In Process With: Natalka Burian

"People are so weird and wonderful, and when I'm feeling my very worst I remind myself that I'm a person, too, who is also weird and wonderful."

This month’s In Process With…has us pulling up a barstool next to Natalka Burian, writer, activist, and host extraordinaire. Her books include the novels The Night Shift (currently in development with Sony/Pamplona Productions!) and Daughters of the Wild, the young adult novel Welcome to the Slipstream, and the cocktail cookbook, A Woman’s Drink. Natalka is the co-owner of Elsa, a cocktail bar in Brooklyn, which happens to be one of my favorite NYC bars. The cocktails are gorgeous and delicious, the lighting is perfection, the backyard is absolute heaven, and it has the best selfie bathrooms out there.

Wait, there’s more! Natalka is also the co-founder of The Freya Project, a non-profit reading series that supports community-based activism and annually awards five unrestricted grants to further the work of women and non-binary writers. The Freya Project was born out of imagining how those of us in blue states could reach to other places where women might feel more alone. To say hey, I see you at the end of the bar/your rope/your rights.

Recent Freya Project events

Natalka possesses tremendous imagination—by which of course I mean in her work, after all, there are literal portals in her most recent novel, The Night Shift, but I’m also talking about her imagination for our collective future and our present. The imagination that asks what if we get together and see what we can do while in each other’s company, while listening to each other’s stories? What I see across the impressive spread of Natalka’s work is a relentless imagination for—and action towards—a more connected universe. This is true of a bar, where we often go to be less alone, and of The Freya Project reading series, and of Natalka’s fictional work, which is about the ways we are tied, for better or worse, to our pasts and our people, and to the physical realms we share, how we feed them and they us. In her novel Daughters of the Wild, the farm at the center of the story relies on a sort of everyday feminine magic, of which I won’t say more about for spoiler’s sake, only that its potency is indeed a facet of the sort of weird and wonderful Natalka seeks in her work and her people. It helps us remember that we are always always always in exchange.

You can read more about Natalka’s books here, and keep an eye on upcoming Freya Project events and learn more about their work here, and follow Natalka on Instagram @ndburian or find her on TikTok for a myriad of your interests, whether that’s considering what a sea hag would read, learning about a new cocktail and book simultaneously, or exploring NYC’s Schomburg Center. For now, below you get to see one of the more unusual working spaces I’ve had the pleasure of featuring, as well as Natalka’s delicious solution for rough days.

-Danielle

What have you been working on this week?