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The Missouri Review 29.1 (2006) 86


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Meet the Author

Joanna Luloff

Joanna Luloff received her MFA in 2001 from Emerson College, where she taught literature, composition and creative writing for five years. Currently she lives in Norwich, England, where she is completing a collection of linked short stories. "Let Them Ask" is her first publication.


Click for larger view		 Joanna Luloff

About her winning story Luloff says, "I wrote 'Let Them Ask' as a response to my experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sri Lanka from 1996 to 1998. I lived in Baddegama, a village located in the island's southern region, where I taught English at an all-boys school. When I arrived in Sri Lanka, the country had entered a relatively peaceful moment in the midst of a decade-long civil war, though random suicide bombings and an ongoing tug-of-war between the government and the Tamil Tigers to control the north and east continued to keep the nation in a state of unease and heightened alertness.

"Though the south was considered safe and relatively free of overt violence, the repercussions of an insurgency that had swept the island through the late '80s were still being felt by almost everyone I met. One of the results of this island-wide violence seemed to be a tension between people's need to maintain silence, guard their privacy, turn away from painful memories, and their desire to tell stories, to offer opinions, to examine loss. In 'Let Them Ask,' I attempted to examine these conflicts, particularly through the lens of adolescents who are caught between their duties to family and acceptable social behavior on one side and their need to talk about their loss and confusion on the other. Alongside these themes, I also wanted to explore clashes that arise from breaking strictly defined gender roles and from differences between Sri Lankan and American attitudes and behaviors.

"'Let Them Ask' is part of a linked story collection that explores three different communities in Sri Lanka—a southern Sinhalese family, a northeastern Tamil family and a group of Western aid workers. Like this story, the collection as a whole attempts to address the complicated relationship between memory, silence and storytelling within the context of the civil war."



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