what he ate, but that’s not his voice. Many have asked me why I wrote about him. He’s rather ugly and ancient. I read something from a reporter who posed the question of why don’t we just let him rest in peace. That was my connection. He lies naked in his perfectly cold tomb with thousands of visitors to peak at him, he is poked and studied, but he isn’t given much dignity. I wanted to dress him in the dignity of a story. I wanted him to wear an identity and have a voice. Our society doesn’t seem to put much value in those deemed lesser. We tend to listen only to the people saying the same things we believe and we tend to look down on those who do not as ignorant. Not everyone does this, but an overwhelming trend is to take someone’s value away based on differences. We have forgotten to learn from the ancient voices, the ones we call primitive. They remind us that people are people no matter the time period or the advancement of technology. If we do not remember that, we will doom ourselves to repeat history.
Some voices I would like to write about belong to Jane of Jamestown, who revealed cannibalism in the founding of our nation. The young slave boy, who earned his freedom coming with the Vikings to Newfoundland. The crewmate on one of the six tall masted ships in the race to open the tea trade in India. Or the suffragettes who fought for the right for women to vote. There are so many people that inspire me. We all have a story to tell. I’m just trying to listen to a few and write them down.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sharonkrasny.com
• Instagram: skrasny9
• Facebook: Sharon Krasny
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-krasny-97a3a763/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sharonkrasny9390
• Other: Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/author/dashboard?ref=nav_profile_authordash

Image Credits

Both images are mine.