Of her own 'Volition'

MOSES LAKE — While at a Moses Lake bookstore signing her new book, a shy young boy approached Liza Y.V. Shipovskiy.

"He's like, 'Well, I'd really like to read your book,'" she said, guessing he must be about 12 years old. So Shipovskiy signed a copy and gave it to him.

"I was excited that young people are taking an interest — he bothers to stop and ask," she said. "That for me was exciting, because when you're writing, you're not thinking, kids at that age, they're still pretty young. I was thinking more like high school age. I said, maybe you're a little bit young for some of these stories, but you'll grow into it," she said with a chuckle.

In December, Shipovskiy's collection of 20 stories, essays and poems on various topics of life, "Volition," was published by Publish America.

Her middle initials on the book's cover are actually her full name, she explained — Yelizaveta Vadimimoma Shipovskaya.

Born in 1983 in Rega, Latvia, in the Baltic States, Shipovskiy came to the United States with her family when she was 7 years old in 1990. The family settled in Gig Harbor.

She studied business in college in Maine, with an emphasis on accounting and finance, but after conflicts, ended up returning to Washington.

Shipovskiy arrived in Moses Lake in November, staying for several months in a house her brother owns until the end of March, at which point she plans to return to Seattle, where she hopes to work with a friend on a new business to print or engrave images onto glass or ceramics.

The technical nature of her studies, reading textbooks and papers, made Shipovskiy desire something more fun and creative. Even literature classes were very technical, she said.

"There's pressure, you know?" she said. "You're being graded all the time, they're putting red ink on your paper, they're correcting you, and I didn't want to have that pressure."

So Shipovskiy began writing to balance the logical, technical side of her brain, she said, noting she also likes Web design along with the accounting.

When she first began learning English, Shipovskiy said, she found herself frustrated in her English as Second Language classes, where teachers taught words to describe such physical objects as a dog or a house.

"Instead of learning about physical objects, I wanted to express myself using thoughts and ideas, creative language or conceptual language," she said.

So Shipovskiy got into writing to improve her language skills, and stayed with it over the years, writing as a hobby. But she stayed realistic about it, she said.

"Nobody makes money in books," she said. "It's hard to get published, books don't even sell and if they do sell, you have to sell like 10,000 copies or more, just to make a few thousand dollars."

She believes her writing should be accessible to a person with a general education degree, she said, but earn the attention of someone with a Ph.D. in English. She sees the book as a transition from one stage of her life into another.

Many of the obstacles and problems Shipovskiy ran into along the way get put into the book in some form or another.

For example, during one summer she stayed in Alaska, she wound up homeless in Anchorage a week after arriving, she said, and ultimately found a spot in a youth homeless shelter, where she befriended a prostitute ordered by the court to stay at the shelter. One story indirectly refers to the woman's third child, who ended up in a special facility due to the mother's drug use.

"For me, the accomplishment actually is in the stories themselves — the people, the lives," she said. "This recurring theme has been happening in my life … I think we should stop to think how these people become the way they are. Because they were all, at one time, little kids, 10 years old. And if you're at that age, being sexually exploited by somebody else, I don't know how you can become a stable person. I think we need to be more conscious of that and try, I don't know, as individuals, as a society."

Shipovskiy hopes people don't ignore such situations and report it so it's noticed.

Shipovskiy wrote the stories in "Volition" over a period of time, with the oldest story produced in 1998, when she was in middle school. She wrote the latest, "I Write to Grow," as an introduction most recently.

"Volition" is available online at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com and Buy.com.