INTERVIEW: Amy Fish, Author of One In Six Million

Interviewed by Lara Lillibridge

For six years, Amy Fish toiled away on her first work of researched nonfiction — a massive undertaking bringing together interviews, research, and a special relationship with a genealogist. The project was, for lack of a more perfect term, beshert for Amy, and she knew it. Read on for priceless advice about persistence, this writer’s absolute specialty.

Lara Lillibridge: This book — One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity — is very different from what you’ve written previously, and I want to start with how you got the idea to write this book, and when you knew this was going to be your next big project.

Amy Fish:  To start at the beginning, I knew that I wanted to write a researched nonfiction book, so my eyes were open for a good story. And I think that’s important for everyone to know. My great uncle passed away. I walked into his Shiva, which is like a post funeral gathering, and I started talking to this man, Stanley, who appeared to be very boring, and it looked like I had drawn the short straw. My great uncle had only one daughter, so we were all helping her host the Shiva. And so it was my turn, and it was the late afternoon, and I remember it so clearly—the sun streaming down, and he sat in my uncle’s chair, which was really a no-no, right? And so then I had to go and chat with this gentleman.

He told me that he was a ceiling salesman, and that he had sold his business, and that he took an interest in genealogy and family tree research. My eyes glazed over, but I asked for an example, and he told me this unbelievable story, and it was the story that drew me into this six year rabbit hole.

I thought about him all night, and the next day, I sent him an email saying, ‘Has anybody tried to write this story?’ And he said many people have approached me. There are documentaries about Stanley. He said many people had approached me, but I always said, no, but because I was tangentially related to him, and because family is one of his core values, he was willing to gift me his story.

LL: Oh, that is amazing. I really like what you said about being aware that you were looking for a story. That was something I was actually just talking about with my partner — about when I was blogging regularly, I was always looking for something interesting to write about. And when I stopped that habit, the world became a less interesting place, and topics were harder to find.

AF:  It happens with persistence. You know, I write this Substack every week, Persistence for Writers. And I try and think about what was the most interesting thing that happened to me this week, and how does that relate to persistence?

LL:  Wait first, let’s talk about what your book is about. Let’s just give a brief overview for people.

AF: Okay. My book is called One in Six Million, and it is a story of a woman who grew up always being told that her parents found her by the side of the road when there was a war, which was the Holocaust, in 1942 in Poland.

She grew up in Ukraine, in Siberia, and she never had any access to any information about who she truly was, who her birth parents were, and whether she had brothers and sisters, what her real name was, her birthday — she didn’t have any of this. And when she got into her 70s, and her parents had passed away, and the Iron Curtain had fallen, she started to look and this mystery fell into the hands of a genealogist in Canada living a few blocks from my house in Montreal.

So the book opens with, what was his story? How did he become a genealogist? What brought him to this? And then we go into what is her story? And then in the third act, it’s let’s unravel this mystery.

LL: I know that for a while you were struggling with who the central character was, or who the story was about: Stanley or Maria, and you struggled with finding the right structure.

AF: When I met Stanley and I first conceptualized the book, I thought it would be braided. And the braid I was looking at was one strand Stanley, because he’s a phenomenally interesting character. One strand Maria, and the mystery of how she went from being this baby in a ditch to this grown woman in Siberia and how her history got unraveled. And I had a third strand, which was about my great uncle up until his death, or around the time of his death, maybe the timeline would have been the days of Shiva, and then reflecting on his achievements as well. And then in that third strand, it would be almost memoir because it would be about my relationship with my uncle.

That’s how I conceived of the book, where I hit a roadblock very quickly was in two places. One was that because of my inexperience, and this is really important for Hippocampus readers, I think because of my inexperience, I did not properly record my meetings with Stanley Diamond in my interviews. And so they went on and on and on, and I interviewed him for two years, and I now know that that was not the right thing to do. Well, not that there’s a right and wrong, by the way.

I had a notebook and I took notes, but that necessitated me continuously going back to him as well. I didn’t set appropriate boundaries with him from the beginning again because of my inexperience and his expectation was that we would continue meeting.

LL:  So, you would have recorded?

AF: Yes. Also, COVID happened so I could Zoom with him regularly. And then at a certain point, I realized you could record Zooms, and then I recorded them. I couldn’t figure out how to transcribe them. Like on the technical side, I was weak.

For my next book, I am definitely planning to at least attend a seminar about how to properly use interview tools and record. I’ve practiced a little bit, but I’m not super confident, and I know there are all kinds of ways to voice record and transcribe and everything that I’m not very experienced with. So that would be my first thing.

My second thing is I would have done more external research in the beginning of this project. I did the research as I went along with the story. I would not do that again. I would have researched Poland and the town and the war and known more about it so that I would be able to ask more specific questions when I did my interviews.

So those were the two technical roadblocks. The third is because of my previous books — this is my fourth book — in my previous books, they’re just nonfiction stories that came into my head, you know, either because of my work or because of an experience I had. With Honeymoon Sneakers, I was following people in the airport, and I wrote a poetry collection about it, like it was a very specific incident.

And the reason I went to do an MFA is that I didn’t want the book to read that way. I didn’t want the book to read, “I met Stanley on Tuesday, and it was raining, and he was wearing a blue windbreaker, and he told me that his grandfather was in the suit business…” I didn’t know how to say, “Harry Diamond was in the suit business.” I just didn’t know how to write distantly like that, and I thought I need help.

I researched MFA programs. I wanted to go somewhere in Canada. I wanted creative nonfiction, and I wanted to apply with a project. And so I found one program that met all those criteria, and it was King’s College in Halifax, and it was an incredibly wonderful experience. And I did learn very quickly how to write from a distance like that.

LL: That’s great. How did you keep yourself motivated with such a long term project?

AF: You know, I’m the kind of person that from the minute I take one step, I am going to complete this project. So I knew from the minute I started interviewing Stanley, this will be a book. I didn’t know how I would execute it, but I can be stubborn, and I tend to work from a vision. And what kept me motivated the whole time was Stanley is going to hold this book in his hands. Sadly, he passed away weeks before that could be a reality.

But he knew that this book was going to exist, and that it had been sold, and that it was coming out, and it had a date, and he wrote the forward for the book. So I feel — it sounds trite — but I feel very blessed that I was able to keep that going. He was a big motivator for me. Another big motivator for me was post October 7, Jewish stories have to be told. There’s a war in the Middle East. Hostages were taken.

I find the whole war sad on every side, and I think the Holocaust story needs to be amplified right now. That was also motivating for me. My story is a story of kindness, about people who had no relationship with this baby, who picked the baby up on the side of the road. And I find that missing from this conflict — we’re not hearing about these kindness stories. And I just know that they must be out there and I want to shine a light on them.

LL:  That’s beautiful. I would like you to tell the story, because it is such a good, persistence story about how you got your agent. Oh, because you kept in touch with him for a long time before he signed you, right?

AF: Okay, this is a great story, and I’m so happy you asked me, because I really want other writers to know about this. I went into the MFA program with an agent. I had a great agent. We worked on two projects together. One did not sell. One sold really nicely — I Wanted Fries with That. We continued to keep in touch. She knew about the Stanley project, and I was about to go on submission — my summer MFA was a two year program, so in the middle summer of the program, I was going to go on submission. My proposal was done. And then I got a call from her saying, “I am resigning from this agency, and I am leaving the publishing industry, and I am not going to be an agent anymore.”

When I first heard that I was super optimistic. I was like, “Well, someone else is going to pick me up. I’m all ready to go on submission.” I was waiting by the phone, figuring someone from her agency would call me. And then two weeks later, I got an email saying, effective immediately, you are no longer a client of this agency. You are released. And I thought it was just me.

My interviewer, Lara Lillibridge, features in this story. Because I was not devastated. I was just like, “Oh, this is so irritating. Now, what am I going to do?” And Lara followed Twitter closer than I do. And she messaged me to say, “By the way, a whole bunch of people were dropped from that agency, not just you.” And then I started looking myself, and there were agents saying, “Anybody who had been dropped by this agency, I’m willing to meet with you.”

I had a couple of those meetings, and again, no fit. And so I was like, I have this project. I’m ready to go. I’ve got to get another agent. So I started submitting and submitting and submitting. I had some pitch sessions through my MFA program, through some conferences, and online. And then I cold pitched to this dream agency called Westwood Creative, and the person wrote me back saying, “it’s not a good book for me. I’m going to send it to a friend.” And the friend wrote me back, saying, “your writing really doesn’t resonate with me.” And I want to pause here, because I found that the funniest feedback to me, that is a comment you can really keep to yourself.

LL: Right? Basically, I don’t like your writing.

AF:  Like, where do I go with that? “This story is good, but your writing really doesn’t resonate with me.” But he said, ‘I have a long shot for you. Is it okay if I send it to Michael Levine, who’s the chairman of the agency?’

LL: Isn’t Michael Levine the agent for Justin Trudeau?

AF: Yes, well, he’s the agent for the Trudeau family. So I said, “Of course, what do I have to lose?” So Chris Casuccio sent it off to Michael Levine. And Michael Levine called me on the phone and said, “I really like it. I don’t think it’ll sell.”

He was interested, but it never came to anything. And we kind of kept in touch. And all the time that we kept in touch, I was still pitching and pitching more people, and then I graduated from the MFA program, and I still did not have a signed deal of any kind. I had not been on formal submission. And there we had a speaker who came and he was available for you to hire him to look at all your rejections and then read your stuff and tell you why you’re being rejected.

LL: Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.

AF: Yeah, it was a few hundred bucks. I hire this guy, send him all my stuff. And he says, “Oh, your book’s fine. Your proposal is fine. It’s just a numbers game.” And I said, “No, no, no, no, no, I paid you.” So I ended up getting on a call with him, and he said, “Go back to everybody who ghosted you, if they showed an interest at the beginning. This is the kind of project that you just have to keep coming back to them.” And I really didn’t want to, because I thought ghosted means dropped.

LL:  That does not seem intuitive. If someone just aborts the conversation, I assume that they’re nicely saying, I’m not interested in you.

AF: And I have a friend who’s a documentary filmmaker, and I told her this whole story except without names, and she said, “Well, why don’t you try Michael Levine, I know him, and this seems like a Michael project.” And I said, “He’s the guy that I’m talking about!” She said that I could use her name. So I wrote him back. He was very interested. And he says that he took me out of the slush pile. It is true in the sense that I cold, pitched the agency—

LL: It was pretty it was a warm slush.

AF: It was a warm slush, but he does not remember that. He thinks that I was in a pile in his email. Okay, it was in a pile, but it was sent by someone else in his office. The way he tells it — it’s been 20 years since he’s done that, he does not take people out of the slush pile.

LL:  What I think is so amazing about that story is how they just kept leapfrogging you along. It wasn’t for them personally, but they were willing to send it to someone else. That, to me, is kind of unheard of, at least in my personal experience, that that number of people would keep pushing it.

AF: I know. It was sheer luck. Before this experience, I liked to think that writing success was more based on talent, but now I don’t think that anymore. This has changed my mind, because it was luck that the first person sent it to the second, and that the second sent it to the third, and the third sent it on. It was lucky. You know, on another day they might have just deleted it.

LL: I would say it’s both though, because if they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t have bothered, right? Like, if there wasn’t talent, they wouldn’t have bothered.

AF: Notwithstanding that they did not like my voice. But you know, I’m a super voicey writer, so if you don’t like my voice like we’re not going to be a fit.

LL: Now I want to jump ahead. So you’ve written the book, you have an agent, you’ve sold the book. Then you decided to hire a social media coach. How long before the book came out?

AF: It’s three months today. So like three and a half months before my release date.

LL: You had to start thinking about marketing this book, establishing social media presence long before anyone is getting any like, you know, buzz about your book. Can you talk a little bit about that and the Hippocampus connection?

AF: Sure, I met Ashleigh Renard at HippoCamp: Conference for Creative Nonfiction Writers. She came to our session about Post Publication Blues. She wrote a memoir called Swing that I had previously read and was a fan. I always liked her. I liked her social media. We have very different platforms. She talks about keeping monogamy hot, very different from shining a light post-Holocaust, but I always liked what she did, and I know that she works a lot in coaching people who are interested in self-publishing, and I just asked her if she would take me on as a client, even though I’m traditionally published, and she agreed.

LL: So, a social media coach is different from a publicist, right? Like you’re the one doing the work. You’re building a platform…you know these things that many writers don’t know how to do.

AF: Right? But here’s the thing about building a platform: I think it’s very important to recognize your strengths, and I am super good with groups of people, and so for me to get on the phone and book myself as a writing teacher for writing workshops, as a speaker at events, I know how to do that. I’ve done it before, and I’ve done a lot of public speaking, so I knew that I didn’t need someone to help me with that.

As far as media interviews, I really thought the press would have pitched in more than it ended up. But okay, it’s not over yet, and I don’t want to be negative, because they’ve done so much for me, and they’re a great press. So where I felt that I could use help was in practical terms with building social media. I had very specific questions: how do I know when to do a post? How do I know when to do a reel? What about this book are the most compelling or most interesting things? Why is building an audience important? How do I move people from, “I like your Instagram post” to “I want to read your book?” I knew that that was the very specific help I wanted, and that’s where I wanted to put my money.

LL: It’s hard, because even when you’re traditionally published, publishers do not provide the support that they used to. And I don’t mean pre-COVID. I mean, compared to back in the days of yore. It’s so funny. Every time I watch Elf with my kids, I die when they send a limo to pick up this ghost writer for a children’s book. That’s what people think when they hear that you’re a writer, and that is not the world that most of us exist in.

I really like that you talked about identifying your weaknesses, and looking for someone specifically to help you, even though as you said, her platform is totally different from yours. You’re not just glomming on to her followers. You’re learning from her example.

AF: I trust her. I worked with a different kind of publicist for I Wanted Fries With That. That book was published in the United States, and I’m Canadian. I wanted someone to help me understand the U.S. press and the U.S. market. I worked with Dana Kaye from KPR. She was amazing. I highly recommend her as well. It was a different kind of project here, and my needs were different.

LL: Your book comes out April 1, and you have a book release in Toronto, and then another one in Montreal. At the Montreal one, you have like every local Holocaust survivor in Montreal coming. Can you talk about that?

AF: I have 20 coming.

LL: I can’t believe 20 are still alive.

AF: I think we have 30 survivors in Montreal altogether. The Holocaust survivors have a coffee group, and I was invited to speak to them a few weeks ago. I had no idea what to expect. One of them is 103 years old.

LL: Wow!

AF: So I was thinking, how am I going to possibly talk to them about the book? And by the way, at that point, I had no script because I haven’t started talking about the book and no copy of the book even. I like to speak, like I’ll take any opportunity. When they called me and said they had a cancellation and could I come a month early and be there tomorrow at 10 a.m., I said, “Absolutely yes.”

I get there, and I have no idea what to expect. I printed out a copy of the manuscript just to have it, and then they said, “Here’s a microphone. You have an hour.” And I had a great time with them. It was so warm, and they were so interested in my story, and so many of them identified with it, and said, “This is my story, too.”

One person said, “This is the perfect title, One in Six Million, because each of the six million who perished in the Holocaust has a big story like this one.” And that was exactly what I was trying to say.

There was a woman there who looked really familiar, and she was very Orthodox with an Orthodox wig, but a very elderly woman. And I kept looking at her, and then we went around the table and introduced ourselves, and she said, “I know you.” And I said, “I know you. Where do I know you from?” And she said, Jewish Elder Care Centre, which is a nursing home. I used to work there. And she said, “No, I knew your mother.”

My mother had Alzheimer’s disease and lived in this nursing home for two years. And this woman had a loved one on the same floor and used to see us visiting my mother. And she came up to me after the talk and give me a hug. And said, “I am going to come to your book launch because your mother can’t be there, and I’m going to represent her.” I don’t know this woman. I don’t know her name.

She’d survived the Holocaust, right? And she’d do this for me. And I was just very moved. The whole experience was very moving. And I had dinner with some friends the next day, and I told them about it, and one of them said, I’d like to invite them to your book launch. And they stepped forward, and they bought tickets for every single one of Holocaust survivors to come to my book launch, and they’re each going to receive a copy of the book, and they’re going to be there with us.

Stanley Diamond, the main character in the book, passed away, but his family members are going to come too. So it’s going to be a very emotional evening. Right now I have close to 200 people registered.

LL: Wow. I had a similar experience with my first book. When you’re writing creative nonfiction, it is emotional and it can be fraught. And when Girlish came out, my parents chose not to come to the book event in their hometown because they did not like that the book existed. But my mother’s friends from my childhood all showed up — these women that I had not seen in 20 years — they all came and they mothered me through it.

Something that I’ve noticed in my personal life is that in every major event, someone that I thought would be there wasn’t, and then someone stepped up who I never anticipated.

It can be so scary when your book comes out for different reasons for different people. You don’t have the fraught family situation I had, but still, it’s scary. You don’t know how your book will be received, whether people will show up. Some people might be afraid of the public speaking aspect. Just know that people step up for you in ways you cannot imagine.

Again, going back to what you first said — you were looking for a story, and this one found you. Similarly, when you keep an eye out for the people who are willing to show up, you can really just feel that love and appreciation from the community. That’s my full circle moment, because this book is such a story of persistence in so many ways.

Is there anything that you want to say that I didn’t ask you, or that I left out that you feel is important?

AF: Well, one thing I’ve been talking about a lot of my interviews, is that it looks from the outside that writing is a solitary pursuit. It seems as though it’s something that you do under a tree with a notebook or at your computer, right? But my experience becoming a writer, which it’s been about a 10 or 12 year thing for me, is that community is so important, and so if you’re reading this and you’re a new writer, or you’re a writer that is stuck, my advice to you is to try and join a community. Look for the writing groups in your town. Look for the writing groups online. Look for opportunities to share your work, but also to help other people with their work. And yes, for me, like having you, Lara, as a writing partner and the writing group that I have from my MFA, I have a few writing supports that I really rely on.

And when I finally held the book in my hand what was my first thought? “Wow, this was a grind.”

So I think my advice is to really lean on your community and support others and build writing community. Because if you ask me again, going back to your first question, “How did I keep going?” I couldn’t have done it on my own. I kept going on the backs and shoulders and leaning on many people.