Chernivtsi, Ukraine → Salt Lake City
Vitaly Kirkpatrick
I write memoir the way I lived it: plainly, and without asking permission to tell the truth.
Memoir about leaving an orphanage, crossing a border, and building a marriage that took the country five more years to recognise.
Read the booksGet in touchThe short version
If you need a paragraph. Take it as it is — it is accurate.
For interviewers, event programmes and anyone who has to introduce me.
Vitaly Kirkpatrick grew up in an orphanage in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, and arrived at JFK on the fifth of August, 2005, with two suitcases and three dollars. He met his husband Kimball the following spring and married him in 2008 — five years before the federal government would recognise it, and eight before he could legally take his name. He is the author of The Misadventures of a Ukrainian Orphan (2022) and Green Card, Gold Ring. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he also works in analytical science.
The longer one: why these books, and no others
I did not set out to be a writer of immigration stories. I set out to get through the immigration, and the writing was what I did at night so the days would hold still long enough to be looked at.
The first book is the orphanage: Chernivtsi in the nineties, a childhood spent learning which adults meant what they said. Writing was already my refuge by then — I put emotions I could not yet name into poems, in an institution where naming them out loud was not safe. That book ends where most immigrant stories begin, at an airport.
Green Card, Gold Ring is everything the paperwork did to a marriage. We began on the fifteenth of May, 2006, with two careful messages and a dollar movie ticket. We married on the fifteenth of August, 2008, in San Diego. And then the Defense of Marriage Act sat between us and every ordinary thing a married couple takes for granted — a visa, a surname, the right to be on the same form — until 2013.
There are books about coming out and books about immigrating. I could not find the one about doing both at once, where the two processes make each other harder.
My one editorial rule: I do not write trauma for its own sake. If a scene is in the book, it is because it is true and it moved something — not because it is shocking. Everything else is a decision about structure, and structure is where most memoirs about hard childhoods go wrong.
A dated spine
The facts, in order. Every date below appears in the books.
- 1990s
Admit one · Book One
An orphanage in Chernivtsi
Western Ukraine, after the Soviet Union ended and before anything replaced it. I wrote poems there.
- 5 Aug 2005
Admit one · Book One
JFK, with three dollars
Two suitcases and a bandura.
- 15 May 2006
Admit one · Book Three
Two careful messages
And a dollar movie ticket.
- 15 Aug 2008
Admit one · Book Three
Married in San Diego
Legal in California. Invisible to the federal government.
- 2008–2013
Admit one · Book Three
Five years of not counting
Under the Defense of Marriage Act, no federal purpose whatsoever recognised the marriage. Not the visa. Not the name.
- 2022
Admit one · Book One
The first book
The Misadventures of a Ukrainian Orphan, published February 2022. Now in its second printing.
The other half of the week
Outside the page I work in analytical science — near-infrared spectroscopy and food-quality analysis. It is the discipline of proving what a thing is actually made of rather than what it appears to be. A sample does not care what you hoped it contained, and neither does a manuscript — which is why I fact-check my own book against contemporaneous documents rather than against my memory of them. Drafts are memory. Records are evidence.
Two names on two covers
The first book was published under the name Vitaly Magidov. Everything else here is under Vitaly Kirkpatrick — same person, and something I am in the process of reconciling.
For press
Details people usually ask for.
- Vitaly Kirkpatrickname · vih-TAH-lee
- Chernivtsiborn · chair-neev-TSEE
- Salt Lake Citylives
- Ukrainian, Russian, Englishlanguages
- Englishwrites in
- Analytical sciencealso writes about
Interviews and events
I am glad to talk about immigration and marriage law, orphanage childhoods, writing a second book against a first, or how a manuscript gets fact-checked. Use the contact page — I read everything that comes in myself.
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