I knew Bistra as my Bulgarian roommate. With her dimpled smile and dark Balkan eyes, Bistra shared not just a room with me in Sozopol but also bottles of wine and walks to the cold beach at night. She and I were fellows at the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, where we joined four other Bulgarian and American writers in cross-cultural writing workshops on the Black Sea Coast. We were a funny mix—including a boxer, a priest, a criminal—though everyone was warm and gracious. During workshops, our stories were translated into wiry Cyrillic letters, and some of the Bulgarians spoke English learned from Mad Max movies.
