Portrait of the writer as a strange child:

I used to watch every show on vampires and Dracula I could find. In the glory days of VHS, I’d tape them and rewatch them over and over again. This included reruns of the old In Search Of… show hosted by Leonard Nemoy. I remember seeing the monastery on Lake Snagov and the story of Vlad Dracula’s remains so many times, and hoping one day I could somehow get there. At that time, Romania was still behind the Iron Curtain, and I was a kid living on a reservation in the poorest part of New York State. Just one of my many dreams that would never come true. I didn’t care about going to Disneyland (I’ve still never been there) or places like that—I wanted to see where vampires came from.

Child-Jenn, dreams do come true sometimes, even if you have to wait until you’re 42.

At the end of 2017, my proposal was accepted for the academic portion of the International Vampire Film and Arts Festival held in Sighişoara, Romania, birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. My graduate alma mater, Seton Hill University, was a co-sponsor of the conference.

Bucharest bears many of the architectural scars of the old Soviet Union. Blocky gray buildings that are purely functional and almost aggressively ugly, especially between the airport and the city. In old Bucharest, you can see more of the Western European influence. The buildings there reminded me of slightly less ornamental versions of those in Paris. But perhaps most important is the restaurant named “Brutal Russian Pancakes.” What does this mean? What makes Russian pancakes brutal? I did not get the chance to find out.