Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools

IntervIeW mAy 2009
emma lucy bay pimentel
jacksonville, florida, usa
We received Emma’s first submission early in February of this year.
Like all of our submissions, her work sat in our filing cabinet while
we prepared for our annual fund raiser. We finally started reading
submissions on a quiet Sunday morning, each of us at a table with a
stack of poems, fiction and nonfiction. I happened upon her poem which
immediately set off my good-poem-sensor. After reading it, I flipped
to her bio. All I could utter was an astonished “Woah...” I immediately
wanted to know more about Emma’s childhood and about her travels. I
hopped onto our email and fired off a few questions. A week later, the
answers to my questions were waiting for me as well as the essay, “Navy
Blue.” She described living in Bosnia and walking across a minefield.
She talked about living in Cairo and about her favorite food, “Koshari.”
She discussed being proud of her younger sister’s attempts to prevent
malaria. Needless to say, her writing charmed us and her life beguiled
us. We thought her story was important to include in the pages of our
magazine. A few emails and a couple weeks later, this interview was
aching to be read.
-Katie DeGrandpre
Editor of Aerie International
AI: Why did your parents decide to move to Bosnia when you were little? Do you
remember feeling any specific way about the move? Once you were there, why did your
family decide to move again to Romania and the Netherlands?
ELP: At the age of seven I already considered myself a seasoned traveler:
I had lived in three different states and visited relatives in a few others.
Moving to Bosnia wasn’t a step I was quite prepared for, especially on such
short notice, but, as a second grader and the fourth child, I didn’t have
much say in it. My father was offered a short-term job he hadn’t applied for,
assessing the needs of post-Communist courts in Bosnia, and our family
packed up and moved out, leaving all of our furniture as well as our dog
behind, the former in the care of a storage unit, the latter with relatives. At
the time, we thought it was for just three months. It was a chaotic time for
me – while excited to ride in an airplane and live overseas, I hated the idea
of leaving my comfort zone. At that age, I hardly knew that Europe existed,
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