Pay It Forward

By Natalia

In high school, I loved theater. But my friend Tatiana, she loved mathematics and literature. She knew that I was always writing something, usually some kind of nonsense. One day, she invited me to a literary workshop run by her father, who was a poet. She went there because she was friends with the group and wrote poetry herself. I went out of curiosity. I didn’t connect my life with writing in any serious way. I was planning to become a theater director.

At that first meeting, I saw young poets for the first time. Some were my age, some older. They were all strange, very different from theater kids. There was a large table in the room, and everyone sat around it. One by one, they read their new poems. Tatiana’s father, V.A. Leykin, sat at the head of the table with his arms crossed and his head lowered. Sometimes he closed his eyes. Sometimes he covered them with his hand. He listened very carefully. Afterward, he spoke about the poems, pointed to specific lines, and said what he liked.

At the end, I expected him to assign homework or explain something. Instead, he read the newest poems he’d written. Then, his students would speak about his poems, too. He was a teacher and an authority, and at the same time, simply one of them. A poet among poets. Young enough to be their father, but not separated from them.

I didn’t dare read anything of my own. Their poems were serious and deep. I was writing funny sketches, small absurd plays. I felt like a stranger in this world of poetry. But I was enchanted. I just kept coming to listen.

I read all of Leykin’s poetry and fell deeply in love with it. I still remember much of it by heart. Later, I learned that he also wrote screenplays, so I watched his films, too. They were completely different from his poems, as if written by another person. For me, this opened up an entirely new world.

Then, the place where we met was shut down. Leykin told us that if we ever had something to share, we should come to his studio, a small rented room where he wrote poems and screenplays.

By then, I had finished school, was studying at a theater academy, and had begun writing more. I had almost completed a large play, several small ones, fragments of stories and dialogue. And I was writing something else entirely, one-page monologues, spoken by incomprehensible characters, ending with an unexpected turn. I didn’t know what they were. But I needed someone to listen.

Gathering my courage, and relieved that there would be no poets this time, I began coming to V.A.Leykin studio, terribly ashamed of interrupting his work. And he would stop. He would interrupt his thinking, his writing, his silence; for me, and for others like me. He would sit on a chair, fold his arms, lower his head, and listen as I read aloud.

Each time when I read these one-page monologues, he asked sincerely, “What is it that you’re writing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It was something that appeared on its own.
“Write a book of short stories,” he suggested.
“I’ll try,” I said, and knew I wouldn’t. It felt pointless to me.

We talked. We analyzed things. He gave advice. But the most important thing was this: he listened. He heard me. He spoke to me honestly.

When I was twenty, over three days, carried by some strange momentum, I wrote a screenplay for a children’s feature film. It wasn’t revolutionary. It was very much of its time. But it was complete, lively, and funny. Two years  later, a studio bought it. After that, I wrote screenplays. And he read everything I wrote.

Would I have become a writer without him? Probably. Or maybe not. But at a time when I didn’t understand who I was, what I was writing, or what I should do next, Leykin was my guide. My protection. My reason to finish things. Because of him, I wasn’t afraid of being alone with this strange process unfolding in my head. I had someone I could call. Someone who understood me, because he himself was the same.

Now, from where I am in life today, his willingness to stop his own work and simply give us his time seems almost unbelievable. None of us promised success or money. He himself was not a wealthy man, poetry never paid for that. He did it out of love. For us. For poetry. For literature. I was grateful to him then, and I remain grateful now. His poems, and the poems of those young poets, are forever part of my world.

Leykin is eighty-nine now. I know he is surrounded by the love of those whose mentor he was. And I send him love across the ocean. Passing on what he gave us, that is what I want to do. Pay it forward.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025.  All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.