Elizabeth Eslami

American Literary Review

2012-01-14T13:45:00.000-08:00

Honored to have a new story, "Sawtooth," in the current issue of American Literary Review, along with great work by Christine Sneed, Karl Taro Greenfeld, and many others.

The Page 69 Test

2012-01-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

Marshal Zeringue was kind enough to ask me if I'd like to submit Bone Worship to Marshall McLuhan's infamous Page 69 Test. McLuhan's idea was that if you don't know whether or not you want to commit to reading a book, you should turn to page 69 and see if it speaks to you.

Click here to see how Bone Worship fared.

Happy Holidays from Dubai

2011-12-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

This picture was taken at the bookstore Kinokuniya in Dubai by a friend of author Ru Freeman. Ru's book A Disobedient Girl appears in the center right of the photograph, as does Bone Worship in the bottom left.

And here my mind was blown was someone wrote to tell me they bought a copy in Australia.

Dubai!

Excerpt from "All the Moon Men We Have Loved"

2011-12-07T09:50:00.000-08:00

Cynthia Hawkins's wonderful film anthology Writing Off Script is now available on Amazon! Please buy a copy and help the kids of Joplin.

Included in the anthology is my essay "All the Moon Men We Have Loved." You can read an excerpt of it here.

NYC Sunday Salon

2011-11-27T07:52:00.000-08:00

Video of me reading in September at NYC Sunday Salon. I was nervous. :-)
Click here.

Writing Off Script has a shiny new book trailer!

2011-11-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

And here it is!

WRITING OFF SCRIPT Trailer from Morris Hill Pictures on Vimeo.

Writing Off Script has a release date!

2011-11-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

On December 1st, Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema will be available as an e-book! Proceeds benefit Joplin Public Schools Tornado Relief Fund, so please, please, pretty please buy a copy.

My essay, "All the Moon Men We Have Loved," will appear in the anthology, along with wonderful essays by Greg Olear, Robin Antalek, Nathaniel Missildine and interviews with Art Edwards, Simon Smithson, and many others. Writing Off Script is edited by Cynthia Hawkins and published by Calavera Books.

Here's a sneak peek at the fabulous cover!

Manhattanville Faculty Reading

2011-11-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

If you're in the vicinity of Purchase, NY tomorrow evening, please join me for the Manhattanville Faculty Reading, 7pm in the library. I'll be reading with Greg Olear, Kris Jansma, Jonathan Tropper, Jeff Pearlman, and many other professors and students from the Undergraduate Writing Dept. Promises to be a great night!

Click here for more.

New Review of Bone Worship

2011-10-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

I'm humbled and amazed that nearly two years after Bone Worship was published, it's still being read and reviewed. Have a look at blogger Jessica's (of Life According to Jessica) lovely review here.

Thank you, Jessica!

Listening

2011-08-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

Our house juts into the woods, under the shadows of trees and into the air space of moths, and so for a time we’ve been allowed inside the thrum of summer. Leaves turn in the ghostly breeze of dusk, their papery faces meeting like secret lovers. Dogs and children run hard over the rocks, their hearts racing each other into the dark. Bats echo-locate dinner and each other, twitchy gray forms slicing past.

Very easily the summer din could claim us, play us as ancillary instruments. I’d be okay with that. I offer my spine as a xylophone.

Listen, now. Moth wing. Ping of solid bone.

Each morning, the vines come closer. Jetty dragonflies rest their wings on the wood steps, miniature helicopters cooling their engines.

One morning, I open the curtains and meet a cicada clinging to the window screen. Her eyes bloom out of her head like poppyseeds. Her mouth-grill scrapes tiny spiders from the mesh. I listen to the whisper of her eating breakfast as coffee slides down my throat.

This summer is loud and fast. It shoves past me, spins my head. A million sounds at once.
I’m listening.

At the end of the month, I’ll be teaching here. I’ll share stories with my students, and they’ll share their stories with me. I’ll listen. I’m so lucky to be able to listen.

I wrote some stories, linked by tendrils, by dragonfly wings, into a collection called The Hibernarium. I was lucky. The Hibernarium has been named a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

I and a lot of other writers have contributed essays for Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema, the e-anthology brainchild of writer, editor, and TNB contributor Cynthia Hawkins, forthcoming from Simon Smithson’s Calavera Books. We all watched coverage of the tornadoes in Joplin and wanted to help, and with the wisdom and guidance of Cynthia Hawkins, we did the only thing we know to do. We spoke. We built a city of words.

Proceeds from the anthology benefit JET-14 via Joplin Schools Tornado Relief Fund. We hope you’ll buy and read it.

We hope you’ll listen.

On Facebook, Technology, and the Nature of Friendship

2011-06-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

They tell me I’m better on the Internet. Funnier on Facebook, more oomph than “IRL.” I’m not sure how to feel about this. I suppose my avatar is something of an improvement, a jovially connected version of myself, my greatest hits, quickest comebacks, and most “likeable” observations. Version 2.0 as Zadie Smith says in her controversial essay, “Generation Why?”

Smith is one of many writers who have taken to “struggling against” Facebook lately, worrying how a generation whose umbilical cords are on display in their parents’ profile pictures will fare over time. Not to spoil the surprise, but she isn’t terribly enthusiastic about their future. Unwilling to go gentle into Smith’s dark night, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal followed with a considerably more optimistic, less end-times approach, defending social media while targeting the motives of literary writers who moonlight as Facebook critics. Most recently, Jonathan Franzen explored the limitations of Facebook in his New York Times essay, citing technology as an impediment to love and an enabler of narcissism.

Franzen’s essay, excerpted from a commencement speech he delivered at Kenyon College, details his transformation from BlackBerry devotee to birder as if describing a path to redemption. Jesus in the form of a rufous-sided towhee. It’s a brilliant piece – as are all three of these – and his celebration of hard earned love is undeniably admirable, if a tad easy. In making his point, Franzen designates technology (special mention goes to Facebook) as the bogeyman to his more authentic, love-filled existence.

“The ultimate goal of technology,” Franzen writes, “is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes…with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.” In other words, the idea that Facebook and its software kin have allowed us to abandon the real world to escape into a world of our own design, and thus our own vanity... To read the rest of this essay at The Nervous Breakdown, click here.

June Fever Burning

2011-06-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

June fever burning
Can’t tell
the difference, under the skin, under the sun.
Stand there all day, skin red to white
like bird shit smeared down a metal screen.

June fever burning
Cook the meanness out
Peel skin, boil cells, kill germs.
Turn up the heat,
Run to my lungs, to the shale rock, to the ground.

First day of June
Ugly bird babies
A mother’s nest of sticks and worry,
Fox snake lawnmower
Everything out to get what’s hers.

First day of June
Everyone’s having babies
Faces like dough, hard gristle eyes.
A mother’s nest of sticks and worry,
Inside not a one of them can smile.

First day of June
Take the tools from the shed.
The father and his boy plant flowers in the crack
Up in the shale rock where it makes no sense
They’ll catch water but not much else.

June fever burning
Heads of broccoli on the floor,
Dinner party skeletons.
Twenty-two legs, not enough chairs,
Uncle folds himself on a pillow like a girl.

June fever burning
We tell mean stories,
Balancing lukewarm plates on our knees.
We laugh when we hurt each other
We laugh til we’re sick.

June fever in my lungs.
Keep going til it makes sense, til I run myself
in the ground.
The father and his boy will come plant flowers
In the crack where the water lives, in the shale rock
Where I used to burn.

Try a Little Selfishness on Mother's Day

2011-05-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

Thanks to a wonderful partnership between Red Room and AOL, Red Room authors are often invited to submit something for one of AOL's various outlets, with $100 donated to a charity of the author's choice.

It's such an honor to have my article, Try a Little Selfishness, up today at AOL's Parentdish, with a donation to a cause (and a place) close to my heart - the Yaak Valley Forest Council. Please read about the Yaak Valley (and donate, if you can!) and in the meantime, hope you enjoy my piece in honor of Mother's Day.

I Heart Malaprops

2011-04-10T20:07:00.000-07:00

If you're ever in Asheville, North Carolina, get thee to Malaprops and buy yourself an armful of books. Great store and incredibly kind staff. It was certainly one of my favorite stops on the tour!

Alsace Walentine, the events coordinator at Malaprops, posted this great Twitter picture of herself reading Bone Worship:

A Red Room Original

2011-03-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

I'm honored that my essay "The Longest Day of Her Life" -- about a young woman leaving her home country in the Middle East -- has been published as a Red Room Original. You can read it here.

Montana Days and Ways

2011-03-01T15:21:00.000-08:00

My essay, Four Years in Montana, has found a new home in this month's Connotation Press! Have a look here.

On Writing, from Beth Hoffman's Brava!

2011-02-02T13:36:00.000-08:00

A great perk of having a book out in the world is that it acts as a kind of calling card, bringing people into your world, and you into theirs. Beth Hoffman, author of the New York Times bestselling novel Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, is one of the most generous people I've ever met, in addition to being a splendid novelist. It's an enormous privilege to know her and to read her work.

Beth was kind enough to ask me to contribute an essay on writing for her site Brava, which introduces authors and readers. Here's my own version of advice for beginning writers: Head Above Water.

New at TNB, None of the Above

2011-01-20T12:29:00.000-08:00

"A man and a woman went for a walk near the road named for luck...and found the skull of a boy."

I have a new essay about a missing boy, grief, and how well we really know each other at The Nervous Breakdown here.

Interviews in the Spartanburg Herald and elsewhere

2010-12-18T15:01:00.000-08:00

I was interviewed by writers Rachel Beasley for the Spartanburg Herald and Kim Henson in a three part interview for her terrific blog, Well-Written Days.

Click the links above for the Herald piece and Part 1 of Kim Henson's interview, and here and here for Parts 2 and 3.

Interviews!

2010-12-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

In anticipation of my December 11th reading at Spartanburg's Hub City Bookshop, I was interviewed for several local newspapers, including the Greenville and Spartanburg Journals and the Herald Journal. Here's the first of these.

An Open Letter to a Private Fox

2010-11-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

Consider this a love letter. As such, it requires patience.

Settle in. Fold under your legs. Curl your tail around the bean of your body, keep the ashy tip poised over your nose. But be quick about it. It is cold tonight, and my voice will carry.

There are many places to begin. One day I saw a hollow under a rock. I had a hunch. Another time I spotted a rotten tree, the pulp soft and pungent. I could see you there, waiting out the night. You could be there now. No one would wait for you but me.

I used to think you were always hiding, but now I know better. We simply are not worthy of your presence.

Forgive my warm cheeks, this terrible sequence of halting gestures. I don’t know how to tell you this story. Should I leave a screed in branches, a chit in stones at your door? My affections are spelled out in river water and berry juice, in layers of soil. The soft bone-glow of the moon.

If I could I would yap at you, wowwowwow, crack open my face in some approximation of love. But I am not vulpine. I would make a mistake, my teeth would clack out the wrong song. I’m used to the grayer ones, understand. The Western ones, thick bodied and substantial. They could pass as coyotes. You could pass as a cat. You keep all your secrets around you.

I know your stealth – once, the cupreous flicker of your tail at mid-morning, my clumsy presence sending you over the hill – but you aren’t so clever at hiding evidence. Those hastily concealed digs in the leaves, the hind end of a mouse, that bird wing in your scat. The tracks by the lake where your thin legs punched through the dry mud. I don’t mean to be presumptuous. You will, I hope, correct me if I’m wrong. I admire your work. You speak a different language from the wild hysteria of the whitetails, the hang-dog pessimism of the possums.

It’s not as if I understand you. For instance, there is the matter of the turkeys. Three, fat and searching. They come in the yard jerking their heads like diplomats, high stepping with raw feet. I watch them peck the ground, and I call them miracles; I chew my dinner and wonder how it is you haven’t chewed them for dinner. Easy prey for you, no doubt. Surely some nights you pray for such prey. Why have you spared them? Is it your humanity? I’m sorry. See, another stupid mistake. There is no word for what I’m trying to say. Altruism, perhaps, but that has a sheen I don’t intend. Your animality?

Your choices do fascinate. Vulpine. I marvel over your aptitude, over the unpredictable, unswallowable desires that crawl up into your mouth like bile.

I never imagined you’d want that pumpkin, discarded in the street, slammed into pieces by a 14 year old’s baseball bat. Not you. The pregnant, waddling raccoons, maybe, hiding their shame behind dumpsters. The ambitious squirrels, who plan but never consider the big picture. I waited for their teeth marks, a dental x-ray of late night hunger.

But you came instead, boldly standing under the street light, orange strings of pumpkin meat hanging between your teeth. You turned your ears toward me, the threat of me, and listened to my blood, to digestive juices, to the thumping and beating of life. Oh, you. You put your head back down, drooped the tail. A meal in front of you.

You marvelous beast. You sexy, beautiful thing. If they saw you, they’d start a fan club, goddammit. They’d build a religion around the jewel of your heart.

You ate, unafraid of me. You swallowed down that orange flesh, vulnerable under the yellow lights, a mouthful occluding your breath.

I could have killed you then. You could have been seen by others, struck down by machinery, snared and put in a loud block of a truck. There is, always, the threat of death. Do you know what they’d do to you? Rubber and asphalt. Latex gloves, a syringe. Do you run from these things? Do you even know, in all your cleverness, from what you’re running? You just run.

That night, you stayed and ate. A gamble. Warm air from your wet mouth, between bites. Your stomach, I knew, would be full of pumpkin. White seeds. You’d sleep dense bellied. In the morning, I’d find your scat heavy with vegetable instead of bone.

My god, you can’t lie.

I should not be saying this. I am married, and you are a fox. I can’t give you my ring finger to chew on, but I can give you my gratitude. A humble meal to soften your pangs.

Thank you for not running away that night. For running away every other time, for making yourself invisible long enough to exist.

Thank you living in this place we have carved into and ruined, making a life in a crumpled shoebox of wilderness. Thank you for moving each night, stone to stone. There is not room enough for a mate or kin. There is only space enough for you, this day, and perhaps another.

In the winter, I will look for your tracks. Tiny feet on the snow. If you make it that long, I will cry for your endurance. If you do not make it, I will cry for your absence.

How long you have made it, already, all alone in the empty ribs of these woods.

New essay at TNB

2010-10-08T18:44:00.000-07:00

I've got a new piece up at The Nervous Breakdown on why we should stop writing obituaries. Check out Everything That Scares Us Is Dead.

Interview for A Tutta Cultura

2010-09-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

In July, Bone Worship was released in Italy as Il Mio Matrimonio Combinato. Journalist Emanuela Frate just interviewed me about the novel and modern arranged marriage for the Italian website A Tutta Cultura. (Q&A is in English.) Check out the interview here.

Of Writers and Recluses

2010-09-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

In some distant corners, the border bushlands of Botswana, for example, there are writers so unaccustomed to human contact that they journey into London for their book tours only to jump at sidewalk cracks, thinking puff adders are underfoot. Authors living in remote Rocky Mountain cabins built into shale, tethered to the publishing industry via the last bar payphone in the world. People who are reticent to move among the thought-scattering, thing-gathering townies below. These storytellers have forgotten their social skills, misplaced them under a pile of words, leaves, and snow. It’s the writer-as-madman, the old coot (or tangle-headed banshee) who comes down the mountain or treks out of the desert just once a year or so, when injured. Or when his truck is.

Everyone sees him in his glorious leonine dishevelment and marvels.

I wonder sometimes if it’s really possible to write about people without being among them. If there’s a way to store up human truths, the ones that don’t expire, anyway, and then disappear into the land of bear grass. Perhaps reclusive writers have found some way to keep themselves undiluted by our herky-jerky business down below. Or, less generously, it’s possible they are doing themselves and their writing a disservice by drawing a line and building their cabins on one side of it. Who defines the world, and why would you want to play cartographer? I suppose it’s merely a choice, and as such, it is meaningless. As long as they keep writing. There are still those brief moments when civilization must pull them in, at least for a new fan belt. Time enough for a draught of humanity.

After all, one can’t draw a steadfast line in rock.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how important having a “place” is. Whether you can move away and take that place with you. And whether “placeness” is even real. If you ask me where my place is, without hesitation I will tell you it is Montana. My husband jokes that when someone meets me for the first time, within five minutes they will know how much of my life was, and is, centered on our four years living there. When I’m feeling especially romantic about it, I am certain I will be writing about Montana for the rest of my life, even though my Montana is not necessarily the same as a hunter’s Montana, or a developer’s Montana, or an equestrian’s Montana. Of course, the bitterroot doesn’t care about such trivial distinctions.

Can there be one place for a person, or many? I want to go to Iran, and Morocco, and I want to return to South Africa and find my way back into the mess of people and puff adders, so maybe those are my places too. How will I know?

Even here, on the other, more metropolitan side of the country, I want to be no less than a zealot in my quest for placeness. I want to see everything. There is the easy beauty of the spider living in the hollow of a lopsided oak, but there is also the extraordinary beauty of a subway rat in New York City, persistently making its way along the smooth, steel tracks, searching for food under shards of glass and soot and cigarette butts, eyes evolving to a life of darkness and the sporadic, subterranean earthquakes of human passage. Say what you will, but not a one of us has the toughness in the last segment of a rat’s tail.

Right about now, I feel like a subway rat plucked from its shadowy life under the city, left to squinny around. The first weekend we drove out to a park on Long Island Sound, looking to get away. We got honked at twice on our way there, found a sandy beach covered with shiny, tattooed bodies, chicken bones, tailgate barbecues. I had to fight my old urge, my Montana urge, to disappear into the periphery, find some mountain to climb. It was chaos, or life. Basketball. Loud music. Puerto Rican women in cut-out bathing suits taking glamour shots of each other with their cell phones. I looked for animals. Twice a gull flew by, having adapted a new city camouflage, some smart slate gray color mixed into the feathers.

Each morning I walk in the woods here, what constitutes woods, tracts of precious land purchased by cities and rich benefactors whom I’ve never bumped into once. They are eerily empty. A handful of turkeys and doves, a dozen or so squirrels. I trip over the rocks, my footing still awkward after a month. I routinely hear sirens and people’s conversations in the suburbs around these acres, creating the impression that I’m inside a movie set. Trees marked for cutting are bound by plastic, yellow tape. This is not the wilderness.

I can’t get lost. I’ve tried.

This is a start. I am good at this, this moving, this adapting to new places, new accents, new habits, but in the beginning, there is blindness. Temporary, but acute. Sometimes all day it’s a single question in my mind, on a loop: “Okay, okay! Turn where?” Perhaps it’s a different kind of lost. What they say is true. It’s faster here, crowded. One keeps looking for mountains, but comes up empty. But it’s not all bad, just different. And I can’t yet see it.

Sour Milk Published in 52 Stories

2010-08-24T13:46:00.001-07:00

My short story, "Sour Milk," has just been published in 52 Stories! Have a look here.

Bone Worship Reviewed

2010-08-10T18:19:00.000-07:00

Two wonderful writers and colleagues, Persis Karim and Chris Clarke, recently reviewed Bone Worship, in the Women's Review of Books and the acclaimed blog Coyote Crossing respectively.

Here are a couple excerpts:

Making Sense of an Iranian Past

Bone Worship
By Elizabeth Eslami
New York: Pegasus Books, 2010,
368 pp., $15.95, paperback

Reviewed by Persis Karim

The late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the publication of a large number of memoirs by Iranian-American women (among the most notable: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi [2003]; Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni [2005]; and Funny in Farsi, by Firoozeh Dumas [2003]). Many of these memoirists were narrating the traumas and losses associated with the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and their relocation to the West.

More than once I have been asked why there are so many Iranian-American women writing-and so few men. The question is partly answered by the history of literature and writing in Iran: for millennia, well into the twentieth century, Iranian letters were the jurisdiction of men. Women were undereducated and in large part limited to the private realm; public disclosure was discouraged, when it was not forbidden altogether. Although there were some female writers, their work was not taken as seriously as men’s and was often judged more harshly. Today, however, women’s long-suppressed voices and stories have been released by the floodgates of history. They can write and publish in ways that were difficult or off-limits to them before. And, just as women have emerged at the forefront of literature in Iran today, so too have they dominated the literary stage in the diaspora. Their personal stories recount the challenges of migration, their struggles to reinvent themselves in new contexts, and their hybridized experiences as hyphenated Americans.

Currently, the urgency of the first-person memoir is giving way to an emerging Iranian-American novel that does more than simply evoke the typical American immigrant story. Two novels by recent MFA graduates exemplify this trend: Laleh Khadivi’s The Age of Orphans and Elizabeth Eslami’s Bone Worship. Both, necessarily, draw from what they know, and don’t know, of their immigrant parents’ journeys to the United States and what they lost in the process. However, each provides her own complex, nuanced perspective as a writer navigating the aspects of “old world” culture in an America dominated by predictable and tired narratives of Iran and the Middle East, post-9/11. Both of these books complicate our notions and invite our curiosity.

Khadivi and Eslami share a longing to connect with and make sense of the past, in order to unravel their characters’ futures.

Bone Worship, Elizabeth Eslami’s debut novel, is also suggestive of her own experience as a first-generation Iranian-American. Eslami spins the story of her protagonist from threads of the old and the new. When the American-born Jasmine flunks out of college, she faces the prospect of an arranged marriage.

Instead of simply playing with the classic stereotypes about arranged marriages as antithetical to Western values, however, Eslami helps us to appreciate the old-world rituals, which are not devoid of meaning, even in the modern world. Jasmine’s rather shaky relationship with her enigmatic doctor-father has real resonance. He decides to involve himself in her life at the critical point when she’s defining herself as an adult, and she becomes curious about what he left behind in his native Iran. She takes the endeavor of finding a suitor as a challenge that resonates with her interest in zoology and biology, and her “research” eventually helps her to understand her father’s motivations. When he left his country, he also left parts of himself, and beneath his gruff, cool personality is a tender concern for his daughter. In the end, Jasmine finds a husband, but what she really discovers is that the culture that shadows her life has something to teach her about the different ways that people “arrange” their lives and loves.

Both these novels communicate important information about the Iranian and Iranian-American experiences (and yes, Kurdish too), in language that opens up western readers’ vision of that part of the world, rather than closing it off in a classical trope of “us” versus “them.” Fiction really is the best ambassador of us all.

From the blog Coyote Crossing, by Chris Clarke:

This review has been a while in coming, partly because life and the accompanying events have overtaken me, but partly because after finishing Bone Worship: A Novel, I wanted to let it sit for a while before I reacted.

Full disclosure: the author Elizabeth Eslami is a friend, and has blessed a book of mine with a glowing review. Situations like this can be awkward, and so over the years I’ve developed a de facto policy when I find myself faced with reviewing a work by a friend. Generally speaking, that policy is that if I find a friend’s book lacking in more respects than is acceptable, I tend not to review it.

Fortunately that’s not the case here. Eslami’s debut novel is wonderful.

The basics: Jasmine Fahroodhi is a young woman with possibly the worst case of sophomore slump on record, which endures until her parents pick her up at graduation — only a few days after she lets them know she’d flunked out of school. Her father, a Persian-born doctor, seems less rattled by his daughter’s failure in school than by her choice of a major other than pre-med. Jasmine goes home to Georgia with her parents, where her father embarks on his “Plan B” for Jasmine’s future: hastegar, an arranged marriage. Jasmine, as unenthusiastic about home life as she had been at the University of Chicago, musters only the mildest American Feminist opposition to this plan.

Dr. Fahroodhi is a classic fish out of water. Opaque even to his family, he is frequently hostile to Jasmine — “you’re stupid” being among his most frequent utterances. Her reluctantly co-dependent mother, born in the Old South, oddly supports her husband’s plans for an arranged marriage, helping him take out “Bride Available” ads in newspapers catering to Iranian-Americans. From Chapter 8:

“Listen to me. I know you think arranged marriages are a thing of the past, and maybe they are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong.” She had stopped blinking completely, something she did when she was worked up. “You’re the one who looks at everything in black and white. If you’ll just give this a chance, you’ll see —”

“Jesus, how would you even know? You were born here! You married Dad for love. Your own choice. Or am I missing something?”

The calendar on the coffee table was still open, showing a boy bending over for a shot from a malevolently cartoonish doctor.

“I know, Jasmine. I know. And look what happened.”

Jasmine reluctantly goes along with the plan, which — true to the book’s dust-cover teaser — results in humorous and awkward meetings with potential suitors, and then the unexpected happens, though not in the saccharine way this telegraphic summary might lead you to expect. In the meantime, Jasmine stumbles through a series of suburban job-hunting moments, culminating in one of those menial jobs a lucky person finds every now and then that utterly transforms them.

That’s the plot, but this novel isn’t really as much about plot as it is character, primarily that of Jasmine’s father. Jasmine’s relationship with her difficult father is the central point of the novel. Early on, she remarks that despite having known him all her life, “if I had to stand up at his funeral one day and tell the world about his desires and hopes and who he was as a person, I’d stand there mute.” In the novel’s first few pages Jasmine lists the seven big things she knows about her father — his lifelong aversion to broccoli; his habit of calling his parents in Iran every other Sunday; the fact that he used to beat their dogs with a shovel; his having pushed a young cousin off a wall in Iran, badly injuring her, and a few others as well distributed along the spectrum from banal to vile. As the chapters unfold, Jasmine examines each of those seven known things in some detail. Eslami deftly structures the narrative around each of these channel markers.

Eslami’s portrayal of Dr. Fahroodhi is frank, and there is much to dislike in the man. His vulnerabilities, explored as the book unfolds, may make the reader cringe on his behalf, but they do little to soften our impression of him; they mainly help reveal what broke him. Jasmine’s relationship with her father is one of those that might seem inexplicable to an outsider, a bond that apparently persists out of duty alone, with neither party gaining much. At that, it’s like a lot of father-daughter relationships. There is tenderness there, but it’s deeply masked: the unrequited love of a daughter for a man who observed his children “from a safe distance like a potentially flammable lab experiment,” the arguable love of a man for his incomprehensibly un-Persian daughter that mainly manifests as frustration and anger. That anger and frustration, felt on both sides, never comes to a head. Conflict builds, tension mounts, and then just as a blowout seems inevitable something turns the narrative and submerges the tension: Mom, or the telephone, or circumstance, or even just Yusef Fahroodhi’s unwillingness to engage with his daughter as an adult worthy of respect. Maybe it’s American of me, but I did find myself wishing for a more open confrontation between the two.

All that notwithstanding, Eslami has not created a loveless father. Jasmine sees his love for her mother plainly and from a bit of a remove, as though it’s a specimen described in one of the natural history volumes she checks out of the small local library:

My parents, when they were first in love, swam out into the ocean and kissed until a lifeguard blew his whistle and yelled at them and made them come in, up to the sand. He was afraid of them drowning, their bodies tangled together in a way that made staying afloat impossible. He was afraid of what he saw from his white wood post high in the sky, the inability to tell if they were one person or two. He was afraid that if you looked up at them from deep under the green water, you would first see the light on the surface slicing down into the water, and then you would see them, and you would get their arms and legs confused with an octopus, a starfish.

One of the things I liked best in Bone Worship is exemplified in that paragraph: Eslami uses images, memories, passing conversations and other bits of detail to represent Jasmine’s exploration of her relationship with her family and herself. The lifeguard is Jasmine, afraid of what her parents’ love for each other might resemble. So is the boy in the magazine illustration, submitting to pain inflicted by a doctor who knows what’s good for him. The remembered Doberman pinscher punished with the shovel, growling at the boundaries of the family as it peered through myopic eyes, stands in for the father who beat it. The whole hastegar plot itself is a fair symbol for the involuntary relationship Jasmine has with her family — as we each have with our families. Eslami weaves these images into her prose quite deftly, and in ways that made me frankly envious of her sight. This is a hell of a fine novel, especially for a debut, and I highly recommend it.

Bone Worship in Italian

2010-07-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Italian translation of Bone Worship, Il Mio Matrimonio Combinato, debuts this month! To watch the trailer and read more about it, click here.

A Journey in Review

2010-06-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

Though I'm still hoping to squeeze in a few stops in the Northeast, yesterday's reading at Cherokee County Public Library in South Carolina marks the end of the six month Bone Worship book tour. I'm incredibly grateful to all the writers, friends, bookstore managers, and librarians who helped make it a success!
The excerpt below is from the last reading -- June 23, 2010 Gaffney, SC

Just eleven days ago, we climbed into a silver shell of a car and started across the country.

First over the dry land of Eastern Oregon, past stiff-legged pronghorn standing in irrigated fields of spinach, of lettuce, and then through pink canyons, the steep walls rising up around us like a pre-dug grave. We stopped once to watch the river, to let our dog wolf down dry weeds, to watch a coyote watch us, his eyes baleful as he ran with a mouse between his teeth up the side of a mountain, his face half in shadow.

We were coming back South, coming back home, you could say, though it had been so long we couldn’t remember what home meant, or if we would even recognize it when we got there. Who could say if home would recognize us, two bedraggled people and a dog, a pack of three, seven years changed.

We stopped at motels planted in deserts, lights humming in the darkness, Indian immigrants who had not slept in months running everything. Their elderly snow-haired fathers stood with hoses dangling from their fingers, keeping the grass alive so tourists’ dogs could pee on it. Their beautiful daughters shyly collected dirty sheets in the morning, long after everyone had disappeared down a vein of highway, of memory.

Almost immediately on our journey, the radio broke, and we were left with only our voices, raw and dry and salty. We asked each other questions, and those questions led us places. It was a long drive through the West.

We drove into the Rockies, past the flooded rivers of Wyoming, everything still green beyond the season. We drank milkshakes in Nebraska, in restaurants half underground, tornado contingency plans taped to the walls. A corner of Iowa, a hot afternoon through Illinois. Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina. And then, finally, like a surprise, the land leveled out. South Carolina. The orange clay visible like a sub-layer of skin.

I was born here. In this place. Almost immediately on my journey, the umbilical cord broke, and I was left with only questions. I tried to find my voice, but what came out was raw and dry and salty. I looked for stories, and those stories led me places, into and out of the South. A good story, you see, from birth to life, will take you far, and you will have to see and learn much to tell it.

A childhood spent outside, the heat puckering my scalp, fire ants, copperheads, mourning doves. Every morning waking to that call – bobwhite, bobwhite. Days digging mud holes, or “swimming pools,” as we called them, building ramps to climb rusty fences into cow pastures, the promise of some vast unknown world.

But the thing is, we were right. It was unknown. It’s still unknown.

Because no matter how many times I come home, it is new and strange to me. I will forever be shocked by the Amazonian tangle of woods. Thumb-sized toads wedged into the corner of the cool, brick stairs. I’ll always sit up in the middle of the night, surprised to hear birds singing.

I started this book seven years ago in the attic of my parents’ house, bare feet on an orange carpet, typing away on a long dead computer resting atop an old black table with a crack down the center. I never thought about anyone reading it. Instead I hoped it would lead me somewhere, deep into the heart of a mystery, into the promise of a grown-up’s vast unknown. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there. Maybe I’d be looking over a cliff. I wrote down my questions, hoping they’d lead to answers.

Six months ago, Bone Worship came out in print. Almost immediately, I broke with who I was, and I began to travel the country. Portland, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago. Fan mail, hate mail, interviews, radio programs, people weeping, people laughing, strangers becoming friends. My hand around a pen, my hand in other hands. Eighteen stops later, my voice is raw and dry and salty. But I am telling a story, and now all of you are a part of it. Now, the story has circled around to where it started, right here, in this place of woods and birds, in this place of family and friends.

Andre Gide wrote, “In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.”

For seven years, I’ve been away, from you, and from who I used to be.

Thank you for still recognizing me.

From Why There Are Words: Heat

2010-06-18T17:08:00.000-07:00

On June 10th, I had the pleasure of participating in a "Heat" themed Why There Are Words reading with writers Cara Black, Prartho Sereno, Joe Quirk, Catherine Brady, and Todd Zuniga. This series, held at the beautiful Studio 333 in Sausalito and orchestrated by Peg Alford Pursell, is an amazing opportunity for established and emerging writers, not to mention those who love attending a great literary event. If you ever get the chance, you should check it out!

To see a clip of my (cooking themed) reading from Bone Worship, click here.

Bone Worship is a Finalist for "The Book Pick" Contest

2010-06-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

I'm so excited to learn that my novel is a finalist in BookBundlz's "The Book Pick" contest! If you can, please visit the link below and vote for Bone Worship. In order to vote, you must register to become a "clubie," but it's free and there are no obligations. You can vote once a day each day until June 29th!

Click here.

A beautiful book about a man who loved a dog, and the dog who loved him back.

2010-05-26T12:21:00.000-07:00

For weeks now, I’ve been carrying Walking With Zeke, by Chris Clarke, around with me. I’ve squeezed this book into my purse and taken it across the country by plane, its pages rifled through by security at LAX. It has endured my tears, my fingers pinching and dog-earing its pages in wonder, my constant, hungry scribbling in the margins. It has glared up at me from a desk in a hotel, daring me to finish it when I didn’t think I could endure its emotional punch. You should see this thing. When I bought it, it was crisp and white and beautiful. Now it looks like it has been tread upon by a monster truck. Twice.

Even now that I have read and digested this book, I find that I’m not quite finished with it. I find that it has digested a little of me in the process, scraped me down. It has left me without the words to tell you why you should read it, simply that you should, and must.

Please understand: this is not a book review. In a review, one is expected to be unbiased. To disclose a work’s shortcomings along with its highlights. So, okay. If you hate humans or relationships or animals or plant life, you should not read this book. If you hate feeling something in such a way that you can’t forget it, read another book instead. There, that fulfills that requirement.

Walking With Zeke is a story about a man who loved a dog, and the dog who loved him back. It is about love, but, as Clarke warns us, it is not hagiography. It is not sentimental. This is not the bland love of a movie dog that has eaten Jennifer Aniston’s necklace. If that’s what you’re looking for, shop someplace else. This is the fierce and abiding love of a dog that has used a rubber duck as a digestive aid, and the kind of man who could not bear to throw away the duck. It’s quit your job to be there, love. It’s love at the end of life, love. Face against the floor, love. “The problem with dogs,” Clarke writes, “is that they live long enough that one day you can no longer remember your life without them.” You know from a line so powerful and true exactly what kind of writer you’re dealing with.

Ultimately, Walking With Zeke is more about Chris Clarke than it is about his dog, Zeke. A man who can tell you everything about miner’s lettuce and cholla, who can walk you through the lifespan of a tree, Clarke comes off as the wise and fascinating friend everyone wishes they had. A guy who “listens to ravens and raves at the listless,” who prays to the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. He’s a less prickly Ed Abbey, a tougher Rick Bass, a Barry Lopez with humor. The kind of writer who observes, without a hint of pretension, that “a long life is a landscape of holes where things once grew.”

But at the heart of Clarke is Zeke. Zeke is an actual character in this story. Adventurous and occasionally misunderstood (no, he’s not part wolf), he’s the canine comic relief and the tragic figure combined, stubborn and smart and decent. “If I leak tears of grief, Zeke nudges my nose with his until I hold him. If my tears are of rage or frustration, he hides under my desk in the farthest room. He anchors our family. He lives to… shove us off the bed at night by increments, to help us eat our sandwiches. He is one damn fine dog.”

Walking With Zeke is a story of place as well, of how well we get on with our journey. It is fluid, but steered forward with a strong hand. Drawn from Clarke’s acclaimed web log Creek Running North (now Coyote Crossing at faultline.org), the book is a collection of journal entries and poetry, with settings ranging from suburban Pinole to the rough streets of Oakland, all moving toward the resolution of Clarke’s life with his dog.

The writing is startling, the images haunting and profound.

I could tell you how hard I cried reading this book, how I sobbed in front of flight attendants, waiters, and loved ones, but what purpose, really, would that serve? I could tell you that I sometimes think of Zeke even though I’ve never met him, sometimes see phantom Zekes in fields or on rocky outcroppings, but what do you care what goes on in my messy head? Yes, this book will devastate you, but it will also fill you with joy. Zeke’s joy. The spirit of a crazy run.

Perhaps the most glorious moment in Walking With Zeke is when Clarke entreats us to walk our dogs in that spirit, to appreciate all the little moments we have with the animals who live with us. To do what he no longer can with Zeke.

I never felt luckier to live with a dog than when I read his words.

“Through it all I have cherished the subtle love of an elderly dog, the gentle glances and the hours of staring, his eyes bound so tightly to my heart that he can wake me at four in the morning just by watching me from across the room. I would not trade these days for anything. His sweetness is solace.” - Chris Clarke, Walking With Zeke

My new essay on book titles in The Nervous Breakdown

2010-05-24T23:31:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder about the title Bone Worship? Apparently you're so not alone. Check out my essay "No Virginia, It's Not About Porn" in The Nervous Breakdown. ;)

Essay in The Millions, Elegy for a Stillborn Story

2010-05-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

I have a new essay up on the wonderful literary arts/news site, The Millions. To read "Elegy for a Stillborn Story," click here.

5 Minute Review of Bone Worship

2010-05-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

I love this review of Bone Worship on Xomba.com! Have a look here.

Broadway Books Reading

2010-04-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

For those of you who missed it, here's a clip from my reading in March at Broadway Books in Portland.

2010 Lit Fest in Dallas

2010-04-22T10:25:00.001-07:00

In or near Dallas? Come join us April 22-24 at SMU for the 2010 Lit Fest! I'm a guest speaker this year. Read more about Lit Fest here.

On Bad Reviews - "I Dreamt a Review in the New York Times"

2010-04-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

Yay! I'm now a regular contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. Read my first post, "I Dreamt a Review in the New York Times," about bad reviews right here.

Bone Worship Featured in Sarah Lawrence Magazine

2010-04-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Sarah Lawrence Magazine, the magazine of my alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, features an excerpt from Bone Worship. (And a lovely illustration by Grady McFerrin!)

Read it here.

Birds and Other Miracles of (Western) America

2010-03-28T09:23:00.001-07:00

This morning, they were necking in the tall, wet grass.

Two Canadian geese off to themselves. You know the ones. Noisy honkers, spook easily. Always make a big production with lots of ostentatious flapping. I admit, I’m not much of a fan. They remind me of tourists somehow. All those little, gray, squishy piles of poo in their wake.

But there they were, together. A couple. The first one thrust his narrow head into the grass, pulled something up – I could hear the roots ripping – and fed its discovery to its mate. Their mouths touched. They rubbed necks like giraffes. One goose tended to the other. It was gentle, intimate. Like parents-to-be, a husband urging his pregnant wife to take an extra portion at dinner.

I felt oafish walking so close to them. I didn’t realize I was throwing open the door to their bedroom.

In a few weeks, if I remember correctly, the goslings will be born. They’ll appear on the water, a string of fuzzy heads following the grapefruit colored legs of their mother. In a few more weeks, they’ll grow into ugly, rangy, unrecognizable teenagers, wandering, heads down to the earth. But not yet. In the beginning, in their dun-headed innocence, they’ll fight desperately to maintain closeness to their parents and each other. The skilled swimmers will do this easily, effortlessly, while the others struggle awkwardly, making a lot of unnecessary waves.

They won’t all make it. Sometimes I’ll come to the park and find a dead one washed up on the banks of the reservoir, the small body in the sand like a forgotten toy. It never has the chance to become something. A goose, or even a skeleton. In a day or two, a feral cat will take it, eating around the heart. Or an eagle or an osprey, something that has been there all along, invisible, patiently living at the top of a fir tree.

It must be a strange thing to see the damp world from such a vantage point.

When we first came to Oregon, it seemed an affront to my dry sagebrush-and-pine sensibilities. We traveled from Montana, from prairie grass and Ponderosas. A place where hound’s tongue weeds get stuck to your boot laces and the cuffs of your pants. Yucca, black widows living inside the yucca. Backyard mountains that were so bare and spiky and beautiful – but also so much an accepted part of the landscape – that only cows ever seemed to climb them. In four years of hiking, my husband and I ran into one person, and that was because we accidentally wandered over BLM land onto his property. He greeted us with a German shepherd and a gun.

Really, though, we couldn’t blame him. If all that land had been ours, maybe we would have defended it too.

But here, four years later, not far away and yet so far away, is Oregon. Green year round instead of dry sage and juniper. Portland and Eugene instead of Bozeman and Dillon. Recycling as a way of life in contrast to Montana’s tendency toward disposability, dumps along the highway with abandoned refrigerators, car batteries, and magpies keeping watch. What you throw away in Montana seems to stay forever, a new form of machine wildlife crouching in the yellow grass. In Oregon, objects are snatched up and re-imagined before they ever meet a landfill, and yet, if left alone, a year of rain could easily consume most everything but plastic. Sometimes the faithful rain almost consumes us. Newts and snails make a soggy life under leaves while everyone else takes cover under the awnings of green energy powered buildings, Dutch Bros. coffee perpetually warming their hands.

Oh yes, you’ve heard: it rains. Moss grows over everything that doesn’t move. (If we had sloths, it would grow over them too.) It took me a year and a half to find proper rain boots so I wouldn’t have to change my socks three times a day. Twice a year, our gutters pull away from the house, weary of all they have to hold.

Some things are the same. The cackling red-winged blackbirds that we came to know in Montana now grasp the tops of Oregon cattails, giving us the avian version of a verbal smackdown when we walk too close. Killdeer with animated toothpick legs turn over to play dead, their little wings flipping upside down. My favorite, the Great Blue Heron, picks through water logged Oregon ditches, through arsenic laced streams in Montana, always enduring somehow in its fragile, twig-like beauty. It doesn’t matter if a heron is in mid-flight, its legs aimed stiffly behind, or if it’s standing, drawing its neck in against the wind and rain; it feels like a lucky day when you see one. That something so beautiful and slight can endure an Oregon winter means that we have nothing, really, to worry about.

From there to here. Montana, where bald eagles perch on fence posts and signs while making a breakfast of mice, to Oregon, where an eagle once stared down at me from a tree, God-like, for four full minutes, the birds were always there, a constant. And yet. Geographically it wasn’t a long journey, but it was a world away.

Before both, there was South Carolina. Robins on my parents’ window sill, squirrels eating moss from brick. New York, with four emaciated deer in the Yonkers woods behind Sarah Lawrence, surviving, just barely. A miracle. A bush next to the train tracks housing a dozen or so crickets, humming like a cathedral. Sooty seagulls on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. New Mexico, where shiny, black cockroaches spilled out of the sewers over your feet at night. Cougars up in the Sandias, roadrunners sprinting through the sand like miniature punks with mohawks.

And now we’re setting out once again. In four months, we’ll be leaving for the Northeast. A chance to re-visit New York as an adult, to see if it fits better than it did when I was in my early twenties. When it seemed to rub blisters in me wherever I went. New York City, Boston, New Haven. I consider the cities, the museums and the schools, the people and the traffic. Snow storms and city buses. But I also know there will be things we can never imagine or prepare for, creatures with wings and multiple legs, up high and underfoot, in trees and in cracks in the sidewalks. New voices and new songs to be learned. Little miracles, all.

Bone Worship Featured in The Daily s-Press

2010-03-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Daily s-Press, edited by Dorothee Lang, is a wonderful showcase for innovative writers and publishers, and they currently have a feature up on Bone Worship!

To see, click here.

An Essay in The Millions

2010-03-18T12:20:00.000-07:00

I've been a big fan of The Millions for some time now, and I can't tell you how excited I am that they've just published one of my essays, Traveling by Faith: Thoughts on Being an Iranian American Writer. Have a look here.

Interview in Portland Reading Local

2010-03-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

I just had the good fortune of being interviewed by the wonderful Karen Munro for Portland Reading Local. In anticipation of my reading tomorrow evening at Broadway Books, PRL is sponsoring a contest. Enter to win a free copy of Bone Worship by leaving a comment on the PRL post, or by linking to it from your blog or site.

In the meantime, hope to see you Portlanders tomorrow night at 7pm, Broadway Books! Click here for the interview.

Book Tour 2010

2010-03-05T18:30:00.000-08:00

Here are some photos from the book tour so far -- Sunriver Books in Sunriver OR, the University of Oregon Knight Library Browsing Room, and Elliott Bay in Seattle. Not pictured are Tsunami Books in Eugene and Powell's in Portland.

This month I'll be reading at Barnes & Noble - Eugene (tomorrow!) Broadway Books in Portland on the 16th, and Alexander Book Co. in San Francisco on the 23rd. For more cities and a complete list of dates and times, check out the News link on my website.

Interview in the Bend Bulletin

2010-02-21T22:02:00.000-08:00

Had a great time talking all things Bone Worship with reporter Julie Johnson from the Bend Bulletin. Read her interview with me here.

Piece on Oregon Wolf Sanctuaries

2010-02-16T11:55:00.000-08:00

I have a new travel piece on Western Oregon's wolf sanctuaries in Matador. It was a joy to research and write, and a highlight for me personally as well. How often do you get kissed by a wolf? Read it here.

Haiti, Backlash, and the Call to Inaction

2010-01-26T16:55:00.000-08:00

With a backlash, we’re responding to that which rides a surge of undeserved popularity. An obscenely lauded sports team we’re certain got lucky at the eleventh hour. An actor collecting one too many awards, his shoulders practiced in a false shrug of humility. The resulting backlash is our collective smackdown, a way of putting the successful entity on watch. We see the world rewarding you unjustly, and we’re going to do our best to turn the tide of your success. We’re going to spread the word that you’re overhyped and overpaid, a phony garbed in an emperor’s new clothes, until the private ill will in our hearts and minds becomes a self-generating force all its own, offering some kind of just equilibrium.

Perhaps our tendency to create a backlash is a good thing under certain circumstances. It’s a turning away from the siren’s call of popularity, a return to the safe harbor of reason, pragmatism. A no bullshit zone.

Yet whatever the merits of a backlash, however one stretches the word to accommodate their personal loyalties, it is utterly unthinkable in conjunction with the human disaster in Haiti.

What, then, explains this Facebook status update?

Shame on you America: the only country where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed without eating, elderly going without needed meds, and mentally ill without treatment - yet we have a benefit for the people of Haiti on 12 TV stations. 99% of people won't have the guts to copy and repost this. I did.

I admit I was stunned. Of course, it wasn’t the first ignorant, erroneous, inflammatory posting I’d seen. If you’re on Facebook and you have “friends” positioned at various points along the political spectrum, you’re definitely familiar with this kind of posturing. Some people do it because the pre-packaged words of zealots strike a chord in their small, atrophied hearts. Others are pot stirrers, people who enjoy tossing in bitter remarks and watching political factions go at each other in the scalding stew.

I didn’t want anything to do with it. I knew the drill. Ignore it unless it’s on your page, and when it gets to be too much, make the friend invisible in your news feed. Worst case scenario – something I have never done – de-friend the person. But wasn’t that a sign that one lacked (dare I say?) the “guts” for debate, for dissenting opinions? If there’s no honest exchange of thoughts, however diametrically opposed, isn’t there a problem?

But I went back to the posting. It didn’t represent honest thought; instead, it displayed, for all the Facebook world to re-post, a dishonest assertion. Or, generously, an error. (Did I really need to point out that America is far from the only country to neglect its homeless, elderly, and mentally ill?) And in advocating that we ignore Haiti, isn’t that also advocating apathy?

So I took the bait. I “commented,” quoting from the U.N.’s 2009 report measuring quality of life in 182 countries. Norway scored the highest. The U.S. ranked 13th out of 182 in an index of life expectancy, literacy, shelter, hunger, and school enrollment, among other criteria. Truthfully, 13th was kind of shocking, though it was far from the lowest ranking countries. Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Niger took those honors.

So, no. America isn’t the only country with shameful problems. And no, as one of the richest nations - our dubious honor - we don’t have the right to ignore the ongoing catastrophic conditions in Haiti. After I posted, I was relieved to notice that someone else had voiced objections to the FB status as well.

The next morning, however, a smear of comments had accumulated. First there were strident calls for inaction, the “government corruption” bogeyman. The Haitian government is corrupt, no one is getting the aid. Why donate millions when they’re not going to get it? Somewhere on the road to apathy, everyone took a mean turn into partisan politics land.

“People don’t stand a chance unless they have a strong faith in God and that’s what will get them thru...”

“It is hard to feel compassion for people who in Pat Robertson’s words ‘made a pact with the devil.’ They chose their voodoo over God and they are paying a price for it now. Notice their Christian neighbors didn’t suffer any damage..”

“Didn’t anyone notice that during Catrina [sic] the only help we received was from our own?”

*Author’s note: According to an April 2007 report in the Washington Post, $854 million in aid was offered by foreign countries in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Those countries included Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, and China, among myriad others.

After this, the debate devolved into a series of ad hominem attacks, punctuated with the stale standby, “Maybe you should read your Bible.”

I thought about jumping back in, fighting, at the very least, against inertia. Yes, there’s always government corruption and yes, inefficiency often plagues aid operations. But did they know that according to the Red Cross website, “More than 430 Red Cross and Red Crescent workers from at least 30 countries are in the country supporting thousands of local volunteers... More than 100 represent the American Red Cross, including a group of Creole interpreters on board the USNS Comfort. The relief operation in Haiti is already the largest single-country personnel deployment in global Red Cross history”? Did they care?

Perhaps they were simply disillusioned by reports of thwarted aid attempts, or of the“Haiti” text scams, or that Facebook would contribute to relief efforts in exchange for specific postings. Maybe they felt hopeless. Frustration was understandable, but still.

What about UNICEF, with this January 16th report on their website: “Another plane loaded with UNICEF emergency relief supplies arrived in Port-au-Prince this morning, carrying urgently needed water and sanitation supplies. This is the second load of water and sanitation materials to arrive in Haiti in the past 24 hours. The shipment contained additional oral rehydration salts, water purification tablets and jerry cans. Two experts in water and sanitation were also on the flight. Providing access to clean water and sanitation is essential in the immediate aftermath of disasters, to avoid a second wave of deaths…Two more UNICEF planeloads, loaded with some 70 metric tons of tents, tarpaulin, and medicines, are currently awaiting clearance to fly to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.”

Do facts matter? Can solid evidence of aid workers on the ground combat this apathy? Or is that not the problem at all? Has Haiti, God forbid, become a partisan issue?

Maybe that’s an extreme leap to take from a Facebook status update. After all, the original poster finally fired back, making it clear this wasn’t really about Haiti, poverty, or politics at all. It was about her. “People should be used to the fact that I voice my own opinion. Right or wrong.” She went on to apologize somewhat facetiously for “offending people.” As if she had merely suggested someone’s football team sucked.

Maybe I’m just letting myself get distracted here. People around the world are helping in Haiti. Miracles – not the kind generated by a vengeful God but rather those created by doctors, aid workers, and volunteers – are happening every day, and Haitians will endure.

But it still bothers me. Somewhere in a dark corner of the Facebook world, someone is writing hateful, fallacious postings. Some people will copy and re-post them. 99%, that seemingly constant number, won’t, will you? Many will believe it, and of those, many will spread it. Who are these people? And how does it benefit them to equate hate with having guts?

When the noise dies down, Haitians will still be trapped under the rubble, they will still have nothing, but we’ll have our posturing. We will argue about Facebook postings and politics. We’ll find a place in ourselves where we can sweep away the facts and the suffering, and proudly take ownership, once and for all, of our own self-righteous right to be wrong.

That scares me. And yes, it offends me too.

Review in The Boston Globe

2010-01-23T14:30:00.000-08:00

‘Bone Worship’ and the human family

"The title of Elizabeth Eslami’s debut novel comes from a ritual that elephants perform. When an elephant dies, its family members cover the body with brush and soil, revisiting the bones for years, caressing them with their trunks. A haunting symbol of remembrance, bone worship becomes the organizing principle of Eslami’s investigation of familial and cultural memory.

When Jasmine Fahroodhi fails out of the University of Chicago in her final semester, she returns home to her parents in Arrowhead, Ga. Her American mother, Margaret, and Iranian father, Yusef, offer an uncomfortable homecoming by announcing their intention of arranging a marriage for her. With the strident bedside manner he perfected as a radiologist delivering bad news, Yusef works to locate potential husbands while Margaret uses the disarmingly calm demeanor she developed as an emergency dispatcher to reassure Jasmine that the hastegar - the arranged marriage - is in her best interests.

Yusef’s frenzied attempts to recruit husbands through newspaper advertisements and Internet postings create a comical “groom soup’’: Mohammed, who protests that Jasmine looks nothing like her online photograph; Ali, a moneyed sloth, who declares “he would never, under any circumstances, work a day in his life” ; John, who after three dates declares “I don’t believe in buying untested merchandise’’; Omar, who chooses a pure Iranian wife over Jasmine; Alan, who brings along his mother and Greek baklava on their first date; and Gabe, a convicted shoplifter who after puzzling over the Fahroodhis’ ethnicities declares his preference for “zebra’’ over “mixed’’ as a description of multicultural families.

With her parents distracted by the husband hunt, Jasmine uses the months following her fall from academic grace to study her father’s Iranian heritage and family, understand her failed collegiate career and confused ambitions, and find a job in the narrow-minded and economically starved town of Arrowhead. She settles on a janitorial position at a nearby zoo, leaving her plenty of energy during and after work to uncover and revere her father’s history.

These reverences and the sometimes unrelated mythologies they provoke become the most compelling geography of the novel, taking Jasmine far from Arrowhead to: the pistachio trees and mud floors of her father’s childhood in Tehran; the icy tundra of the North, where Eskimos lure wolves with bloody caribou bones; the bustling streets of Delhi, where a snake handler and his sons sleep with cobras; and the Yucatan Peninsula, where jaguars live high in the mountain jungles. These beautiful waking dreams of life abroad consume Jasmine as she labors to learn the past her father refuses to share with his American family." - The Boston Globe

Bone Worship Reviewed in Eugene Weekly

2010-01-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

My favorite alt-weekly just published a lovely review of Bone Worship! Have a look here.

Don't ask me how this happened...

2010-01-19T22:52:00.000-08:00

...but the 16 year old in me is jumping for joy.

The Daily Beast. Timothy Hutton. And yours truly.

All right here.

Review in The Inkslinger

2010-01-05T21:45:00.000-08:00

I can't tell you how much I love this review of Bone Worship from The Inkslinger!

"Elizabeth Eslami’s debut novel is a culture clash from the get-go, but it’s a beautifully written clash filled with the most familiar kinds of yearning, both familial and cultural.Jasmine is the prickly college dropout daughter of an Iranian father and an American mother. She is uncertain about what she wants, or if indeed she wants anything at all, but her father has plans for her new path—a hastegar, or an arranged marriage. Jasmine is horrified, and as father and daughter begin their wary but determined dance around each other, she wonders exactly who her father is, where his strange ways came from, how it is that people ever come together in the first place. Cultural confusion becomes less of an issue than the desperate need for connection, and the earnest ways in which Jasmine and her parents go about trying to simply see each other are equal parts heartbreak and revelation." – Kimberly Snow

The San Francisco Chronicle cites the first sentence of Bone Worship!

2010-01-04T13:05:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Chronicle has listed the first sentence of my novel as one of their top "grabbers," along with one by Joyce Carol Oates! Pretty neat, even though a "grabber" sounds more like a new fast food snack item than literature. :)

Have a look here.

Bone Worship: The Book Trailer!

2009-12-20T17:43:00.000-08:00

Yay! Check out the book trailer for Bone Worship!!!

Bone Worship in Iranian.com

2009-12-12T21:44:00.000-08:00

In conjunction with We Are All Iran, Iranian.com has published an excerpt from Bone Worship here.

Great Review in Booklist!

2009-12-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

Booklist says of Bone Worship:

"A realistic and heartfelt depiction of a young woman at a crossroads wondering “What’s next?” Eslami’s debut deftly limns a young woman’s exploration of her roots, her attempts to understand her father, and how, to her own surprise, she finds a way to navigate both the expectations of her parents and her own burgeoning desires."

Totenbein in Natural Bridge

2009-11-23T18:47:00.000-08:00

You can read my short story, "Totenbein," and lots of great fiction and poetry in the current issue of Natural Bridge, available in bookstores and libraries everywhere.

We Are All Iran -- San Francisco Public Library

2009-11-18T12:22:00.000-08:00

If you've looked over at the cover of Bone Worship lately and wondered if A)it looks somewhat different and B) if you've gone somewhat crazy, don't fret. The cover has indeed changed slightly, but I love it just as much. (I hope you do too! :)

In other news, on December 12th, I'll be reading from my novel with several wonderful AIAW writers at the We Are All Iran event at the San Francisco Public Library. I'm thrilled to be the company of such an excellent group of writers. If you're in the Bay Area, please come and join us.

Sat, Dec. 12th, 2-4 pm - SF Public Library
We Are All Iran: A Literary Reading to Mark the 6-month Anniversary of the Iranian Elections
The June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election put the international spotlight on Iran and the courageous acts of its citizens who filled the streets of Tehran to protest the election results. The days and weeks that followed June 12th--when ordinary citizens took to the streets to protest, to raise their voices-- inspired people around the globe..
As the months have dragged on and media coverage has waned, the U.S. news headlines have refocused on Iran's nuclear ambitions--and by doing so have minimized the spirit and energy of the Iranian people in their efforts to challenge their government.
To remember and bear witness to the extraordinary courage of the Iranian people, Bay Area writers from the Association of Iranian American Writers (AIAW) will share their literary work at the San Francisco Public Library.
Bay Area poets and novelists will read from published and recent work and invite members of the community to share with us as we remember the courage and sacrifice of those in Iran struggling for democracy, human rights, and to have their voices heard.

Authors to read include:

Persis Karim (introduction)

Laleh Khadivi
Esther Kamkar
Elizabeth Eslami
Ari Siletz
Anahid Hojjati
Farnoosh Seifoddini
Tissa Hami
Katayoon Zandvakili
Angella Nazarian

Date: Saturday, December 12, 2009
Time: 2pm to 4pm
Where: San Francisco Public Library

Official website now up!

2009-11-04T16:37:00.000-08:00

Read about the book and buy a copy at my shiny new website.

Bone Worship Reviewed in Library Journal

2009-11-04T09:15:00.000-08:00

Bone Worship just got a really nice review from Library Journal! Here's an excerpt:

“First-time novelist Eslami gives us the perfectly titled story of Jasmine Fahroodi, an aimless college dropout seeking direction in her life… Her discovery of what she feels passionate about is compelling and authentic. Another thread in the story is her Iranian father's determination to arrange a marriage for her. While it's a bit puzzling why a man who rejected his homeland and family and married a very American wife would seek such a traditional solution for his daughter, the resolution of this story line is immensely satisfying. The novel is full of wonderfully drawn characters, especially Jasmine's awkward, gruff father. And there are some lovely stories about the father's childhood… VERDICT This debut's real strength lies in its treatment of the Fahroodi family's complex relationships and of Jasmine's journey into womanhood. Recommended for readers who enjoy immigrant family dramas, such as Monica Ali's Brick Lane and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake.”—Evelyn Beck, Library Journal

Odds, Ends, and Litfest

2009-11-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

Just a heads up that you can check out my story, "Everything Gets Mixed Together at the Pueblo" now in Crab Orchard Review's current issue, Cultural Heritages in the 21st Century, available in hard copy everywhere. This story also received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train's Fiction Open.

In the social media department, don't forget you can now follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Red Room, in case you didn't notice all the razzmatazz down below.

And finally, it seems the book tour for Bone Worship is finally taking shape! Yay! There are several readings lined up in Eugene and the surrounding area in January -- more on that later -- and, excitingly, I'll be at the famous SMU Litfest in Dallas in April. Mark your calendars! :)

The Richest Hill on Earth

2009-10-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

My favorite city is not Paris. I’ve been to Paris. It was cold, rainy, and full of aggressive street vendors hawking miniature Eiffel Towers. When they tried a sales pitch in French first, and then English, I pretended to speak German.

It’s not Zurich either. A beautiful city, full of cobblestones and cathedrals, but one in which the public restrooms seem to be constructed from the refuse of an original Star Trek shoot. When I got locked in one of these restrooms for over twenty minutes, I tried to read the instructions in German first, and then English, until I realized I didn’t speak the lavatory-Swiss German of: “You’re screwed.”

I wandered through these cities in a permanent state of awe and confusion. I gawked, spinning around like a top stuck in a sidewalk grate. A top, you realize, has no business being in a sidewalk grate. I’m not sure exactly what does belong in a sidewalk grate, but I certainly didn’t. Those cathedrals are meant to tower over carelessly chic, peripatetic, polyglot Europeans who stroll arm in arm under crouching concrete gargoyles and stiffly postured saints, not a dork with a twenty pound backpack and some rusty high school Spanish. That’s when I realized. When I tasted the truth of it, bitter as Turkish coffee.

My favorite city is not one of these magical places. It’s a place where I can stand still. Where I speak the language, which can only be described as a cross between rancher and miner, with some base metals on the tongue. Butte, Montana. A stone of a place that manages to get down inside you and rattle around your skull so much that, when you’re not there, you actually miss the noise.

When I first visited Butte, a dirty city carved into a cluster of denuded, mine-scarred hills, my husband and I were looking for a place to settle in Montana. We had narrowed it down to Butte and Dillon, one a city of 30,000 and the other a town of 4,000. We had a hard time deciding, so we did what we always do: we looked for ice cream. It was August, and we stood around – there were few outdoor tables at this particular establishment – with chocolate cones dripping down our wrists. The guy next to us, born and raised in Butte, said: “Ice cream is good on a day like this. Of course, come winter, we’ll all wish we were somewhere else.” He had a look like he was seeing the future, our future, in the reflection of the glass window, just behind the Go Bulldogs sign, and it wasn’t good.

Afterward, we wandered up and down the streets, all with names that function as testaments to the copper boomtown Butte was until 1920 or so. Mercury. Granite. Quartz. The hot wind blew up dust devils that raced past our legs, and we strolled on, staring at the grand old Hotel Finlen, at brick buildings with the shadows of bankrupt business names stenciled above the windows, worn away by decades of snow. We kept squinting; something blew in our eyes.

“Could you live here?” my husband asked. “I don’t know,” I told him. “The grit in my eyes is keeping me from saying yes.”

When we checked into the Capri Motel to deliberate, a man emerged from a back room, a TV dinner still warm in his hands, and gave us the key. We started our laundry, went back to the room to look at a map, and when we returned, someone had stolen my underwear.

We never did end up living in Butte. Dillon won out. But as anyone who lives in Dillon knows, if you have any emergencies or need anything important, you go to Butte. So we came to know it. We’d drive an hour up through the Pioneer mountains –sunrise, sunset, bighorn sheep crossing the road – to conduct business at a little copy shop full of kind ladies. Their pug, Pearl, sat in the window, frosting it with her breath. We had lunches at the Hanging Five diner, which I thought for years was the Hanging Umbrella diner, not realizing the “umbrella” was an upside down 5, our car parked precariously on an ice-covered hill in the parking lot. Once during Knievel Days, when Butte’s own Evel Knievel family is celebrated raucously, I waited for a mechanic to bring my car back to life while motorcycles flew over the car dealership and flames shot out of pyrotechnic equipment positioned in hollow trash cans in the street.

We flew in and out of Butte, with half of our outgoing flights cancelled from blizzards. We didn’t mind. It seemed a better deal to be in Butte, even if it just meant wandering along Blacktail Creek trail. Sometimes, flying in, we were given the option to stay put in Salt Lake or risk a flight with the world’s bravest pilot (sorry, Sully Sullenberger) through blank-white skies and clouds like speed bumps to get back home to Montana. We always chose to take the risk, and as we’d come down, a cemetery on one side of the airport and a bowling alley on the other, we were never sorry.

I love Butte and its contradictions. In the winter, the cold freezes everything, and the bitter air gets down in your lungs like metal, but ice crystals fall from the air like some kind of miracle. It’s a poisoned place, with arsenic and lead left behind from copper mining days. It had the longest running brothel in the United States, but its inhabitants also built a giant, 90 foot Our Lady of the Rockies statue out of donated material, which juts out of the mountains like a toenail. It was built, they say, to honor women.

Butte is not pretty. The biggest tourist draw is the Berkeley Pit, what remains of the largest truck operated pit mine, a toxic brew so full of heavy metals that, a few years ago, three hundred unfortunate geese made the mistake of using it for nesting grounds and perished. Almost alone among U.S. cities, Butte allows open containers of alcohol on the street.

If you go to the brand new Butte-Silver Bow website, you’ll see a pretty picture of the county courthouse. You won’t see the ramshackle buildings, the ice cracked roads. The website seems to suggest that Butte needs – and is getting – a city’s version of an Extreme Makeover. It says, as a selling point, that Butte is “…located halfway between Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, which makes us a natural stop.” It’s like the most the city can ever be is the cultural version of a rest area.

I disagree. When you drive over the Continental Divide in fall, the mountains yellow with aspens and red with mining scars, you know it’s a place worth stopping for. That it has earned its hardness, and that it demands the same of you.

Butte is a hard, ugly diamond of a city. Maybe it could use some polishing, starting with cleaning up the lead and arsenic in its rivers. That I can get behind. But I don’t want Butte to become Disneyland or Times Square. I don’t want it to be anything but rough and cold to the touch. It’s probably selfish of me, I know. But in the end, I want “The Richest Hill on Earth” to stay the same, or at the very least, to hoard all its strange riches for myself.

A Piece in Matador Travel

2009-10-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to be featured in the current issue of the wonderful travel magazine, Matador! As part of a new series that looks at how authors take a story from field notes to final form, I reflected on how my real life experience at Acoma Pueblo helped shape my short story, "Everything Gets Mixed Together at the Pueblo," appearing now in the current issue of Crab Orchard Review.

Check out my piece in Matador here.

My baby, in the flesh.

2009-10-14T17:11:00.000-07:00

“Remember this moment,” my husband wrote today. “Remember this day.”

I told him via IM that the first ARC copies of my novel, Bone Worship, had arrived, brought up to the front door by our perpetually angry looking mail lady. (“Why was she angry?” he asked. “Probably because she’s a mail lady,” I told him.) We had waited so long to see them we had begun to give up hope. It seemed that everyone else had a copy to review, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, but I still had not seen one. It was like in one of those bad movies where a woman gives birth and nurses whisk away the child, never to be seen again. What did my baby even look like? Maybe it wasn’t a book at all. Maybe I had given birth to a fish.

But I saw it, so it was real. It did exist.

The angry mail lady walked briskly, dodging the flower bed, the rain puddles, clutching the package in her hand. The white padded envelope. Probably it was something else, I thought. A forgotten Amazon order. One of those weird, free pseudo-Christian novels you find wedged into your mailbox, the kind proselytizing people leave around at gas stations. “Thank you,” I said, as Sad Mail Lady (the anger now subsided, dampened by the cold rain) handed the envelope to me, along with our cable bill and some other assorted, pedestrian correspondence. Strange how it arrives this way, the end result of seven years of your life, your work, just slipped in like any other thing. No shaft of light, no heavenly music, no friendly UPS man in autumnal brown micro-shorts asking me to sign a form. (Although it did seem to happen in something close to slo-motion.) The mail lady told me to take care and backed away from the door. I didn’t say anything. I stared at the envelope.

I went inside, placed it on the table. It couldn’t have been anything else. I squeezed the envelope, felt three, maybe four copies inside. I could not open it.

Remember this moment, the whole day. All that came before and all after.

Before, what was I doing? I took a break from a full morning of story submissions and article writing to have lunch. A banana, half of a PB&J sandwich. I turned on the television in the background, and there was a show about meth addicts on MTV, people in rehab with blue lips. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer stood in the gilded, technological prison of The Situation Room.

After the envelope? My heart pounded, I paced. I washed the lunch dishes, took the dog out to pee in the rain.

I moved the envelope from room to room, letting it get acquainted with everything. Like a pet.

Recently I read author Mahbod Seraji’s blog about the first moment he opened an envelope containing a copy of his debut novel, Rooftops of Tehran. It was a moving and funny account involving a flight from Iran and the actress Annette Bening. Seraji wrote about weeping when he held his book in his hands, and I wondered if, when my moment came, I would do the same.

Instead, I found myself thinking about babies.

Once I went for a physical, and a nurse asked me a series of questions from a clipboard. Did I have children? “No.” (She glanced up, as if to ascertain my age.) What did I do? (This question, I think, was not on the clipboard, but rather a matter of curiosity, or an attempt to make the general experience of being in the doctor’s office less terrifying.)

“I’m a writer.”
“Oh, like a journalist?”
“No, a novel and short stories. Well, some non-fiction, here and there.”

After this, somehow the subject of children came up again, though I can’t remember how or why. She said something that involved this phrase: “When you have children.” To which I quickly responded, not wanting to be coy when one’s health is under discussion – “Actually, I don’t plan on having children.”

Immediately the nurse asked, almost reflexively: “Is there a problem? Have you been trying?” Images of defective ovaries danced through her head, twisted sperm, ill-fitting plumbing, a general reproductive breakdown. “No, we just don’t want them,” I answered. (Though I have always wanted to say, “like” instead of “want,” but have never been brave enough to do so, mostly because one is looked at like a monster when unmoved by the cuteness of children.)

“Ah, I see,” she said, after what seemed like an inappropriately long pause. She laughed nervously. “Perhaps your books are your children, then.”

She went on with her business, the physical came and went, but those words stayed with me. And the pity behind the words. And believe me when I tell you there was pity. As if one’s creative endeavors, one’s novels and poems and stories, have all become the literary equivalent of the mangy cats that spinsters allegedly keep for company in the drafty attics of their empty houses. Surrogates for families. Poor substitutes for flesh and blood.

Perhaps she was right. It may be that there is something pathetic about me in this moment, standing around, staring in awe at the fresh copies of my novel on our kitchen table. They don’t seem lifeless, even though they’re not crying, not spitting up. There’s a story inside, moving all around. In them, I can see fragments of the writer I was when I began, the writer I became by the end, all of it recorded in their pages.

Four copies. They’re so beautiful, just resting there.

Like a new mother, I hardly know what to do with them.

Four Years in Montana

2009-10-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

I have a theory that the state of Montana is enormous for a reason. That its vastness is a test, each highway a reticulated part of a puzzle. You have to work hard to get there. Whether it’s 15 North, winding from the lunar hills of Monida Pass across to wind-scraped Great Falls, Interstate 90 from hip Bozeman to rimrocked Billings, or the hi-line from Cut Bank to Wolf Point, where blizzards seem to blow up out of the road itself, travelling through Montana is a test of your patience and of your character. After all, what else can you expect from a place famous for the size of its sky?

It is easy to be swallowed up in all that space. Easier still to pretend that you’ve tamed it by driving Going-to-the-Sun road or having your picture taken next to the Missoula airport’s stuffed grizzly. In order to really understand Montana, you’ve got to adjust yourself to the rhythms of the rivers, the snow. The golden flicker of aspen leaves. If you let it, Montana can shape you. As Annick Smith, smitten with the Bear Creek Valley near the Big Blackfoot River, once wrote: “If I lived here, who would I be?” It can make you – better yet, show you how to make yourself – carving the promise of you out of millennial rock, like the pipe organ formations that hang over the highway south of Dillon, the whole land worthy of worship. You can’t rush through Montana, however much you might want to – though, truthfully, I’ve never wanted to – and if you’re not open to it, you won’t be affected by it. It’ll be just a blur outside your cold glass window.

Recently I overheard two friends talking about how bored they were driving through Montana. Their conversation was peppered with Unabomber jokes, and they insisted on calling the gritty city of Butte – a place where the hills were leached for copper, a place with its own pit, for chrissakes – “Butt.” Ha, ha. I refrained from telling them the whole of Butte, with its jagged edges of ice in winter, everything metal cracking at -20 degrees, could probably kick their collective asses. They didn’t mean anything by it, of course. Montana wasn’t their place. Maybe their place was Texas or Florida, or even Hawaii, which has always seemed to me like a land of perishables – fragile flowers, endangered cultures, and a bunch of slovenly tourists who sprawl on the beaches, their hearts and minds elsewhere.

Do people still have places anymore? That’s what worries me. Does anyone consider it worthwhile to relocate because they love a place? Nowadays, people move for jobs, for houses, for the low price of gas. Tell someone you’re moving to a place you love just for its placeness, and they look at you like you’re nuts. (Much less a place like Montana, plagued by meth, a scarcity of jobs, and unremitting low incomes.) Tell someone that and they think you’re a fool, a romantic. And maybe it’s true; it’s just a silly romance. No maybe about it. I’m in the midst of a love affair with the state of Montana.

I blame Rick Bass. My evidence for indictment is Winter: Notes from Montana, his glorious account of a frozen winter in the Yaak valley. I read it when I was 22, about to start grad school, and then I convinced my mother to accompany me to Missoula. We rented a car and drove through western Montana, from the Bison Range in Moiese up into Glacier, stayed in little hotels shaped like teepees with photographs of grizzlies on the wall, and when we weren’t seeing our first bighorn sheep or navigating the snow-packed, cliffside dirt roads around Lolo and Libby, I was reading about Rick and the Yaak, reading enough to know that two weeks in hotels, however quaint, wasn’t going to cut it. I had to live in Montana. I wanted to be, again quoting Annick Smith, “that woman chopping her wood.”

Two years later, MFA in hand, my boyfriend and I packed an aging Ford Taurus before sunrise, loaded up our year old lab mix, mosquitoes taking shots at all of us, and drove from South Carolina across the country to Dillon, Montana. Our foolishness astounds me now; we had no jobs, knew no one. We’d only ever driven through Dillon once, for about fifteen minutes – that’s about all the time it takes to drive through Dillon – on the way back from Yellowstone. From Butte, we came down 41, from Twin Bridges, called “Twin” by everyone as we’d later learn, through pastures with distant mountains jutting up in the background, their peaks dusted ominously with snow. It was August. The drive was blazing hot at first, and we let our dog splash around in the Beaverhead River to cool herself off. She had never been in a river before that day, but since then, she has been in almost all the major rivers in the country. That’s another thing about Montana – it shapes dogs too.

We lived in a half-brick duplex on a dead-end street, with the Blacktail Creek flowing nearby, a rickety foot bridge leading into town. In the spring, we’d stand on the bridge and wait for the season’s first ducklings to float under, gently swept along by the Blacktail. Sometimes in summer, walking our dog, I’d spook a Great Blue Heron, either walking the handrail of the bridge, lifting its feet like a can-can dancer, or standing on pencil thin legs in the creek below. Flapping tremendous blue wings, it seemed like something between a dinosaur and an angel. In the winter, we walked down to the bridge at night, when the snow muted everything, our footsteps, our breathing, and we’d stand on the old nails and joints and eat snow off the rail, chomping our frozen lips into four inches of fluffy snow limning each plank of wood.

For four years, we lived in Montana, and it lived in us. If I’m being romantic describing it that way, I apologize, but only in the way that two lovers apologize for getting caught kissing in a grocery store aisle, by which I mean to say, I’m not really sorry at all. We grew up there, grew into each other, married each other and then married the land. There are parts of us there even now, long after we moved away. Once upon a time, we climbed mountains and wrote love letters and set them free in the frozen wind; the scraps of paper got caught in cattle fences where, I believe, they will stay forever. Our dog chased rabbits for four years, carving tracks into the Beaverhead Mountains, the Pioneers, kicking up wild iris at Lemhi Pass, and she came to know who she was, even if she never caught a single rabbit. We watched a porcupine by moonlight on an ice covered mountain, turning over and over a piece of bark in his claws. We were, as I said, in this world, and it in us.

We no longer live in Montana. That is an illness that plagues us. Norman Maclean wrote about being haunted by Montana’s waters, and I don’t think he was being romantic in the slightest. I understand how he felt. That yearning for a place that becomes a part of you. Of course Montanans, native ones anyway, would probably laugh at such thoughts. One thing we learned was, no matter how long one lives in Montana – four years or forty – if you weren’t born there, you’ll never be considered a Montanan. You can’t fake it. You were born of the long, bitter winters and short, blazing summers, or you weren’t. It’s pretty simple that way. They’ll be nice to transplants – indeed, some of the kindest people we’ve ever known are native Montanans – but you’ll never really be one of them.

True Montanans are practical people. They build their pipes so that they don’t burst in -40 degree weather, and they shoot gophers to keep their horses from falling into their holes and breaking their legs. Real Montanans work two and three jobs, are good at everything, and still roll under barbwire fences when they are 80. They have no patience for movie stars who spend easy summers on their land, nor do they suffer poets, unless you are a poet who also knows your way around a fly rod. In the four years we lived in Montana, someone must have squinted at us half a dozen times and asked “Why the hell would you want to move here?” Sometimes it seemed like no one wanted to be in Montana at all; other times it seemed like the whole state consisted of a private club of ranchers, a league of men who knew a secret they could not or would not share with you. Somewhere in all those acres of pastureland was a password passed down from grandfather to grandson, some word we’d never know. That’s okay, I always thought. If I lived here, I’d be proprietary about it too.

In the years since we’ve been gone, I have always tried to say that one place is as good as any. I do believe that, in some sense. I’ve always found beauty in the places we’ve lived. But then, if I’m honest, really truly honest, I have to admit that, for me, there is no better place than Montana. It’s okay if you don’t see it that way, if you like Michigan or Vermont or Iowa. Those are all nice places too.

I know that Montana is not finished with me, nor I with it. It’s a long, slow process, the carving, the creating. Perhaps it won’t be over until I’m an old, white-haired lady with a stooped, white-haired husband, surrounded by dogs, making our way along the Big Hole River, finding all the familiar trails and re-learning them, committing them to muscle memory.

We go back sometimes and walk into the woods, and it all feels fresh again. The song of the black capped chickadee, the magpie, the summer grasshoppers on the dry, yellow grass. We drive into the smell of sagebrush, and our dog becomes alert again, even though her muzzle is not the muzzle of the Montana puppy she once was, but is now speckled with white fur. Her legs tense, as if she is remembering it all, the four years, the mountains, the sky, all at once. And when we start walking, the sage rubs against our legs, marking us, claiming us, and it seems if we listen hard enough, we might, at long last, hear the word.

"It Is All Getting Away From Us" in Segue

2009-09-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

To read "It Is All Getting Away From Us" (and a description of the process behind it) in the online journal Segue, click here.

Medicine Wheel in Weber: The Contemporary West

2009-08-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

When I got up this morning, I thought the rain -- our first in several months of a long, dry summer -- was surprise enough. But what should appear in our mailbox but (well, a wasp, but never mind him) a copy of Weber: The Contemporary West! It's a gorgeous issue, edited by Elizabeth Dohrer, with an India/Postcolonial theme. In addition to my story, "Medicine Wheel," you can find work by Samir Dayal and Lyn Lifshin, as well as lots of great fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays.

The Fall 2009 Issue of Weber: The Contemporary West (Vol. 26) is available in hard copy now.

At least I ain't one of them black holes.

2009-08-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

This week, I'm a Red Room "Rising Star" -- which probably means this is my last 15 minutes. ;)

My Red Room Author Page

2009-08-20T12:49:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

You can now find me here. As a Red Room author, I get to (theoretically) rub shoulders electronically with the likes of Salman Rushdie, Dorothy Allison, Susan Orlean, and, um, Stephen Colbert. Yes, that Stephen Colbert. Plus the President himself, though I kinda get the feeling someone else is updating his page while he busies himself with health care reform.

Anyhoo, they've asked me to blog there as well, so if you're not yet sick of me, you know where to go for more ramblings about homicidal clowns and stuff.

AIAW

2009-08-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce I'm now a part of the Association of Iranian American Writers, a wonderful organization headed by writers Persis Karim and Manijeh Nasrabadi.
Check out the AIAW and a profile of yours truly here.

Let the social networking commence.

2009-08-10T17:58:00.000-07:00

I'm now a Goodreads author.

my read shelf:

Don't get too close.

2009-08-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

Just back from a wonderful trip to Germany and Switzerland. We're still marvelling at all the European quirks, including but not limited to: twin beds pushed together for married couples, two hour meals, all-purpose shampoo/hand soap/body wash, mannequins with nipples, tiny cars driving on sidewalks, aggressive shopping, pay toilets, a paucity of washcloths, dogs in restaurants, pink jeans for men, a paucity of bras, an open appreciation of writers and artists demonstrated on currency and in the naming of streets, and lots and lots of fashionably dressed people engaged in gratuitous PDA. But hey, if you look that good, why not?

From Frankfurt to Zurich and everywhere in between, we saw things beautiful, magical, and just plain strange. Perhaps nothing more so (on the disturbing end) than the clown featured above. Yes, he's real, though he pretended to be animatronic, getting his jollies by grabbing young children as they walked by. And they actually seemed to enjoy this. Go figure. I thought he was just about as terrifying as The King from the Burger King commercials who assaults you in your sleep.

Vielen Dank, Constance. For everything and a good jolt.

Snow in July

2009-07-07T08:02:00.000-07:00

A handsome but testy badger from the Historic Quarry Trail at Fossil Lake National Monument in Wyoming, and a peek at the still snowy (!) peaks of the mountains around Laramie. On July 4th, we managed to escape parades, fireworks, and children by driving through stunningly lonesome cattle ranches, a full moon casting its yellow light over the snow. After days of driving in 92 degree weather, we put our hands to the windows and felt cold glass. There was still snow by the side of the road, and fat, black and white magpies bouncing around in it.

Idahoan Curiosities

2009-07-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

The world's biggest quail, just on the outskirts of Glenns Ferry, Idaho.

From the Road

2009-07-03T08:01:00.000-07:00

Scenes from gorgeous Yachats, OR - official location of my Badger's special 30th birthday trip. A fresh water river meets the Pacific, a view from the top of Cape Perpetua, and yours truly getting blown around at the Devil's Churn. (No devils sighted, but lots of churning water!)

Meanwhile I'm blogging from a hotel in Burns, OR, at the beginning of a long journey across the country. We're Southward bound, but I must say the true pleasure of a trip like this is driving out of the verdant green of the Willamette Valley, past the Blue and McKenzie rivers, out into the desert of Western Oregon. Sagebrush land. We could smell it immediately, bringing back memories of Montana. Plus, the big, black pooch gets pretty darn excited in this kind of terrain. Excellent rabbit chasing and all.

ARC Cover of Bone Worship

2009-06-26T17:28:00.000-07:00

You're looking at the front and back ARC covers of Bone Worship! (ARC being, I think, publishing lingo for "advanced readers' copy." Or something thereabouts.) Pegasus Books will be sending out five hundred ARC's of BW (how's that for acronym overkill?)to libraries and independent bookstores across the U.S. in anticipation of its release everywhere in January.

My thanks to my fellow writers (and friends) who were kind enough to offer advance praise -- Joan Silber, Meagan Brothers, David Haynes, and Janet Peery. I hope I can repay the favor someday.

"Everything Gets Mixed Together at the Pueblo" To Be Published in Crab Orchard Review

2009-06-14T20:48:00.000-07:00

As the kids say, Boo-Ya!

After getting honorably mentioned a couple weeks ago by Glimmer Train, my story "Everything Gets Mixed Together at the Pueblo" has been accepted for publication by the prestigious Crab Orchard Review from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. It will be part of a special "Color Wheel: Cultural Heritages" issue.

FYI, I'm pretty proud of this story, particularly because it explores some interesting racial issues between Native Americans and whites. While also making a gratuitous reference to The Bachelor. :)

The Summer/Fall 2009 Issue of Crab Orchard Review (Vol. 14, #2) will be available everywhere in September.

A Summer Lament

2009-06-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

Summer – and is the living easy, you ask? No, the living is hot, mosquito-y, and full of charcoal grilled meat and the skirls of small, snotty children. Ah, summer. Full of my least favorite things. Sweat, bugs, fireworks. Shorts. Naked toes. It was only a few months ago that I was knee deep in rain, longing for the impossible (a suntan), and here I am lamenting this time of barbecues, biting flies, and potato salad.

You’ll have to forgive me for being a summertime curmudgeon. I’m much more a winter gal, a fan of fall. I like cold weather, curl-up-with-a-book-weather, write until your fingers thaw… weather. Everything about the chillier seasons seems, well, better. Fall, my editor tells me, is when the “serious” books come out. All the good fiction, especially. It’s when the Oscar-bait movies show themselves in their celluloid glory, the Meryls and the Seymour Hoffmans and the Winslets. Kids buy shiny textbooks and fresh notebooks and head back to the halls of academia. (Sure you kind of dreaded it back then, but who doesn’t love new school clothes? Unless of course you shared my pious fate and had a new Catholic school uniform to look forward to, made of a burlap-polyester hybrid.) Fall. Even now, I can taste it. Pumpkins. Halloween. Pie. (Okay, a perennial favorite.) And yet it seems so far away.

Just as the rest of the world breaks out their cursed grills and releases their annoying children from school, the writing world shuts down. Agents and editors disappear to, well, wherever it is that agents and editors disappear to – perhaps a sun-bathed island where their pale skin, free from their dark, cocooned Manhattan high-rises, can be irradiated by actual sun rays. Literary journals close up shop because all their student readers and professor/department head/editors have gone home to blacken meat and enjoy family barbecues while their children shoot off fireworks, terrifying dogs everywhere.

Why does summer suck? Why do people get excited about bad popcorn movies and flimsy fiction, the brightly colored tomes with skinny, cartoon women in bathing suits and/or tin foil-covered thrillers about the Vatican? When did baking yourself (and your brain) on the beach become a vacation? Are we not supposed to think during the hot months? What, will we melt? I know, I know. I’ve officially become the cranky old person down the street.

So sue me. I’m going to miss the literary seasons. No more trips to the Post Bot to mail submissions, no last minute re-writes. It’s the lazy, crazy, smog-hazy days of summer, and now that my NEA fellowship paperwork is in order (fingers crossed!), my book has found a home, and my stories are all out there collecting dust on desks in empty universities, I’ll have to wait out the fallow time. Do a little travelling, see the country, see the folks. Maybe I’ll even do some long-postponed joining and get with Facebook and Goodreads. (And no, that adorable cheerleader on Facebook named Elizabeth Eslami, from Iowa, is not me. You could’ve knocked me over with some lightweight chick lit fiction. I have a doppelganger? You mean I wasn’t the only person with an Iranian name in rural America? Did she too endure the endless Salamis and Islams?)

Whatever happens during my literary hibernation, here’s hoping for a quick, painless season. I plan on gritting my teeth til the leaves change again. And in the meantime, if you see someone awkwardly standing on a patio while holding a charred hot dog and flailing at mosquitoes, that’ll be me. Just don’t ask me if I can recommend any light summer reading.

An Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train's Fiction Open

2009-05-27T15:18:00.000-07:00

My story, "Everything Gets Mixed Together at the Pueblo," just won an honorable mention in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. Dang. Close, but no cigar.

Still, apparently my piece was in the top 5% of over a thousand stories, so I guess that's something to celebrate, right? Check out us honorables here.

"Hibernators" in The Minnesota Review

2009-05-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

It's been out in print for some time, but now you can also check out The Minnesota Review online with my story "Hibernators" and lots of excellent work from writers thinking big thoughts here.

Luminescent Lopez

2009-05-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

This luminous form immediately to your left is the magnificent writer Barry Lopez, whom we listened to last night in a state of awe. After he finished speaking, he passed within a couple feet of us, and I'm ashamed to admit I was too chicken to approach him. While I trembled in abject terror, my better half courageously managed to shake his hand.

In the first clandestine photo, he's on the left, looking a little more recognizably human. I only say a little more human, since he is, after all, a god. :)

Now I know where to get business cards (when I can actually afford them.)

2009-05-02T18:15:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that an important part of being a writer is learning to use your time wisely. Writing should be treated like a proper, hands-in-the-dirt nine-to-five job, at the very least to contradict all the people you meet at dinner parties who, when you tell them what you do for a living, smile condescendingly and imagine you sitting at a window, waiting to be visited by a romantic, winged, pixie dust-shedding muse. Like Sharon Stone in that Albert Brooks movie, or Carol Kane in Scrooged. (For my own part, if I gaze out my window, I am far more likely to see our neighbor walking down the driveway, looking left to right before dumping a dead squirrel in the street. If it’s a good day, he’ll be wearing pants. If not, well, you don’t want to know. In any case, he doesn’t look at all like Sharon Stone.) Sure you may sit down for four hours and force out the beginning of a story only to delete it all the next day, but hey, you wrote something. Maybe you can even cannibalize what you didn’t use for a later piece. (In truth, this never happens with me. But I do really enjoy using the word “cannibalize.”)

When you’re not writing, you should be attending to the boring nuts n’ bolts of things, like finding places to submit your work, actually submitting said work, and seeking out contests, fellowships, and anything else that might afford you all those envelopes, paper clips, and stamps you’ve been using. The short-term goal here is to publish in a decent enough (read: paying) magazine or win a contest that will cover the gas you’ll need to drive to the Post Office. (While we’re talking about the P.O., don’t get me started on the Post-Bot, the postal robot that mails your packages and prevents you from standing in line with postal employees. Love him, I tell you. A robot that allows you to avoid human interaction and mail story submissions at eleven at night? I see the future, and it is the Post-Bot.)

Sometimes you end up incredibly busy when you least expect it. Over the last few days, I’ve been trying to incorporate my editor’s final edits on Bone Worship before it goes to galley, proof-read and make changes to my story, “Medicine Wheel,” which will be appearing shortly in Weber: The Contemporary West, prepare a non-fiction piece on literary agents that’s going to be published in The Willamette Writer, and squeeze in the last few story submissions before the Literary Journal World shuts down for summer vacation. Plus, this happens to be the season when they tell you whether you’ve won one of those coveted contests. For instance, I’ve been obsessively checking the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize web page for days now in the hopes that they’ll hurry up and post the winners, even though I’m just as likely to win as I am to see Sharon Stone chucking a dead squirrel in the street. Oh well.

Maybe the lesson here is that sometimes, for your sanity, it’s good to waste time. Especially if it involves Google. In a rabid attempt to keep from crashing Crazyhorse’s page, I went into a Googling frenzy this morning, starting with “Bone Worship.” And, in doing so, I had the unexpected pleasure of finding Michael Fusco Design. (Michael Fusco is the super-talented guy who designed the cover of my novel, among many others. He and his wife Emma Straub design for Sony/Columbia, Doubleday/Random House, and of course Pegasus Books, my publisher. Their work is gorgeous, and if I can ever afford them, I know who to go to for some kick-ass business cards.) Most exciting for me – and well worth the time I spent not harassing literary magazines – was the fact that they've posted two alternate versions of the book cover that didn’t make the cut. Of course, they look pretty damn fantastic to me, but I still love the ultimate one the best. Check them out here.

Lopez! (Not to be confused with the one from Kids in the Hall.)

2009-04-24T11:28:00.000-07:00

On May 8th, I'm going to see National Book Award winner (and Oregon literary legend) Barry Lopez read at The Hult Center here in Eugene. It's for a good cause too -- the McKenzie River Trust -- which I confess I don't know much about, but if it's an Oregon cause, it probably has something to do with helping the environment.

But never mind that, people, it's Barry freakin' Lopez! Author of Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men. He's a brilliant writer, he and his wife once raised a wolf hybrid, and he's helped cut out the heart of a narwhal. (With biologists, of course, in the name of science.) Need I say more?

I'll pass along any clandestine pictures and/or locks of his snow-white magesterial beard. In the meantime, you can check out his pouty visage here.

Notable

2009-04-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

It felt pretty good when I first noticed a Wikipedia entry for my name. There I was, linked in the Wiki-sphere to other writers and various Iranian-Americans. (Intriguingly, Wikipedia makes a point of saying that Iranian-Americans are among “the most highly educated people in the country.” No elaboration on whether that includes Iranian-American JAG actress Catherine Bell.) Plus, because I’m a Sarah Lawrence alum, I was alphabetically positioned snugly next to SLC grads Cary Elwes from The Princess Bride and White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel. Not too shabby! However, just as I was getting comfortable with my sudden Wiki-presence, I received an email from the very person who generously established the entry on my behalf. It was a sincerely worded apology for my entry being deleted.

I was gone, vamoose, with only my name and some ugly lines about my entry being unsubstantiated (was I a ghost?). Initially, I shrugged. It’s not like Wikipedia is The Best American Writers of the Century. Heck, anyone can make an entry for anybody, ensuring that their cat’s bio is preserved for millennia, right? Or so I thought. Turns out you’re not supposed to put just any ol’ body in the Wikipedia directory – not your boyfriend, not your band, not your pets. In fact, there are vague but general criteria for having an entry. For writers, you must be “notable”-- meaning you have a book published, or stories published in notable journals, or you have won awards. (I’m still working on that last one.) Naturally, I was confused. I had stories published in notable journals. I have a book coming out. These things aren’t notable?

Because I don’t know when to let things go, I asked my friend why my nascent Wiki-self came to be extirpated. And the answer was disturbing to say the least. While I imagined a team of people in serious, drab business suits with an intricate system of rules and regulations deciding my fate, instead there was a guy named, let’s call him “Yellow Bill” (not his real name). Yellow Bill, it seems, has no real qualifications or standards for his vigorous, surgical deletions; indeed, from what I can tell, he spends his days and nights trolling Wikipedia, deleting people with wild abandon when they don’t meet his (personally ascribed) definition of “notable.” Interestingly The G.W. Review, an international literary magazine, is notable because they have a Wiki entry. So is The Minnesota Review. Yet despite having work in both, I’m not notable. (I hope my un-notableness doesn’t rub off on them.) Perhaps it’s my association with excellent magazines like Weber:The Contemporary West (un-notable despite having published literary god Rick Bass) and Coe Review (which manages to be un-notable while showcasing the lovely work of Pimone Triplett.) Quoth Yellow Bill: “Even my wife was published in Coe Review. That doesn’t make her notable.” (Way to take a crap on your wife, Bill.) Worst of all was YB’s contention that despite having a contract, despite thousands of dollars (okay, a very few thousand) changing hands, and just because there’s a publication date (January 15, 2010) for Bone Worship, it doesn’t mean my book will actually come out. Is that a threat, or is he like the Nic Cage character in that numbers movie and has calculated the future?

In the end, it turns out there’s not much I can do. Maybe when the book comes out – or if I win an Academy Award in the meantime – somebody out there can try to re-establish my page. If our irate cyber cop still doesn’t find me notable, however, he’ll blackball my name forever from the annals of Wikipedia. I don’t know what I did to you in a past life, Yellow Bill, but I promise, no hard feelings.
When the book comes out, I’ll even send you an autographed copy: From Notable Author Elizabeth Eslami.

Clubs that would have someone like me for a member.

2009-04-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Groucho.
I am now a member of Willamette Writers and the Association of Writers and Poets. You can check them out here and here.

I (Kind of) Get Political

2009-04-04T17:03:00.000-07:00

The Minnesota Review, edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, has long been known as a politically-charged literary journal. Operating out of Carnegie Mellon University, TMR specializes in fiction, poetry, interviews, book reviews, and critical theory with all manner of cultural loose canon philosophers and writers.

And now I'm in their company!

My story "Hibernators" -- about a couple who decides to live underground -- is featured in The Minnesota Review, Issue 71-72, out now in bookstores. Link to follow...
Obviously I'm fond of all my stories that I haven't shredded, burned, or deleted, but I admit to being quite partial to this one. Even a year after writing it, I'm still pretty darn proud of it. Plus it doesn't hurt to have my work included among pieces about Geopolitical Translators, Pack Consciousness, and Studs Terkel.
Hmm... maybe someone made a mistake?? ;)

Pre-order the book!

2009-03-28T13:42:00.000-07:00

No, that's not an order.
But it has come to my attention (thanks, Heathe!) that you can now pre-order Bone Worship at Amazon and Target.com!

A Farsi Disclaimer

2009-03-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been wondering if my novel might set off a few cultural landmines in terms of criticism. I guess if Bone Worship inspires any kind of controversy, that’s a good thing. Publicity being publicity. But it still makes me nervous. Am I going to face several irate Iranian-American readers at book signings, poised to point out what I got wrong about Iran? Will I be excoriated for not being Iranian enough? What is Iranian enough, anyway?

In writing Bone Worship, I wasn’t trying to write a book about race. I wanted to explore ideas of love, familial and romantic, of growing up, finding your voice, and ultimately using that voice to ask the necessary questions a young person has to ask: about who your loved ones are (as real people) and about your own identity. In doing so -- and by writing about an Iranian-American protagonist in the midst of an arranged marriage -- I have managed to, er, accidentally write about race, along with a lot of other things. Ultimately though, I just wanted to write about a Georgia girl who goes to the University of Chicago, falls in love with science (and with one of her teachers), flunks out, and returns home to her mysterious, confounding parents. And the possibility of an arranged marriage. Indeed there are a whole lot of landmines to be triggered there: feminism, racism, May-December romances, North vs. South.

Of course, I have to navigate those mines in other ways too. Is it okay for me to join a group of Iranian-American writers when I wasn’t born in Iran, when I don’t speak Farsi? Am I allowed to write a book with several scenes in Tehran when I’ve never been there? Is there some kind of test I have to pass to be a legitimate Iranian-American writer? What about the simple fact that I look so darn white, that I have traces of a Southern accent, that I hardly seem – to those who know me – “ethnic” at all? Expatriate writers, exiled poets and playwrights – these people we should listen to about matters of race. But there is also something to be said for our own experiences. Those experiences are valuable whether you are native-born of a country, second generation, bi-racial, or whatever cultural mix you happen to be. All have a story to tell.

Perhaps, in the end, what matters is the writing. To have written a good first novel. To be in a group of writers-of-a-certain-ethnicity first because you’re a writer, and second because you have a cultural heritage. We’re all just a jumbled mess of voices after all, right? (For that matter, I’m a soon-to-be member of the Willamette Writers of Oregon, even though I’ll always be a Montanan in my heart.) I might be criticized for a lot of things when this book comes out, for the notion of a modern girl even considering an arranged marriage in the first place, for failing to capture Iran’s complex beauty. But I hope I won’t be found guilty of not having an authentic voice, an authentic experience. Because finally, including race and going beyond it, what it comes down to is telling stories. All worth telling.

Publication News

2009-03-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

Segue, the online literary journal of Miami University-Middletown, will publish my short story, "It Is All Getting Away From Us." It also happens to be the title story of my second book, a collection of short stories I hope to have published after Bone Worship. Link to follow...

Editorial Board Divided By "Hyena"

2009-03-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

(Well, not by an actual hyena. Now that would just be plain silly. And terrifying. Though it probably would expedite the submission process.) The hyena in question is my eponymous story, “Hyena,” and the editorial board is that of the Blue Mesa Review, the University of New Mexico’s excellent literary magazine. http://www.unm.edu/~bluemesa/

BMR has published such luminaries as Joy Harjo and Leslie Marmon Silko, both of whom managed to unite a perspicacious but contentious board of readers. You see, I figure I’ve spent several of these blogs waxing rhapsodic about the 1% of story submissions I’ve sent out that have been accepted for publication, and the rest of the time lamenting outright rejections, form letters, and editors who read my work and subsequently bled from the eyes. But I’ve neglected to discuss the in-betweens, the limbo land of a jury divided.

Probably because it’s a new experience for me. This may be the first time, in fact, that I’ve queried an editor about my submission status – in this case because they’ve had “Hyena” for just under a year now – and been told that the editorial board was split. What does this mean? Half hated it, and half drooled over the story of a couple vacationing for a month in South Africa, during which their safari guide is partially consumed by a leopard? Or some cross-section just shrugged, feeling ambivalent about animal maulings and a marriage on the brink?

Naturally I’ve come to my own paranoid, delusional, sexist conclusions. A-ha! The board must be divided along gender lines. Clearly the men hated a story told from a female protagonist’s point-of-view! (But she was a desperately flawed character – can’t the women-haters get on board with that?) Bingo! The women readers hated her because she rejected her adopted baby! Everybody hates baby-haters! (But wasn’t her rejection a poignant moment, one in which she at least becomes partly sympathetic?) Maybe it’s neither of these. Maybe some contingent saw through my thinly veiled attempt to fictionalize an "Anderson Cooper character" in honor of my celebrity crush, and being Sean Hannity fans, has decided to penalize my ever-lovin’ CNN self.

Oh well. Maybe the board will unite in the end and decide to publish “Hyena.” I hope so, if only because The University of New Mexico and BMR have a permanent place in my heart. My husband and I spent a wonderful summer living in Albuquerque, roaming the campus, hiking the Sandias, braving the Aerial Tramway, and enduring a trial-by-fire introduction to the red versus green chile wars. (Not to mention a strange, beautiful, transcendent moment I shared with an orangutan at the Rio Grande Zoo.) Whether BMR rejects my story or not, I sure miss you, New Mexico. I can’t lie. It would be an honor to be associated with UNM’s fine literary journal. But it's equally great just to have grazed past, if only for a moment and if only by association, Bill Richardson’s lush beard.

Blogia Apologia

2009-03-09T16:35:00.000-07:00

I’ll admit it.

This whole blog business still feels a little strange to me, and not simply because it took me three days to select an actual photograph of my head, and then expand my head so that it fits in a slightly more visible space above the shamelessly promotional “ABOUT ME” sidebar. (Don’t laugh – the photograph selection process is harder than it looks. If you choose to go with the default photo size, you will appear roughly the size of a pocket gopher. Fine if you’re not Heidi Klum, right? Problem is, if someone should dare click on gopher you to expand the photo, something out of The Ring happens to your face, and you become blurred, demonically distorted, and new, unfortunate moles appear on your face. To avoid this depressing turn of events, you can post an enlarged photograph of yourself.) Sans a glamour shot by a professional photographer, you’ll have to go it alone and seek out something where you’re centered, all parts are represented – it’s amazing how many Hannibal top-head-sheared-off pictures exist of me – and where you don’t have, at least in my case, an angry smirk. Which is, if you must know, my “resting face.” At present, I exist in a somewhat washed-out looking state, but I figure that’s okay, since I’m currently an Oregonian. It goes along with the nougat and the hemp pants.

Once you deal with your mug, it’s on to the blogging, wherein you do your best to strike the right tone of geniality and humor, intelligence and wit. Or none of the above. In a futile effort to learn exactly how to blog, I consulted the blogs of several writers I admire, only to learn that A) none of them actually had blogs, B) they considered blogging the direct antecedent of the recession and/or subsequent death of professional journalism, and C) the ones who do blog do so with a snarky, venomous vigor that single-handedly defines and deconstructs the zeitgeist, and basically scares the crap out of me.

How did I get here? Why am I doing it? Can I say “crap”? Does anyone, save my friends and family, even read this thing? More importantly, can Oprah sue me for the Favorite Things/sex toy analogy?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I do know this: When my editor tells me it’s in my best interest to start blogging, to introduce America to my voice and my wheat-colored head, I say how much, how loud, and yikes, maybe I should get a haircut. When she tells me to build my brand, I pump a fist into the air and shout “Yes!” while wondering how exactly Nike is going to fit my head on the side of a tennis shoe. I’m still struggling to find my voice, to not get sued, and to find a way, in the end, to make people excited to read Bone Worship. I hope I don’t offend sensitive bookstore conglomerates’ collective eyes with my blogbastic ramblings. I hope no one holds this thing against me when it comes time to throw out some names for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Ultimately, to quote Stefan from Top Chef – and probably some well respected, albeit severe German philosopher whom he’s paraphrasing – “It is what it is.” It’ll have to do.

At least until the website. ;)

"Totenbein" called Nabokovian

2009-03-02T12:01:00.000-08:00

99.9% of the time, when a writer receives some piece of correspondence from a literary journal in her mailbox or inbox, it's a rejection. Of course, what you want is something personalized, with some concrete, albeit arbitrary, reason why they couldn't publish your work. Something like, "It was brilliant, it blew us away, but it was just too long." Hopefully it's polite. Often it's a form letter, with no handwritten response at all. Even these can be valuable. If The Paris Review sits on your story for two months instead of two weeks before rejecting it, you can consider that a minor victory, because somebody from the freaking Paris Review actually moved his or her eyes across your words.

Other times, however, literary journal responses are downright weird, or frustratingly vague. Some of my personal favorites include "Fascinating, original work with compelling, poignant characters, but ultimately not what we were looking for." Okay then. I'll send you my cliched work with hackneyed characters next time. Or "Loved the voice, intrigued by the plot, but just couldn't get excited about it." I think my all-time favorite was one that was simply my cover letter, with the word "Sorry" scrawled across the bottom. I actually felt pity for them! Once there was just a "No." Which I imagined as being more akin to "Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!" A kind of nightmarish rejection written as they dragged themselves away from their desks.

Imagine my surprise when I received an email from Natural Bridge -- the University of Missouri-St. Louis literary journal -- indicating not only that they want to publish my story, "Totenbein," but they found it "masterful" and "entertaining." As if that wasn't wonderful enough (and quite the improvement on "Nooo!") a 14 person editorial jury and writer/editor Inda Schaenen called my story "Nabokovian." As in Vladimir. Consider me wildly undeserving of such praise, but also immensely flattered. (Frankly, I'm amazed they would want to publish a story about a world expert in mummification. Thanks for the chance, Inda!)
It'll be a while before the story's out, but in the meantime, here's the website for Natural Bridge.
http://www.umsl.edu/~natural/

While Nabokov rolls in his grave, I hear that Humbert Humbert has responded, calling me "A little long in the tooth, but eminently tappable." ;)

A Book Tour. Really?!?

2009-02-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

There are a few harsh realities that a debut novelist has to come to grips with, or so I've been told. The sooner you realize these things, the faster you can move on with producing your second book, and/or scouring the job listings for a comp. teaching job to help support you while you write that second book.
What are these realities, you ask?

1) Your family won't quite have the reaction to your newfound author status that you hoped for. By this I mean, they will continue to see you as a five-year-old child, albeit a child holding a freshly published novel. When you stand before them -- and before a room full of beautiful Barnes & Noble patrons -- their eyes won't mist over, and they won't be staggered by your brilliant prose. It'll be more like "Looky, me make pretty thing."
* An addendum to this is what reactions you will inspire, and that is (mark my words), every person you've ever known or met will think they are in your book. Even your dentist. And even if you are writing about a chicken coop.

2) You won't be chosen by Oprah. Just get used to it. Maybe it's karma for your mixed feelings about her "Favorite Things," which has always sounded to you like a confusing cross between The Sound of Music and sex toys. Whatever the case, she won't choose you. You won't make it to her couch, no matter what. Instead, patiently observe and catalog every author she does anoint, and vow to kiss up to them should you ever encounter them at the airport.

3) In the category of "Things I Thought I Knew About Authors From Movies," forget as well the notion of a book tour, unless of course you're writing about Jesus, vampires, or sick dogs, in which case, well, you'll be going home to one of your three houses, so does it matter, really? Book tours have gone the way of the dodo -- for debut novelists, at least. After all, we're in a recession. For that matter, nobody knows who you are. Besides, I don't look nearly as scruffily sexy as Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset.

And yet, here I am, blogging about the possibility of a book tour for Bone Worship. Granted, at this moment, it's months away. It's like a little spark that I, my agent, and my editor all have to fan with Tom Hanksian vigor. It's creatively financed, meaning that I will be spending most of my nights on friends' and family members' collective futons instead of sleeping in four star hotels or above Parisian bookstores with French cats, a la Mr. Hawke. (At least that's what I imagine once I tell them that I'm coming with a box full of books to sign.) Indeed, it's a speck on the horizon, but it's in the works, and you should know about it. Heck, if you ask nicely, maybe I'll come to your city and sleep on your couch. But only if there's the promise of a cosmopolitan pet of some sort.

** Tentative book tour locations include: Seattle WA, Portland/Salem/Eugene OR, San Diego/Los Angeles CA, Missoula/Bozeman/Butte MT, Louisville/Lexington KY, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charlotte/Asheville NC, and Greenville/Spartanburg/Gaffney SC.

Winter Reading

2009-02-23T13:26:00.000-08:00

I don't know about the rest of you, but outside my window, it's cold, rainy, moss-covered, and Bleak House bleak. In other words, it's Oregon in February -- enough to make you crave sunburns, pray for sand in your bathing suit, and even brave possible pirate attacks. Well, maybe not pirates, but you get the picture. Winter's beginning to wear on me. And this from a person who used to celebrate -28 degree weather in Montana, so you know I'm not kidding around.

How to endure? Read good fiction, for starters. Better yet, read it in struggling literary journals. You think the newly downsized New York Times has it rough? Imagine being a tiny lit mag produced by a staff of volunteer students. Now that's tough. They can only endure if you subscribe and keep reading. They're cheap, they're chockablock full of great literary fiction, and they'll get you through to May, I promise. Here are a few I highly recommend -- and not just because they've been gracious enough to publish my work.

1) Bat City Review. Straight out of The University of Texas at Austin, this journal is known for its excellent roster of poets and fiction writers, including Dean Young and Steve Almond, just to name a few. You can find my story, "Inheritance," in Issue 4 (2008).
Here's their website: http://www.batcityreview.la.utexas.edu/current.php

2) The G.W. Review is George Washington University's literary magazine. It boasts an international list of contributors. My story, "Softy," appears in Vol. XXIX (Fall 2007), along with powerful work from Polish and German writers, among others. Jean Valentine and Gloria Naylor have had pieces published in The G.W. Review, along with lots of heavy-hitters who intimidate and awe me. http://studentorgs.gwu.edu/gwreview/

3) Beeswax Magazine. Last but not least is this gorgeous, handmade magazine produced by Oakland, CA editors John Peck & Laureen Mahler. If you think I'm waxing hyperbolic when I say "gorgeous," you have another thing coming. Issue 5 -- with my story "The Cougar in the Lilac Bush"-- is linen covered with hand-sewn Japanese block binding, people. I don't even know what Japanese block binding is, but it's dang pretty.
http://www.beeswaxmagazine.com/current.html

An Interview and Story in Neon Magazine

2009-02-19T12:41:00.000-08:00

If you're interested in watching me narrowly avoid an international incident while discussing robots, cyber sex, and dead ants in short fiction, check out my story and interview in the exceedingly edgy British literary journal, Neon. I still feel guilty about making fun of celebrities' kids' names. I don't, however, regret pioneering the renaissance of the word "meathead." Enjoy! http://www.neonmagazine.co.uk/currentissue.htm

Bone Worship...The Cover!!!

2009-02-19T12:06:00.000-08:00

In January 2010, Bone Worship: A Novel will appear in print! In the meantime, gazing meaningfully at this lovely cover will have to suffice.

That is one gorgeous eyebrow, no?