On Books and Memories and Hope in On the Tips of Her Fingers
By: Bibiana Kerpcar
Tags: Publishing, Fiction, Writing, Authors, Novel

Writing a book

As a lifelong reader and writer, I would like to say that the story was always brewing inside me, waiting for an opportunity to release. It was knocking at the door that guards my innermost thoughts from the rest of me.



But that’s not true.



That’s not to say that I haven’t, throughout my life, given space for ideas to develop. That is not to say I didn’t dream of becoming an author, of spinning tales for readers who would become enraptured with my prose and character building. But it is to say that I never had my one golden idea, the one that felt good enough to build.



On the Tips of Her Fingers was that idea. And it came about rather serendipitously. But before I go into that, it’s important to share some background.



Growing up in Brooklyn

My life began in Stará Ľubovňa, Slovakia. It’s a picturesque town in northeast Slovakia, currently numbering around 16,000 citizens. It has a beautiful medieval castle — built at the turn of the 13th century — that overlooks the town from atop a hill. As a young girl, I visited the castle with my mother and aunts, surrounded by silver weapons and upholstered chairs and grand rugs. I lived with my maternal family: my grandparents, mother, and aunts and stole bread from the grocer down the block when I was 3. In my defense, I had no concept of money at that age and my debts were promptly re-paid.



When I was five, my mom and I moved to Brooklyn, New York. I didn’t speak any English, nor did she. She began working immediately, long hours to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. While she worked, I attended school and, in the afternoons, a bilingual daycare where I began to learn English. In the evenings, as my mom and I sat down to do homework, or read a story together, or do a puzzle, I would teach her the words I’d learned that day.



It was a quaint and comfortable life. But different, nonetheless. I felt like an outsider at times, constantly attempting to find the right words and, more often than not, supplementing broken English with fluent Slovak. As a child, it was lonely.

Photo of Bibiana Kerpcar, the author

Memories of Slovakia

With time, my broken English turned into fluent English and I forgot much about Slovakia itself. It was only when I visited for the first time, over a decade later, that I remembered the familial feelings of togetherness.



I experienced the bucolic beauty of Slovakia all over again: the way in which the trees around the Lower Tatras cast shadows over the forest floor during mushroom picking; the way in which the water moved around the wooden rafts at Pieniny; the bubbling of the mineral springs where we would gather water for my grandfather; the way in which the mountain-top snow crunched under my boots, and the way in which the woods came alive at night, wolf howls coming closer to the campfire.



It’s that imagery that inspired my novel. While I did not do much traditional growing up in Slovakia, I grew up with my family. And that was pretty close.



Impact of books

But my life in the United States was very different. Struggling with growing up and the unique challenges of being a young immigrant in a new world, I threw myself into books and novels and stories, using those as an outlet for escapism.



I used books to travel to far-off lands, riding river rafts in the Amazon with Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea.



I used books to learn, new words floating into my brain like feathers dancing on the wind as I flipped through Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.



I found passions and interests — creative outlets — among dogeared pages of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.



The more I read, the more I became confident in myself and my words. The more I read, the more my personality started to shine through. The more I read, the more I began to fit in. On my own terms, of course. At night, I curled up under the covers with a book between my hands, escaping elsewhere for hours at a time.



Writing a book, again

That brings me, once more, to the reason behind my book. Books were my creative outlet as a child. Books promised magic and infused that magic into my everyday. As a young adult, I found myself once again picking up ASOUE or Coraline and finding genuine comfort in the storytelling. It felt nostalgic and special and magical.



That is what I hope On the Tips of Her Fingers can be as well.



I hope that, in reading it, people will discover and regain a little bit of magic in their everyday. On its surface, it’s about escapism and the journey to grow up. At its core, it’s about self-identity and self-expression. It’s about hope and the courage to face difficult situations head-on. Yes, it will surely offer magic by way of special powers and abilities. But it will force us all to acknowledge that there is a power in perseverance and courage.