David Kherdian: A Life Saved by Writing

Although he considers himself a poet, Kherdian spent much of his time writing novels, autobiographies and anthologies. “I had to make a living in writing, so for me poetry was a luxury,” he said. During these 25 years he made a living in writing, he would get up in the morning and work until noon “[writing] anywhere from roughly 500 to 2,000 words a day.”

William Saroyan, towards the end of his writing career, became Kherdian’s mentor. “I was the only protégé he ever had and I was very proud of that. And one of the questions I asked him was, ‘how do you start a story?’ And he said, ‘Well, you write. And it may start on the fourth page; it may not start on the first page. You may have to write a while and then some day you say, oh this is it.’”

Kherdian has written hundreds of poems and scores of books, including his most famous work, The Road From Home, written in 1979. In this Newbery Honor novel, he recreates his mother’s voice in telling the true story of a childhood interrupted in 1915 by the Armenian Genocide. “I never called it my book, I called it my mother’s book, I did it for her as a gift,” he said enthusiastically. He and his wife, Nonny Hogogrian, have collaborated often in children’s books. In a new children’s book, Come back, Moon, Hogogrian provided the illustrations and Kherdian wrote the words.

While writing a novel or an autobiography takes time and determination, “poetry is a very different animal,” said Kherdian. “You cannot start a poem; a poem starts in you. And there are moments — maybe once a year — suddenly a power appears inside of you and you have a connection to the unconscious that you don’t have ordinarily. And you find that you want to write something, you begin to write something, your being touched by something way beyond you and transmitting this energy.”

Kherdian has recently finished writing a retelling of the legend of David of Sassoun. Seeing that very few Armenian-Americans are familiar with this story, to which Kherdian refers as “a symbol of our Armenian nation,” he saw the inspirational potential of putting the tale into his own words.

Kherdian was ahead of his time in discovering that through writing he was able to repair his relationship with his father, who had long since passed from this earth. As a memoirist, working interchangeably with poetry, fiction, memoir, and creative non-fiction, he found a new method for inner transformation, but he likes to say that these creative discoveries are in the air and come to us for a purpose higher than our own needs. “We are meant to bring what we find into the light of consciousness for the purposes of our planet.” Many of Kherdian’s works can be found on Amazon as well as his personal website at www.davidkherdian.com.