Playwright, screenwriter, journalist and war correspondent Oksana Grytsenko is sharing her years of professional experience, advice and valuable insights from working in the media with our students. Oksana has long worked in English language journalism, travelling to and reporting from war zones. In recent years, she has been writing plays, which have been performed in various cities in Ukraine and abroad. And her play Don Juan of Zhashkiv became the basis for the script of a feature film of the same name, to be produced by Kristi Films in 2021.
Here is my interview with Oksana Grytsenko.
I’d like to start by looking back a little, to the distant year of 2015. Back then, you had the opportunity to spend six months in the United States as an Alfred Friendly Press Partners Fellow, working with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and studying at the Missouri School of Journalism. Could you please tell us about your experience studying at this school, how you got into the programme, and also could you talk a bit about your work at the local edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette?
The Kyiv Post, where I was working at the time, received a gold medal from the University of Missouri in 2014 for its coverage of the war in Donbass. And the Alfred Friendly coordinators offered our publication a place on the programme. I passed an internal competition at the Kyiv Post and went there.
It was a very interesting experience. I came to the small university town of Columbia, Missouri, about a month after I had been in Bakhmut (then Artemivsk) writing about the difficult withdrawal of our troops from Debaltseve. So for me, studying at the School of Journalism was both an opportunity to learn and to relax. Although the two weeks of training were very intense. In Pittsburgh, my colleagues at the Post-Gazette were very interested in Ukraine, constantly inviting me to meetings and asking me about our war. In general, Pittsburgh turned out to be a very interesting and pleasant place to live, I really fell in love with this city.
At the Post-Gazette I covered both light stories (about the local marathon, which was a big event there) and heavy ones. For example, I had a big front-page story about human trafficking. I also learnt a bit about balancing work and life. At the Post-Gazette people went home after 5pm, while at the Kyiv Post we worked until 8pm or even longer. I realised that I needed more rest in order not to burn out professionally. In fact, I was on the verge of burnout after working on the Maidan, in Crimea during the annexation and covering the war in Donbass, and a trip to the US helped me recover.
What advice do you have for today’s younger generation of journalism students who want to try their hand at working abroad, but may be hesitant?
What do you think is the value of such international programmes, and what did you learn from those six months?
All study trips and internships are useful experiences. And now there seem to be more opportunities than 10 years ago. I would advise you not to go just for the sake of going, but to choose the programmes that interest you and help you grow professionally. That is, if you write about politics, you should not apply for an internship in economics or business.
It is also important to make new contacts. After all, when you return to Ukraine, you should be able to freelance for the newspaper whose editors you have met. Immersion in the language will also be a plus. Before that trip, I was already fluent in written and spoken English, but after six months in the US, I became even more confident in my level of the language.
In your work as a war correspondent, what is the most difficult thing for you personally to write about?
What topics are the most painful and difficult for you when preparing materials, talking to people, covering life in the war zone?
Both during my time at the Kyiv Post and now, I find topics about torture the most difficult. Working in Bucha or in the village of Motyzhyn, where the Russians killed the village head and her entire family, was very exhausting psychologically. It was also difficult (physically and psychologically) to write from the site of the Malaysian Boeing crash in July 2014. These are tragedies of such a magnitude that it is difficult to even think about, let alone write about them under a deadline.
Now to the present. What inspired you to change your life’s path, if I may put it that way, because you worked for a very long time in English-language journalism, writing reports and articles, especially about what was happening in the occupied territories of our country. Your material has been published in leading Western publications, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, etc. You have extensive experience working for the Kyiv Post, the largest English-language publication about Ukraine. But today you are a playwright, and I understand that this work takes up most of your time. Your plays are performed in Ukraine and around the world. For example, The Guardian recently published an article about one of your plays, I Will Return, which was performed in Prague. Do you feel you want to return to journalism, or is playwriting absolutely what you live for now, you’ve found yourself in it and you don’t want to do anything else, at least for now?
I started playwriting out of curiosity. In August 2019, the PostPlay theatre hosted a two-week rapid drama school, curated by Maksym Kurochkin and Anastasia Kosodiy. I signed up with a story that I had heard about during an interview. It turned out to be a play that several directors wanted to stage, but unfortunately the production never happened due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Then I was very lucky, the late producer Yurii Minzianov became interested in my second play, and I wrote a script for the film Don Juan of Zhashkiv based on it.
In fact, I still work in journalism, I returned to it right after the full-scale invasion. But I try to combine journalism with playwriting and screenwriting. In fact, I’m surprised at how much these professions have in common. After all, to write plays or screenplays with quality and honesty, you also have to do a lot of research and interviews. The only difference is that in journalism you can’t make things up, whereas in fiction you can.
Because I am a freelance journalist, I can take breaks from writing articles and travelling to the East to write plays or screenplays. Deadlines usually inspire me to do so. I have just returned from the Rikstolvan literary residency in Sweden, where in one month I completed the script for the feature film The Milkweeder, based on my play, finished one play and wrote the first draft of another.
How would you compare these two fields to which you have devoted so much time and effort: journalism and playwriting? Are they equally challenging for you personally, or is one harder to master? What do you think is the greatest difficulty in each field?
I can’t say that one of these areas is easier or harder. Both have their own peculiarities. Journalism is hard because everything usually requires more efficiency and deadlines are tighter. But the advantage is that you see the result faster – it’s a newspaper publication.
Looking at your life before and after the 24th of February, have your views and perceptions of things changed in any way? I think events of that magnitude are almost certainly going to change something in people psychologically, have you observed that yourself?
Before the invasion, I thought I had a lot of experience covering the war. But after 24 February, it seemed to me to have little relevance. The scale of destruction, the number of deaths and the intensity of the fighting were simply incomparable to what had happened before. The psychological exhaustion came faster and I realised that it could not be neglected and that I had to take great care of my health.
In your opinion, was a full-scale war inevitable? It is very interesting to hear your opinion as someone who has been working on the subject of the war in Ukraine for so many years. When 24 February happened, was it as big a shock for you as it was for many Ukrainians, or did you perceive the events of that terrible day differently?
Since the autumn of 2021, my colleagues and friends, Western journalists, had been telling me that an invasion was imminent. In January and February 2022, they talked about it incessantly. I was also reading Western analysts, including Michael Coffman and Rob Lee, who were arguing in their articles that the Russian army was already so far advanced that a full-scale invasion would definitely happen, it was only a matter of time. So on 22 February I was not in Kyiv but in Chernivtsi, realising that it would be very difficult to leave the capital in case of an attack.
In the first days, I was desperate, because I thought that Kyiv would fall. It helped that I immediately started working for the Japanese newspaper Nikkei and the Guardian, and this work distracted me from my heavy thoughts.
Could you please describe in a few words what you would like to do after our victory (we all hope that it will come), your biggest dream that you would like to fulfil? Do you think that our victory is at all possible, in the sense of Russia’s withdrawal from all the territories that belong to Ukraine according to the Constitution, the complete liberation of our country from Russians and our accession to Western institutions, how realistic does this scenario look?
Victory will mean different things to different people. Some say that we have already won because the Russians did not capture Kyiv and did not destroy Ukrainian statehood, and there is some truth in this. I find it hard to believe that we will return to the borders of ’91, although I’ve stopped being surprised in the past almost three years. After the victory, the first thing I might do is get drunk.
Do you think that the new generation of Ukraine, our youth, who in many cases have to hide in bomb shelters and watch their loved ones and friends die instead of conquering the world, is deeply traumatised psychologically and morally by the war, and is it possible to change this at all? What should we do to become new people with an optimistic vision of the world and our country after the war is over? Also, let’s not forget that most of these young people are dying in the war today, and demographically, yes, Ukraine is facing a very difficult situation, as many experts have already said. How do you see the prospects for our youth in the future?
I see the prospects of our youth in the same way as the rest of the population. The main thing is to survive in these conditions. A significant part of our youth now lives in Europe, and it is not known when and if these people will return to Ukraine. Some of the youth stayed in the occupied territories, and some were taken to Russia by the Russians. By the way, my play ‘I Will Return’ is about these young people.
I think the war has already changed all of us and will continue to do so. And the level of optimism in society will depend on the circumstances of the end of the war. Even if we don’t get all the occupied territories back, but we do join NATO and the EU, then I think Ukraine will have good prospects.
The ‘engine’ of our media and organisation is students, active and talented young people. Let’s imagine that you were invited to one of the country’s universities to talk about yourself, your experience in the media, and some of the nuances and subtleties of covering the war. What would you say at the end of your talk to today’s journalism students, who are just beginning their journey along this thorny path, who want to spread the truth in such difficult times of information warfare and uncertainty about their own future? What should our young people do today to ensure that independent Ukrainian journalism is in good hands and continues to flourish?
I would say that journalism in Ukraine is in a very bad state at the moment because of mobilisation, lack of money in newsrooms and people leaving to work in Western media. That is why we really need young, motivated and intelligent journalists. But you have to be prepared that this is not an easy profession, especially in Ukraine. On the plus side, while in the West you are likely to be making coffee for more experienced colleagues and learning from them by the time you are 30, in Ukraine you can be put in charge of writing big and important stories right away.
How do you find yourself today and draw inspiration from life, when it seems so easy to despair when you read all the news? How do you manage to do this, to create, to write, and not be constantly distracted by the surrounding tragedies?
I, too, often get despondent and exhausted, that’s the way things are in our country. Working with a psychiatrist and doing sport help me a little. It is also important to set personal limits and not to take on more than you can handle. It took me years of work to realise this.
