Queer history meets ancient theater and contemporary poetry in Eleni Sikelianos’s new book, Memory Rehearsal, which she’ll discuss as part of Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Parallel Stories series on May 21 (register at bit.ly/4daBSFx ). David Starkey catches up with the Santa Barbara–raised poet and Brown University professor ahead of her visit to town.
You grew up in somewhat less than ideal circumstances in Goleta and Isla Vista, but it turns out that your great-grandfather Angelos was one of the most famous Greek poets of the 20th century, and your great-grandmother Eva was equally extraordinary. Connecting those two worlds makes for quite a story in your new memoir, Memory Rehearsal, but it must have been awfully difficult to weave all those threads together.
Yes, it was. In early drafts of the book, I only accounted for discovering Eva and Angelos’s history on my travels in Greece. But I realized that this collision of realities had to be part of it. I grew up on food stamps in Section 8 housing in Isla Vista, yet my great-grandparents were these illustrious figures! That’s been the process for me in each of these family histories — I’ve had to figure out how to include more of my own experience, as part of the ecosystem and context, to anchor the story.