Talking Location With Denise Derya Brandt: TÜRKIYE (Bursa)

1st September 2026

#TalkingLocationWith … Denise Derya Brandt, author of Istanbul Dreaming

Bursa First

One early evening in Bursa, when the light was still golden, I was playing in the street with the neighborhood kids when someone shouted that it was time. I hadn’t been in Bursa long enough to know what it was time meant.

All the other kids stopped playing and ran to a neighbor’s open ground-floor window. I followed, not wanting to miss out on whatever was about to happen. The neighbor had pushed aside her sheer white curtains so all of us kids could peer through the curved, black iron rails into her living room. We all jostled for position, pressing ourselves against the rails, each trying to get the best view of the television inside, one of the few in the neighborhood. Turkey only had one television station, TRT, and every evening at the same hour, it aired an hour of cartoons.

The neighbor turned up the volume for us, and familiar opening music spilled into the street. It was strange to hear Fred Flintstone—or Fred Çakmaktaş, as he was called in Turkey—speaking Turkish. I wasn’t fluent, but my Turkish had improved enough to get the gist. Tom and Jerry was easier since there was no dialogue.

An hour later, when the cartoons ended, we all scattered. I headed back to my uncle’s building and climbed the winding concrete steps to the top floor. It was time for dinner.

***

Bursa was my mother’s hometown, and the birthplace of my favorite Turkish dish, İskender kebap. She grew up there, and two of her siblings still lived there with their families. Every summer that we could, we traveled to Turkey for three months, dividing our time between Bursa, Istanbul, and the beach. My other aunt lived with her family in Istanbul, the glamorous stop, the one with the ancient buildings and bazaars. The beach was the escape. But Bursa was where most of our family was, a tight-knit neighborhood where everyone knew whose child I was before I did. I wasn’t a visitor there. I was family, sent out to play like everyone else’s kids. I know Istanbul better now, even setting my novel there, but Bursa came first. Bursa is where Turkey began for me.

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And the Bursa I knew had no borders. Officially, the neighborhood was divided the way all neighborhoods are—this family’s garden, that family’s wall, someone’s attic, someone’s window. But those lines existed for adults. We kids kept a different map. I hopped garden walls to follow street cats who treated every private courtyard as public territory. We hid in neighbors’ attics during games of hide-and-seek that went on for hours, no one ever telling us to get out. Occasionally, cici anne, the neighborhood’s beloved eldest grandmother, would interrupt our play to ask if we were hungry. The cats and I had the same understanding of the neighborhood: it belonged to whoever was small enough to slip through it. It would be years before I learned that Bursa had boundaries after all, and that some of them were meant for a girl like me.

***

The map changed when I got older, or maybe I changed. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, when the summers took on a different shape. The games in the street had ended, and in their place were long days standing around with neighborhood kids, who were no longer just kids but boys and girls, a distinction that had never mattered before and now mattered more than anything. We talked and laughed too loudly. We lingered at corners to see and be seen. It was innocent, but it was the first thing I ever did there that anyone minded.

My enişte, my aunt’s husband, had opinions about a girl hanging out and laughing with boys on the street, and in a neighborhood like ours, opinions traveled.

“What will people think?” he wanted to know. “It doesn’t look good.”

But I was an American teenager, raised to believe that being a girl was no barrier to anything. So when he sent his son, who was eight years younger than I was, to keep an eye on me, always lurking around a corner and appearing out of nowhere at the most annoying times, I was outraged and confused. What was wrong with having male friends?

I understand him better now than I did at fifteen. In his world, a girl’s reputation was a real thing, and other people’s words could tarnish it without her permission. He wasn’t trying to control or shame me; he was trying, in the only language he had, to protect me and our family’s reputation. The neighborhood that had watched over me all those summers—that knew whose child I was, that fed me from windows, that let me hide in its attics and play in its gardens—had never stopped watching. I had just never before been the thing it was watching for.

***

No one had given me the full map, and one afternoon I proved it. I was walking toward the city’s Grand Mosque (Ulu Cami) and its adjacent covered bazaar when I stopped at an outdoor café. It looked like every other café I had passed dozens of times: small tables; tea in tulip glasses; men bent over backgammon boards, smoking cigarettes. I was thirsty and tired, so I sat at an empty table near the sidewalk.

The café didn’t stop, exactly. It was subtler than that. A pause, a turning of heads, a long moment in which I understood that something was off but could not for the life of me figure out what. The waiter who came over to greet me was polite, but curious and cautious. Once he realized I was foreign, he took my order.

It wasn’t until later, when I got home and described my afternoon, that my aunt explained I had entered a men’s café. Women didn’t go inside, not by law, but by an unspoken rule nobody ever thought to tell me about.

Decades later, when I sat down to write my debut novel, Istanbul Dreaming, I remembered the incident at the café and gave that experience to Yasemin, my main character’s bold best friend. Readers of the book will recognize the moment.

Now when I visit Turkey, I usually stay in Istanbul, where both my aunts and most of my cousins live. But my dayı, my mother’s baby brother, and his immediate family remain in Bursa, so I still visit. The city has expanded and changed the way all cities do: more cars, fewer children playing in the street, a television or two in every home and a phone in every pocket, so that no child will ever again need to press against a stranger’s window rails to watch cartoons. But when I walk those streets, I still walk them on the old map, the one the cats and I drew, the one with no borders at all. Istanbul gave me my novel, but Bursa gave me the woman who inspired it and made me the woman who wrote it.

About the Author:

Denise Derya Brandt is a debut author whose writing is inspired by her life and the lives of the people she met while working for more than twenty years in international development, leading life-saving women’s health projects in Afghanistan, Liberia, and Myanmar (with shorter stints in other interesting places).

She’s a graduate of The Book Incubator writing program, was a 2024 finalist for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Rising Star Award, and was a 2025 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out publicity incubator fellow. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Arizona State University and a master’s degree in development management from The London School of Economics.

After graduate school, Denise lived in Istanbul, where she worked as an Associate Publisher for Turkish Business World, an English-language business magazine. As a Turkish-American with moderate Turkish language skills, she claims she can fool tourists but not taxi drivers! Originally from Arizona, Denise now lives in Northern Kentucky with her husband.

Her debut novel, Istanbul Dreaming, is forthcoming from She Writes Press on September 29, 2026 and is currently available for preorder.

Catch the author on Facebook – Threads – Instagram and connect via her website

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