Today we’d like to introduce you to Galina Vromen

Hi Galina, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

I grew up as the child of immigrants in the US and early in life decided I wanted to be an international journalist. So after getting a BA from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, I spent some time in NYC working as an editorial assistant at Knopf Publishers to save money and took off in my 20s to Paris, where I was fortunate to land a job at the International Herald Tribune. When the French authorities turned me down for a work visa (a 1.5 year process) because I didn’t have European citizenship, I traveled in Europe for a few months and then headed to Israel, where I worked for AP and then Reuters, first in Tel Aviv and later in Jerusalem, covering domestic Israeli affairs as well as the West Bank and Gaza Strip (yes, it was fairly easy to travel around in the Gaza Strip in the 1970s and early 1980s). Reuters eventually promoted me to their international staff and I was posted to the Netherlands. It’s hard to think of a place more different than Israel for a journalist! Instead of terror attacks, a war in Lebanon and endless emergency cabinet meetings over 400% inflation, suddenly I had time for lots of feature articles — on training programs to get women out of prostitution, on drug rehab programs, on the crews who dredge the garbage in Amsterdam canals, etc. My next assignment was in London, working on the equities desk, which meant mostly covering the stock market. I eventually left Europe and Reuters, worked as an editor on the English edition of Ha’aratz newspaper in Israel and in 2002 moved with my husband and son to the US.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

Back in the US, I couldn’t find a job in journalism for love or money. I was pretty desperate, and ended up applying for a job as a TSA baggage checker at a nearby airport. Fortunately, the process of being approved for the job took a number of months and in the meantime a philanthropist, Harold Grinspoon, took a chance on me and hired me as director of special projects at his Harold Grinspoon Foundation. It was a jack-of-all-trades position: at one point I was sent around to check out Jewish retreat centers throughout the US to figure out what was the most viable model, another time, I was sent off to a fat farm to explore the possibility of putting together a fun educational show on healthy eating habits (the idea was to create a show as funny and instructive as NPR’s Car Talk). But most of the work focused on making grants to non-profits in Israel (surprisingly similar to journalism work — everyone tries to make themselves look good and your job is to figure out who has a stake in telling you the truth and to find out whether an organization is actually doing the work it says it is). I was also involved in starting up a Jewish book program for children and their families — PJ Library. All of it was challenging — I was always doing things I had no experience in — but it was also a lot of fun and I thrived on the variety of my tasks. In 2008, I returned to Israel and moved with my husband (my son was by then off at college) to an Arab town in northern Israel, Shfaram, population 40,000, We were the only Jews in the town. We lived there because my husband was interested in learning about sulha — the traditional mediation/arbitration process used to resolve inter-clan disputes in the Arab world. While my husband concentrated on learning Arabic and attending sulha sessions, I was busy creating an Israeli version of PJ LIbrary, which eventually grew into two programs — one in Hebrew and one in Arabic. We distributed books to children via their preschools, working with the Israeli Education Ministry which co-funded the books with us. During my 12 years running the programs, we handed out some 20 million books to children and their families and reached about 85% of all children in public school (public education starts in Israel at the age of 3 and our programs eventually reached children ages 3-8). Working with the government was a challenge because we never knew whether and when there would be a budget, the ministers and director generals changed about once every two years and each time needed to be convinced that our program was worth funding. Also I supervised a hugely diverse staff, from ultra-orthodox Jews to highly devout Muslims (and everything in between — communist leaning, settlement supporters, progressives, hawks, doves, you name it). The truth is that although this definitely had its challenges, with a very few exceptions, people got a long great and respected each other. The greatest difficulty was finding books that would serve as a common ground among Israeli’s crazily diverse population. We knew that you can’t please all of the people all the time, but we wanted to please as many of them as possible! Three years ago, I retired and turned in earnest to finishing a novel I had been playing with for a decade. The novel is set in WW2 Los Alamos NM, where the atomic bomb was developed, and focuses on the families of the scientists. The families did not know why they had been brought to this remote place and had to make a life for themselves. I was lucky that the first agent that I sent the finished manuscript to liked it and took me on. A year and 27 rejections later (more than even J.K. Rowling got) the book, HILL OF SECRETS,, was acquired by Lake Union, a commercial publisher owned by Amazon. The fact that the movie Oppenheimer was just coming out really worked in my favor, and I think played a role in the fact that the book was sold at all. The editorial team at Lake Union was fabulous, one more talented than the other, and the book was released in the beginning of October. 2024. Amazon has incredible marketing capacity and the book has already racked up more than 4,000 ratings on Amazon (more than 80% of them five or four stars) which is pretty amazing. So many really good books die almost as soon as they are published. The next challenge is selling the film or TV rights. Oh, yeah, and then there’s the minor challenge of writing a sequel – making it as good as Hill of Secrets but taking less than 12 years to write!

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?

Being a writer or any type of creative has a terrifying aspect to it. Because you are always testing yourself on the most profound level, between you and yourself, to see if you can reach something sublime, something profoundly true and felt. It’s like plunging into a pool of cold water every time. You recoil, hold back, but you also want to do it and once you plunge in, the feeling is wonderful. And sometimes you write hundreds and thousands of words that are garbage to get to that one clear and true sentence that makes it all worthwhile. That first stage of writing is what some writers call the ‘throw up version” — just spewing. Then comes the “throw out” stage, where you edit and hone, over and over.
At some point you have to stop and say, “good enough.” And then the writing is out of your hands. It’s other people who decide if it will ever see the light of day (unless you decide to self-publish).

Finally, regardless of whether you self-publish or go the traditional route, you have to market yourself, get out there, inspire people to read you. I both love and hate that part. Meeting people, that’s fun, especially if they like the book. Writing letters promoting myself, not so much. Asking people for favors, hoping they will recommend you, or host you, also not so much. But your creation is like your child, you want to do the best by it, so you ask and cajole and push if you want your book/child to do well out there in the world.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?

I had a strict but very broad cultural upbringing. My parents were very European. Doing well in school mattered, reading and going to museums mattered, writing and speaking English well mattered. So did traveling to different countries and hiking. Community and family gatherings mattered less. Ditto when it came to owning things: We never bought our cars new, shopping was a necessity not a pastime. We were the last people in the neighborhood to get a TV.
My parents both spoke English, French, German, Dutch, Hebrew and had studied Latin and Greek. (I chose to take Spanish in school mostly because I wanted to learn a language the DIDN'”T know! Some rebel, right?) My father, who was a chemist in the corporate world also became a certified yoga teacher and in his free time taught himself Sanskrit because he wanted to read the Rigveda, the oldest and most sacred Hindu script, in the original. On the other hand, after living in the US for some 15 years, he asked me how many bases there were in baseball. Need i say more?

Pricing:

• Hill of Secrets is available on Kindle, in print and audio

Contact Info:

• Website: www.galinavromen.com and [email protected]

Image Credits

headshot: Jo Rosen Photography