Mrs. Meri Tumanyan, Glendale High School English teacher, writes in her own spare time, and she has published two children’s books: Mommy, the Dreamweaver and Daddy’s Waltz.  Mommy, the Dreamweaver, details a working, single mom, dealing with guilt and the family’s financial hardships, while Daddy’s Waltz illustrates her own husband’s crying-child-calming-song and his relationship with their children. 

Mrs. Tumanyan was inspired through quarantine to write and publish her third book, that documents a story through poetry, titled Love in the Time of Corona. The book captures an “honest description of the loneliness and isolation we experienced during quarantine.” She describes Love in the Time of Corona as an “exploration of love, love for people, love for earth, love for yourself, love for nature.”  

Mrs. Tumanyan first experienced the poetic mind by writing ink on paper when she was eight, during an earthquake that struck Armenia. Her mother swung in with an experienced eye and did what mothers do best: tout their children’s work. She paraded her daughter’s poem, complete and advanced for a person of her age, with stanzas and rhyme schemes and the like. 

Once Mrs. Tumanyan moved to the US, she wrote in English, but as her life went on, her poetic hobby couldn’t keep up, overshadowed by the ultimate killer of creativity, work and school. But her poetic mind finally got a stake of time during quarantine, where she constructed her new book, inspired by a Facebook page titled “Letters in Quarantine”, which gave a platform to the newly-found time that her mind wanted. 

In the “Letters in Quarantine” group, Mrs. Tumanyan first wrote epistolary prose aimed towards friends and employers, but she said that “it became more abstract, like dear loss, dear restlessness, or dear solitude.” As this went on, she transformed her letters into poetry, at which time a chapbook contest appeared before her. She submitted twenty love-related poems, won the contest, and expanded them past twenty before publishing them. The poems within this book retained the experimental aspects from their previous form, including one that can be read forwards and backwards.

Mrs. Tumanyan decided to write her new book from the untimely circumstances in the pandemic, where the online group and digital interaction and feedback kept her motivated through a time like now, where motivation is as scarce as a MAGA hat and a face mask. She was motivated by the realization that, through the direct, unfiltered, sharp like/don’t like feedback in social media, people responded to honesty, especially in a time like now. She elaborated that “whenever it got dark, I was more motivated to write.”

 Mrs. Tumanyan also stated, like a teacher with the world as her student, that in life  “people are attracted to positivity and hope.”

You can find Mrs. Tumanyan’s new book at Amazon. We hope that her story inspires other Nitro authors to follow their own passions in writing.