The first thing one notices when one meets Gerry Turyiska is her radiant smile and the energy behind it. She is living proof that you really can spin and reel at the same time and do it well.

Gerry is author of the lyrics to many of the music hits that are constantly on the air, she is singer with the Rubikub band, writes poetry and has a blog of her own. She also created the popular Fairytale Mailbox and for some time, has been a mother to a delightful little girl. This year her Mailbox is celebrating its 6th birthday, though it started out almost as a joke. The project was inspired by an epistolary novel made up of the love letters between a man and a woman with authors Gerry Turyiska and poet Stoyan Dinkov. The young author invited friends and relatives to write love letters of their own and to deposit them in a red mailbox. Some of the letters – most of them anonymous – were read out by Bulgarian musicians, actors and journalists at a café in Sofia. The attendance was modest, yet the idea took hold and now hundreds come to attend this cultural event. The stories are mostly comical, but Gerry admits there have been times when listeners have shed a tear:

“We have been doing this for a long time and what I like most about these meetings is that the people coming to them come up to me and say: “I have been with you from the start.” We have a core audience that haven’t grown tired of us, so we are obviously doing things right. The meetings are not monotonous and the authors are no longer anonymous. In time they mustered up the courage to state their real names. We had one author – Stefka Kilimanjaro, obviously a pen name, but after the third time her letters were read out, she said to me: “It is time to own up who I really am, I enjoy being a celebrity,” Gerry says.

The Fairytale Mailbox is proof that anyone, whatever he or she may do in life, can be a writer. Nikola Kroumov made his debut with the Mailbox and he is now the darling of the public; he even recently released his book Prefab Apartment Block Diary.

Gerry says that Bulgarians are on the shy side when it comes to sex, that is why she launched her Dirty Stories Mailbox in which anyone can tell a real-life erotic tale from their own experience or imagination. Surprisingly, or maybe not, the “dirty stories” bring in an even bigger crowd than the “ordinary” tales.

Being a lyric-writer, Gerry is inspired by the artistes, of whom she writes that in recent years, Bulgarian music has been undergoing a revival with new and fresh acts on stage and that the audiences have been returning to clubs. As an author, however, Turyiska admits she is jealous:

“There was a time in my life when, besides song lyrics for other people, I started inventing things I was jealous of and wouldn’t let anyone else see. And they started piling up. I said to myself “I sing in tune, I’ll sing them myself” and if I can’t – big deal. The truth is that in 2010 when we founded the band Rubikub I was far from ready. There was a great deal I had learnt in the process of performing and of making studio recordings. I had watched other people’s studio work for more than 10 years, I knew how songs are made and the emotions the performers go through while recording, I knew how they feel in concert. But when you go through these things yourself everything is absolutely different and other people’s experience is no use. One has to learn one’s own lessons.”

Gerry has been writing poetry since she was a little girl and there are more than 600 works posted on her blog.

“My writing is stream of consciousness. I start out with some idea, of what I want to write – usually in the small hours. I prefer to be by myself and that is very difficult when you are a mother. But I have written texts in the noisiest of places – at the bus stop, in the car, in the park. In time one learns to control the energy. But the most important muse of all is the deadline. It is the same with the Mailbox – in the last three days I get 90 percent of the letters.”

After so many stories from the Mailbox, Gerry says she was overjoyed when she met her prince – Yassen Kozev. Now the two are raising their daughter Anika and working on different projects together. And though people have been wondering how it is she is managing to squeeze so many different things in one day, Gerry says she has found the key to success and it is “organization” – “One can find time for everything in a day,” she says.

English version: Milena Daynova