When Ellen Litman and her family came to Pittsburgh from Russia in 1992, she was 19—a few years older than Masha, one of the central characters in the linked short stories that comprise her first book, The Last Chicken in America. But that doesn't mean readers should see the stories as autobiographical. "A lot of it was reworking the feelings of those first three years of adjustment," Litman explained as we chatted in a West Village café last week, a few hours before she was scheduled to read at Happy Ending. (Missed it? You've got another chance to see her tonight, appearing with Deb Olin Unferth at the soon-shuttered Mo Pitkin's.)

"They're the sort of things that happen to so many people who come to this country," she says of the stories' incidents. "I wanted to start out with characters who had just arrived in America, then see how people's experiences changed over the years, once they had learned what to expect." Although she says the possible reaction from other Russian emigres was "one of the scariest things" about the book being out in the world, Litman is actually quite calm about it all. "I got one response from a Russian woman who was in Pittsburgh when I was there who are convinced one of the stories is about her family," she jokes.

"I didn't start getting fluent in English until I moved away from Pittsburgh," Litman remembers. "As long as I was with my parents, my head was full of Russian." She followed a teacher's advice to stop using a dictionary to get through English-language books, rereading authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald she'd previously read in translation to make the process easier. But her original field of study was computer programming, and she spent six years after college working in information technology before she began to study creative writing at Boston's Grub Street. Eventually, she landed in the program at Syracuse. "The three years you spend there are such a gift," she recalls. "It's a small community, which only lets in six fiction students and six poetry students each year, so you can get a lot of attention from the teachers."

These days, Litman is the one doing the teaching—first by returning to Grub Street, and now at the University of Connecticut. She's also working on her second novel ("not in stories," she laughs), set in Russia in the mid-'80s. "I find myself having to do research to trigger my memories," she reveals, enthusiastically describing how watching a film from the period can evoke a long string of associations. She still reads Russian literature in the original language (and finds it can help inspire her when she goes back to writing in English), but also enjoys the work of her fellow emigres—she says she was "blown away" by Anya Ulinich's Petropolis over the summer.