My Shadow is My Skin Virtual Panel

In March, the co-editors of the new collection My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, Katherine Whitney and Leila Emery, joined contributors Dena Rod, Darius Atefat-Peckham, and Siamak Vossoughi, along with the University of Texas Press Publishing Fellow Dr. Laura Fish, for an in-depth conversation. The group discussed how the volume of more than thirty essays came together, how the writers have experienced an evolving and inclusive diaspora, how everyone celebrated Nowruz while in quarantine, and more. Enjoy the video of our Zoom panel discussion here, with a full transcript below.

Transcript of Virtual Panel

Hi, I'm Katherine Whitney, with Leila Emery, co-edited this book: My Shadow is My Skin and I'm really happy to be here with all of you today. And I'm phoning in from Berkeley, California.

Hello, I'm Leila Emery and I'm co-editor of My Shadow is My Skin with Katherine. It started in 2015 and it's just such a pleasure to be able to have it out in the world and we're very grateful to our authors and to have the opportunity to do a reading and have a chat.

I'm Laura Fish, I'm a, I'm the publishing fellow at the University of Texas Press, and I've been doing some of the publicity work for My Shadow is My Skin. And so it's very nice to finally see people in person, or on a screen, put voices and names to faces. And I guess I'll be helping to kind of moderate this discussion throughout.

Hi my name is Dena Rod, my pronouns are they/them/theirs. I'm one of the contributors from My Shadow is My Skin. I wrote an essay in there. I wrote about being queer and Iranian and how those two intersections come together. And I'm also phoning in from Berkeley, California today.

Hi, I'm Darius Atefat-Peckham. I'm also a contributor to My Shadow is My Skin. I'm so excited to be here. I am an essayist and a poet, and I'm a freshman at Harvard University, which is currently happening on Zoom as well, so this is kind of cool. I'm already pretty hip to it. And I'm from Huntington, West Virginia, so I'm in, I'm in West Virginia right now.

I'm Siamak Vossoughi. Also a contributor to My Shadow is My Skin, and I want to say thanks first off to Leila and Katherine. This is the first time I've had a chance to say thank you in close-to-person, together, and also to Bailey and Laura and everyone at UT Press for putting this together. I'm very excited to be a part of the conversation, and I am calling from Seattle.

Laura Fish: Katherine asked if I could share some of the reasons why the University of Texas Press decided to acquire your book and publish it, and hearing from the acquiring editor, because I, I wasn't here at the time—I'm new, but also temporary status—hearing from him, Jim Burr, on the decision to get in touch with you and to acquire My Shadow is My Skin, it kind of seemed like a no-brainer. He had met Persis at the Middle East Studies Association meeting a couple of times, and had talked with her about the possibility of a kind of volume like this, and and then he said that he was able to meet with Katherine and Leila about the various stories that would be presented in the volume. And he was very excited about that. He is always on the lookout for stories of underrepresented groups he's, he's acquired previous texts on the Iranian diaspora, and so when he was given the opportunity to publish a volume of nonfiction creative stories, he jumped at that opportunity especially given the current political landscape. He thought that this was a very important volume to get out and and contend with different notions that are present especially within the American political sphere. And I think that, on a personal note of having read the volume, that the variety of stories that are offered within this volume really speaks to every aspect of American and Iranian life that really does provide the opportunity to challenge a lot of the discriminatory beliefs that are often presented about Iran and Iranians and the Diaspora.

Katherine Whitney: Sure, I think that that's a great summary. I mean that's, that piece of representing underrepresented culture/voices, and also we felt strongly in this volume to include a combination of people, of writers, who were emerging and established because we felt like the more different voices and different perspectives we could get out there the better. Because it's really, what we wanted to emphasize was the not just the human stories but the diversity of stories coming from this population. And Leila and I got a chance to really think about how we were part of this new diaspora, and it's not something that I had ever really thought of myself being part of as an American, you know born in America, but having married into an Iranian family and really taken on the culture, I, I came to understand through this process: the writing workshop that we took together in 2015 and then the putting-together of this book that the diaspora is really, the net is very wide and we wanted to reflect that in the writing as well.

Leila Emery: I agree and I think another really important goal of ours was to try to capture the stories that haven't been told before by the Iranians. I'm thrilled about it, and I think a few of the readings beautifully fall into that category, so we feel very very lucky. 

Fish: So I think from here we were going to have the contributors supply a, about approximately five-minute reading from their stories. So I'm not sure who who would like to go first, maybe Dena?

Dena Rod Reading

Dena Rod: Yeah, let me go ahead. This is an excerpt from my essay called "Pushing the Boundaries." This essay was written in 2015, and so it's about five years now, but I still think is really important piece: 

Coming out is not a singular process. Ever. You can never do it just once, because with heteronormativity, everyone assumes you're straight. Coming out to my mom in 2009 was only the beginning. Since then I have constantly come out about my queerness to strangers on the street, cashiers taking my coffee order when I'm holding my wife's hand, or, before I was married, when I first met people and they assumed the fiancée I spoke of was male. Now, it's always an act of coming out when I say "my wife," and there is no misunderstanding anymore about the differences between girlfriend and fiancée.

This protracted coming out also translates to my extended Iranian family. I remember constantly checking in with my parents about which "aunts" and "uncles" I could be honest with. And, however, they're not actually related to me by blood. When my parents first immigrated to America in the early 1980s, fresh off the heels of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, they each heard about the thriving Persian expat community in Northern California. When they met at a wedding in Oakland in 1986, their individual journeys converged. Settling here in California, they imported a desire to belong to the type of community an Iranian village provided for them back home. These woman and men raised me and looked after me as I grew up, gave me advice when my parents couldn't, and tried to prevent any boys from breaking my heart.




"Does Amu Mehdi know?" I asked my father once about one of my "uncles" unrelated by blood but knit into our family by distance and circumstance. "Does Aria? Does Khosroh?" Persians like to talk. Even though I didn't speak with my extended family often and knew that they were too polite to say anything to my face, they likely already knew this piece of family gossip and had said something to my parents. They're more proficient in Farsi than I was, and with my American accent being the family joke (I spoke Farsi "like a Turk," my dad said, I tried, every time, so the time I tried to say sofreh aghd—the wedding altar set up in front of a bride and groom—with it's hard gh sound no found in English), my communication with my extended family had all but ceased because of my discomfort with the language and lack of understanding of what my family was saying around me.

"Amu Mehdi knows, Khosroh knows, Aria knows..."  my dad rattled off a list my extended family in Northern California. A prickly hot-cold feeling came over me. The only person I'd taken the time to tell directly was my Uncle Rasool, who embraced me with open arms and understood completely. The reality that my entire family knew about me and my wife without my consent felt terrifying, but surely nothing was amiss because my dad said all of this so nonchalantly.

"It's a different country, a different culture," he said. "We have to adapt."

This sentiment made me want to protest. I would've been just as queer growing up in Iran, albeit much more closeted. My bisexuality wasn't an American influence—it was a part of me that would've been the same in Tehran or San Francisco.

Yet my father's words sowed seeds of doubt. Adaptation can also feel like assimilation. At times, it feels like my relationship with Diana is proof of how far I've strayed that comes to growing up in America; here I am married to a white woman from Texas whose heritage is as middle-American as you can get. Would I have these same feelings if I was born and raised in Iran? Would my queerness have spurred me to leave the country, as my parents' political beliefs had them? Tracing these threads sometimes seemed as if I could unravel my sense of being Iranian, especially when my dad would "reassure" me that I was a child of America, not Iran. However, if that were true, the diaspora wouldn't be calling me as it is now. Thank you.

Laura Fish: Thank you so much, Dena. Alright! Darius would you like to go next? 

Darius Atefat-Peckham Reading

Darius Atefat-Peckham: Sure! I'm gonna read an excerpt from the essay in the book and then a poem. Primarily I'm a poet, but when I was approached about this collection of essays I really wanted to be part of it, so I wrote an essay. But kind of like, not really, because I just took a bunch of my poems and took out the line-breaks and then expanded it. Which is like cheating, but, but I think that after a lot of revision, with Leila and Katherine, that it became something that I'm really proud of. Just a little back-story: my Iranian heritage for a lot of my childhood was, was kind of a yearning for it. My mom passed away when I was little and, kind of with her, was my direct tie to Iran and its culture. So this is called—the piece is called "Learning Farsi:" 

Almost every year, Bibi set up a haft sin, a traditional Nowruz table adorned with the many Iranian symbols of renewal, love, and beauty. She told me many stories about the beauty of my great-grandmother's table in Iran, all of the seven requirements accounted for, while we watered the sabzi and covered it with a wet cloth for the night. I was always amazed by how fast the sabzi grew, tall sprouts of wheatgrass shooting out of the seeds by the second day of nurture, full and thick like Iranian hair.

On the thirteenth day of growth, we'd drive out to the river in the woods where they used to throw the sprouts with my mother. Bibi turned in her seat and telling me stories of Amu Nowruz, or Uncle Nowruz, Santa's Iranian counterpart, my eyes wide with the fantasy. Papa would laugh along with her. When I was seven, Bibi was the first person to tell me that Amu Nowruz and Santa weren't real, a heartbreaking moment of truth for me; at first I refused to believe her. "Believe what you will," she said to me and shrugged. "It's reality." When she told me this, I thought of what had happened the last time we threw the sabzi in the river, the clump flying through the wind, settling on top of the water, and rushing away. She'd said, "Dada, quick, make a wish to Amu Nowruz!" And I had. When we got home, a present was sitting in the living room. I cried with joy I believed.

One night recently, while watching Donald Trump in a press conference, Papa slammed the remote control on the table. "Stupid son of a bitch," he said, and struggled to get up from his chair. Sometimes, when he drives, Papa will mutter strung-together Farsi words under his breath. "Zahremar pedar sag," he'll say, and blush after, as if embarrassed that he ever said such a thing. With some careful probing, I once got him to tell me what this particular curse meant: "Snake poison to your face, father of dog!" We laughed hard while I said it over and over in Farsi, a young child cursing everything and nothing all at once.

Although I've never been there, I yearn for Iran. After my great-grandmother passed away, I felt profound guilt for never having gone to visit her, for the times when I had complained about talking to her on the phone, the language barrier being a problem I felt I would never conquer. When I was fourteen years old and Bibi called to tell me the news of her death, I was dumbstruck. The United States suddenly felt smaller to me. I felt trapped. I wished, silently, as I used to when I was little and we through the sabzi in the river, that I could go to Iran, or somewhere else, and feel free. I thought of the balloons that we let go and memory of my mother and brother each year, that tossed about and flew in the air with ease, and wondered if they popped and fell back to earth, if someone found them and read the attached notes, wondering where they came from. I listened to Bibi's weeping, the phone digging into my cheek, her voice echoing in my head: "Azizam, I wish you could have met her."

Thank you. 

Thank you so much! We can move to Siamak.

Siamak Vossoughi Reading

Siamak Vossoughi: Alright. Kind of like Darius, I am not primarily a nonfiction writer. I'm mostly a short story writer, but I have also always felt that there's a blurry line between fiction and nonfiction. And it's nice to kind of go back and forth. So the piece that I wrote is called "The Iranians of Mercer Island," which is the town that I grew up in for most of my childhood, nearby here in Seattle. And just to give a brief context, the question that I was trying to deal with in the piece, was about being a small community within a larger community, what that meant for us as the Iranians growing up there, and whether that meant we had something tighter within our small community than I saw on the outside, and how much we were supposed to go back and forth. These are all the questions I had. So, alright: 

Little by little, we began to see that the place we could have here was the place we could make for ourselves. It meant that who you were had to emerge. We owed it to one another. I owed it to the Iranians to try out for the basketball team even though I got cut every year, because if I did make the team, there would be an Iranian name on the back of one of the high school jerseys. Then nobody could say that we weren't a part of that place.

We had a chance to show them what Iranians were, but this meant that first we had to know ourselves. I didn't know how we were supposed to do that when even the air I breathed was American before it was mine. But I breathed it in deeply until I knew that that wasn't true—it was mine before it was American. It needed a boy to breathe it in, before anything else. It needed a boy the same way that the evening sky needed a boy to dream under it and the stars needed a boy to wonder at them. America needed me, I thought. It didn't always know it, but in its quiet moments, it did.

And it needed the Iranians to sing long into the night. It didn't know it needed that at all, but we did. I didn't know how we knew, but I would listen to the singing and tell myself to remember that there was a secret knowledge in the world. Something that wasn't seen in the rush of the day. But the next morning, I would wake up and it would seem like the only thing secret was wondering and asking again. I didn't know how to bring that secret part of myself together with the part that knew something for sure. If I had Iran the way they did, I thought, then I would know it. I would know what longing really was.

The singing always sounded very sad to me. It was the only time that I saw people making room for sadness together. In America, sadness seemed like an individual's road, and I tried to make the street behind our house that ran along the school and the fields my version of it. It was good to have a street like that. I'd walk up and down it, thinking of the American girl in my class and whether she could really help me love as much as it seemed like she could. I'd come home, and my mother and father would ask me what I was thinking about, but they wouldn't asked me what was wrong because the memory of the last time there had been singing in our house was still within them. They knew there was plenty that was wrong if you wanted to look at it that way. You were stuck in the business of living, and maybe that meant you were stuck living far from home or maybe it meant you were stuck living in a world that felt too small at some times and too big at others. But either way, there was a respect for sadness because we couldn't know ourselves without it.

So I listened and thought of all the things that wouldn't keep going here in America. There were a lot of them, and most of them I didn't even know yet. The Iranians knew it. They didn't expect us to carry on everything. The best we could do was to be quiet when they sang, which we were. Then we would joke with one another about their extended goodbyes, full of bows and ceremony, knowing somewhere inside of us that their goodbyes would last longer than our joking. They would still have the last word. We had to joke because it softened the edges of the two sides we sat upon. Those two sides were far apart most of the time, but they were close when we were all together. And those sides were close inside me when I walked along that street behind our house. I just didn't know how they could ever be close in a way that was meant for all the world to see—like the way it could be seen in the Iranian singers. Even an American could hear the sadness of their singing. I saw it firsthand the night that the singing got too loud and one of our neighbors called the police.

He was a lonely American cop who knocked on our door late at night. My father told him that we would sing more quietly, and then it felt too impolite to just send him off into the night, so my father invited him in to have some tea and listen to the singing. I was thrown for a loop because I thought that one way to be Iranian in America was to be against "the agents of state control." But my father, who knew much more about agents of state control, didn't care about all that and brought him in and gave him a place to sit. The Iranians of Mercer Island were very happy. It was a chance to show their lives, to show that whatever else the cop thought Mercer Island was made of, it also had this: Iranians singing in the night. It was a part of Mercer Island the Iranians had always known. They were introducing the cup to his own town—the quiet town he had been patrolling at night. I was going to have to find something more when it came to being Iranian in America than just being against the agents of state control.

"You see," my father told him, "the singing is sad because we miss our country."

"I can see that. It is sad."

"Yes," my father smiled and the Iranians smiled, as if to say, Tell us what you are sad about.

"Thank you," the cop said.

"I hope you can come again," my father said.

"Thank you," the cop said again. "Hopefully it won't be because you have been singing too loud for the neighbors."

My father smiled and shrugged, "Yes. You see," he said, "we forget. We forget when we sing."

The Iranians had something. To not only sing but then to invite in a cop called to stop the singing and have him listen to more—albeit quieter—singing. We were seeing something of their lives too. We were seeing how something hard could also have moments of being very easy.

They started saying their elaborate goodbyes again, but we didn't joke about them. We were only kids, but we were starting to pay attention to what lasted and what did not.

Discussion on the Collection, the Politics of Diaspora, and Nowruz during Coronavirus

Fish: Thank you so much. So I guess we'll get into the more discursive-based element of the session. So my initial question is for Katherine and Leila in how they decided to organize this volume, and how did you determine who should contribute, or how did you find the writers to contribute to this volume?

Whitney: I just, before I start, I just want to say how amazing it is to hear you all read your pieces, because Leila and I have been sitting with these pieces, some of them for years, and reading them over and over and over again. But to hear them come out of your mouths is like such a gift. So thank you for that. Really they are, I mean I'm sure you agree, Leila. I mean, they were animated, and there's so much love. So, thank you! I appreciate that! It was a, well, the process, was a long one, and, as you know, it started in this this workshop that Leila and I took together on Iranian identity. And then we the first thing we did was put out a call for submissions, in a few literary venues and the places that we thought would be a good place to attract sufficiently. And then we were so excited that we got any submissions at all, like "Ah, people really have...?!" and we got a lot of submissions. And then we, our idea of it really shifted over time, so we didn't really know what we were, we had no, backing up, we had no idea what we were doing. And I think that Persis kind of handed us this project. Persis Karim and Anita Amirrezvani were the instructors for this really incredible writing workshop. And Persis sort of singled Leila and me out and said, "Do this!" and we're like "Okay!" because we didn't really know what was involved. So, I would say we were really learning on the job and we got a bunch of submissions and we just sort of read them, and, you know, we had it sort of a moving-in and -out group, and, it really kind of, they were influenced by each other. So the things that we had to end up cutting didn't necessarily mean they weren't good, it just meant they weren't, you know, working with the bigger picture. And then we also, following that, we started getting really curious about who was out there writing about this and so we would approach, a lot of times, we, many times, we approached writers whose work we really liked. And sometimes they wrote a piece for us, you know, when we asked them and sometimes they would give us a piece that had already been published, which is why some of these, you know, there's a selection of pieces in the book that are previously published pieces. And we thought that those really added to the conversation in an important way. Leila? You have anything to...? 

Emery: I would say that because we didn't set out with a specific goal of "okay, this is the type of, the type of writing we'd like to see," I think we had had some idea of what we're drawn to certainly, but the process was, as Katherine said, very organic. And once we started to realize that the submissions we were receiving were as wonderful as they were the selection process became more difficult. But with that it also became more illuminating, in the sense that Katherine and I began to realize, "Okay, you know, we can we're gonna this collection thematically," which I don't I don't think we initially set out to do. But all of the pieces, one can argue, that all of the pieces could, or rather any of the pieces, could fit into any section of the book and that's really exciting I think, because it means that, I think, the collection as a whole it's asking important questions and it's providing important answers to a lot of questions that I think are, have been raised over time with regard to "What is the diaspora? What does it mean to be part of the diaspora in this moment in the 21st century?" and as I was mentioning previously - with regard to the themes that began to emerge, we saw just the incredible bravery of really all of the authors as far as the themes that they were delving into. In some cases, these were really painful memories that that the authors were harkening back to, and that was very meaningful to us and I think that when people read the collection they'll be inspired by that and really moved by it. 

Whitney: Yes, can I just pick up on one thing that Leila said? We, there's, there are a lot of taboos, you know, Iranians came—we, we started sort of focusing on—backing up: we got a big pile of pieces that were really set in that leaving from Iran in 1979 and coming with that there was a lot of trauma and there was, there were certain relationships that people didn't want to want to talk about. And Leila and I, personally I think, both have that in our families, you know. There's certain things, you know, doors that don't open. And we found that, picking up on what you said, Leila, we found that people were really willing to open some of those doors and talk about some of these things that aren't really talked about generally in in public with, amongst Iranians, and that was super exciting for us to kind of "Let's go in this direction!" because it just seemed new and really relevant and modern. And so that was exciting. Go for it! 

Emery:I wanted to be able to say was the fact that we received so many submissions from writers who were going outside of their preferred genre, actually I think many poets and a fiction writer, writing nonfiction, I think is really exciting and, in fact, I don't have a hard number for you, but I would say many of the writers in the collection were writing outside their preferred genre. I think it means that we're seeing how interesting creative nonfiction can be and that there are elements of poetry and there are elements of fiction that can entail accuracy. And that was really, a really lovely thing that began to emerge in it and again it really helped us kind of categorize. 

Fish: I think we lost the last word that you said: It helped you categorize, something? I think categorize the the themes? the story? 

Emery: Exactly, yeah. 

Fish: So kind of combining that point, where do you see this volume within the world of creative nonfiction? What do you think that this offers to interested readers who tend to go for creative nonfiction? 

Emery: I think people are used to memoir and memoir has been a popular genre for a long time. And although these pieces aren't memoir necessarily I think that they're accessible in that way. People are interested in reading about other people's lives, even if those people are, well we hope anyway, even if those people are different, have different backgrounds. And so the fact that I think people are already interested in that, means that these essays will, I think, be of great interest. And certainly Katherine and I have talked about this at length: the fact that, let's say, a largely American audience maybe has never read writing by Iranians before or this type of writing by Iranians; maybe they're familiar with Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example. But this is something different, and and we really wanted to push the boundaries in so many ways. I think the collection does that really beautifully. 

Atefat-Peckham: I think, sorry, I think this is interesting because I was like in my head justifying kind of how, how do I? how do I send this in as nonfiction if really it's a lot of essentially prose poems that have been expanded? And I think that actually, you know my mom was a poet, my grandmother isn't a poet but she writes poetry, and all of my, all the Iranians I've ever met really feel poetic to me. And that might be an extension of, you know, the culture that is so steeped in Rumi and Hafez and Forough, and those you know those incredible poets of Iran. But also I think it's just, I think it really is just part of the culture. It's part of the people's nature in Iran is poetry. And I think that all translated works that I've read—even fiction, nonfiction—have felt extremely poetic in their nature, and dense and mythic, and necessary. So I think for me, you know, when my understanding of Iran was from Rumi, from my mom's poetry, from my grandmother's poetry, from, you know, just all those poetic conventions that really color life in Iran, that as a person living in America felt actually completely right to write my memoir nonfiction as kind of these poetic forms. 

Whitney: Leila, maybe you would want to say something about, we had these conversations about a possibility that the book, the collection could be a kind of between-genres piece, and how we sort of struggled with that in terms of our understanding of the publishing world, because it's really harder to sell a book that doesn't confine to anthology or nonfiction or memoir. But because at first we had poetry in as a, you know, interleaf between the essays, and we didn't in the end have enough poetry to make it make sense as a whole volume. But it was interesting to try to find that continuum of kind of truth in what nonfiction is and also incorporate all these different ways of writing, like Siamak, to have something that's a voice that's really more grounded usually in fiction and sort of storytelling and we had a couple—Persis also is a poet. So, you know, that... If you have anything, you have anything to add to that, Leila. 

Emery: Yeah, that was, that was certainly a challenge for us, you know. How do we decide what is, like, how do we draw those lines? And to me the best nonfiction has elements of poetry in it, and maybe that's because I'm biased and I am a poet primarily as well. But to Darius' point, I feel like some of the best writing has that lyrical quality that poems takes. Fiction writers, for example, bring some of those skills to bear, as far as dialogue is concerned, and describing memories. Because, again, you know, how perfect are our memories, I think, that happened to us 5, 10, 15, 20, or more years ago. And fiction writers, you know, even though it was really difficult to kind of draw that line and say, "Okay, we need to focus on nonfiction," I think the collection in some ways is stronger because it's kind of in some ways cross-genre without being cross-genre if that makes sense.

Fish: The narratives that we get about the Iranian diaspora in the US, I think focuses on kind of prosperity narratives. So we often think of LA Iranians, Shahs of Sunset, is what is often marketed to non-Iranians in the US, and I'm wondering from you all, various contributors, how you view your stories as offering something new to explain your own experience within the diaspora.

Rod: I can start with that one. I know for me personally, I had a interaction with Azar Nafisi, who is the writer of Reading Lolita in Tehran, at the Texas Book Festival in 2015. And I was really like trying to engage with like my heritage in a way that I hadn't as an adult. And she told me the best you can do was to read and even gave me the name of a bunch of publishers as well. And so I spent most of 2016 reading a lot of Iranian literature written in English and published for an American audience. And I very much saw that I didn't see myself reflected whatsoever. And that was primarily why I submitted an essay to the call for submissions for, at time it was called "Iranian Musings." And really feeling like, yeah, I didn't have this when I was growing up either, like when I was I'm like 15 years old, I didn't see myself reflected in the type of literature about like young immigrants or the children of immigrants or even any particular diasporic context. And it was really lonely, and so that's primarily what I wanted to do was to try to carve out space for myself that wasn't really there previously. And also how are we talking about prosperity narratives and what representation Iranians do get. It does come from a more higher class perspective, because those are the people that have access to publication points, who also have the way of...money to be able to have additional resources to actually write these types of things. Both of my parents come from Shiraz and Abadan in Iran, and I don't remember reading a lot of narratives from people from those areas back in 2016. I read a lot of narratives that were written by people who were from Tehran or for ??? from the northern part of Tehran. And so I never really even saw our family reflected in what narratives we had available in America. And so that was something I was really heavily trying to remedy in my writing. And even even now when it comes to way books that are being published now about Iranians growing up in America, I'm still not really seeing that. And so I'm going to move forward with other writing projects I'm already at as well. 

Vossoughi: I'll jump in! Yeah, that's a really great question, Laura. And I feel like sometimes, you know, especially for, maybe, for older generation—Iranians or ones who, you know, were coming over in the in the 70s, in the 80s—sometimes it feels like that the dark underbelly of the prosperity narrative is a kind of "grateful to be here" narrative, which is very one-dimensional-izing. And it's actually like really just has very little to no place in art or fiction, in my opinion, because it's just very simple. And, you know like, there's a temptation, I think, to swing all the way in the other direction. And, you know, make, you know—for my family like our political way of being Iranian, what in terms of—I mean this was handed down from my parents—in terms of having a critique of the American Empire. That was our main way of being Iranian. So I almost feel like, you know, that was even as much as the culture and the language played a significant part as well, but the politics really dominated. And that's a side of the pendulum that I didn't want to swing all the way towards either, because for me growing up like I was confused about things like: how do I reconcile my parents' critique of America with my love for Jack Kerouac and Walt Whitman? You know? Like this...that was, and so there were no easy answers to that either. But I think that you know that's where things get interesting, you know. And that's what the book does that I think is so interesting, is it just is trying to wrestle with all those questions at once. And, yeah, so, that's what I appreciate about the collection.

Atefat-Peckham: Yeah, I think for me it was, for me for a lot of my childhood I felt as though my strands, my connection to Iran was a tenuous one. That I didn't feel like I had the license to write about Iran because I had never been there, I hardly spoke the language, and I was only half. And that was for a long time, you know, it really drove me to write about Iran in a way that probably wasn't very genuine because I was... I was stubborn and I was trying really really hard to to be a part of that culture that I really wanted to be in and not really having the ability to get there or to even like just talk about my experiences. But I think that a big part of, for me like, that justification was just allowing myself to be an Iranian American writer and to write the things that I was interested in without forcing myself to imagine what it's like, you know, at the base of the mountain Damavand, you know, or whatever. And a lot of my work now is, you know, I find the culture and what I learn about Iran and everything just bleed into it and, you know, I find that the Iranian culture that is a part of me is just as stubborn as my feeling of, you know, "I don't have a place in it." And it's, you know, I'm lucky, I got to go to an AWP reading last year which had Persis Karim and Jasmin Darznik and Sholeh Wolpé. And they're all kind of like heroes in the Iranian diaspora to me, because right after the reading they came up to me and asked me questions and just made me feel for the first time a part of that very community, and made me feel like I had a place to write about my specific experience, which was tenuous, which was far away. And that that was important, so that was really important for me. 

Fish: So do you think that these stories are particular to an American experience of diaspora? Do you feel that Iranians in diaspora who live in Europe or Latin America or other parts of Asia might feel some sort of resonance with this project? 

Emery: I think that was our hope, certainly, and while it's difficult to speak to those specific experiences of the "what is it like to be part of?" is one shared element of that is sometimes feeling in that liminal space between two cultures. And that thinking, I think, is reflected in many of the pieces in this collection to varying degrees. And I think it just depends person-to-person. Some people, I think, feel like they're squarely in the middle, maybe neither here nor there in a way. Some people, others rather, I think are more comfortable fully embracing one side of their culture than the other, whether that's their new country or the one that they were born in or where their parents were born in. And that, you know, is interesting and that's a really interesting thing to explore in writing. I love that the collection does that.

Whitney: I would say, I would add, that I think there is something unique about the relationship between Iran and America that is, you know, that goes back to that political and historical and that there's a level of tension between countries politically and that and, something that immigrants from Iran had to deal with, and then, you know, sort of having.... What's interesting to me is that, you know, my husband came when he was 15 and he had to assimilate as a teenager and as an Iranian, you know, cut—assimilated into this country at a time when the hostages were being held. And he wanted to be more American, and he really did it, really he did such a good job of it I barely recognized him as Iranian, you know, when we got married. But my daughter, in the next generation, it's like "I want to be more Iranian and I don't look Iranian enough," you know, "I want, you know." And she feels sort of that this, not discrimination, that's too hard of a word, but she feels a little an outsider in the gatherings that are fully Iranian. So that, there's, you know, that's I think that assimilation, and there's two—that walking on both sides happens in all countries, you know, whatever there's a, whether there's a diaspora, I think, that one in particular is heightened because of our political relationship. And then that carries on to today, why one reason we thought this collection was so timely was because of the, you know, the bellicosity in our, between our leaders of, on both sides. And that it gets, the depiction of Iranians, Iranian Americans becomes very monolithic. And we felt like this is a book where you really see so much nuance and real human stories and that that was important.

Fish: I think we're running out of time, unfortunately. I think that this conversation could go on for much longer than this. So I kind of want to leave on a more hopeful and and happy note: The book came out on March 16th and that was immediately before Nowruz. I guess with all of the Covid-19, of the stress and fear around that, how have you celebrated the publication of this book and how did you celebrate Nowruz, if you could, if you were able to in any small way this year? 

Rod: I joined a Zoom celebration for Nowruz that was organized by some friends of mine. It was all Iranian queers and it was the first time that I had taken part in that, been in that. And it was really gratifying. And then to the point where, you know, we were all comparing our haft sins to each other and being like "I couldn't get this, I could get that, but not this," and then someone even said how her sister called it a chahār sin, like a four sin, instead of a seven sin. And then, actually, I ended up not being able to go to the market to get my own supplies, so I painted a haft sin; it was inspired by Katherine's essay that she wrote about her daughter painting a haft sin, a traveling haft sin. So I was really inspired by that and I cribbed off of that. 

Vossoughi: I had big plans of jumping over a candle, but they didn't come to pass. Mostly I just I'm putting it off till next year. I talked to some relatives; I tried to remember the relatives that my parents would have called and gave them a call all over the country. So that was the big one. And in terms of the book, we were trying to get something going with the University of Washington Near East Studies department, I have a friend who's a professor there, it's still in process. We're hoping for something in September maybe once the world recovers from everything. 

Atefat-Peckham: Just for me was kind of the acknowledgment of warm weather. I've been in Boston for the last, you know, year and it's cold. And for me what Nowruz means is this warmthening of the world and of the natural. I've been writing a lot of poems at home and just trying to keep, you know, in contact with my grandparents as much as possible, talking to them. And we usually spend Nowruz together, my grandparents and I, as I write in the essay in the book. It's kind of like they're one, they get that holiday with me. It's like my parents are like "Alright, you know, that's Iranian, that's yours." And it's a, you know, it was sad, but was also it was also good to be, to have this especially this anthology to flip through and work through during my March while it got warmer. And just, you 

know, doing all the things that you can you can do when you're in isolation and, you know, and still feel part of that Iranian wider community.

Whitney: I mean we, there's a huge Chahar Shanbe Souri celebration in Berkeley that had to get postponed or canceled outright. And I think there was, for my family, we're kind of spread out, but my kids weren't around, but I know they were jumping over, there's candle jumping. And then we actually had a multiple FaceTime call on New Year's with my mother-in-law, who's been sequestered in Iran for you know six weeks. I mean she's older, so she was really being careful, so but it was supposed, she cried you know. If you can see, imagine her, an Iranian grandmother, just like seeing all her family had little squares on her  iPad and it was really really lovely so yeah. So that was both, you know, so technology meets the virus.

Emery: I usually spend Nowruz with my parents, who live about 30 minutes from me, and they're older and I've been trying to be very cognizant of social distancing. So while I was heartbroken to not be able to spend this New Year's with them, we did speak on the phone. I spoke to some other relatives. And in addition to that, I think it's it's been lovely to celebrate the debut of the book at this particular time. It seems so fortuitous, oddly enough, that that it would so close to Nowruz. And in some ways that all this other stuff is happening that's so beyond our control, what we are seeing in response to that is just this incredible a response to these stories, to these authors, to the book as a whole. And just the community as a whole really embraced this. And I think one wonderful thing that has come out of this situation is the fact that people are finding ways to celebrate virtually or some, you know, allow people to feel less alone. And that has certainly helped me this year, so I feel very privileged to be part of this community, and I hope all of our authors do as well. 

Fish: It's been an absolute delight to get to hear you read your stories and it's been an honor and a privilege to to be able to talk with you all about this project that has been absolutely so meaningful, and I think will hopefully bring a lot of people joy during this very stressful time. So I want to thank all of you for being here! 

Khodahafez! Khodahafez, thank you!

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