Immigrant Strong: September 2024

A family car ride, writing between two worlds, and teaching Arabic literature

Hi there—a few quick announcements before we dive into this month’s readings:

• SHOW: I have an essay, “Dear 13-year-old me,” that will be performed in the Your Faithful Reader experiential theatre production in New York. The full show has been postponed due to construction issues at the theatre, but my essay will be among those in a shorter preview show this Friday, Sept. 27 at Caveat. I’ll be there—and you can also buy tickets for a livestreaming show.

• CLASS: The following day, on Saturday, Sept. 28 from 1-4 pm ET, I’ll teach the Writing About Your Immigrant Experience zoom class through Cooper Street Writing Workshops at Rutgers-Camden Writers House. This is an info-packed class, and every participant will walk away with a comprehensive list of resources. It focuses on creative nonfiction (think essays and memoir), with readings from diverse contemporary writers. I hope some of you can join me!

• READING: I'm excited to again have an essay in the Connecticut Literary Anthology, and will be among the contributors reading on Sunday, Oct. 27 at 2 pm at Stratford Library in CT. (The book will be launched at this event on Oct. 20 in Hartford—I hope to make it to that as well). The anthology is now available for pre-orders via bookshop, amazon, etc.

• BOOK: I have an essay in another beautiful anthology that I think will be of interest to many of you—it’s called Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, and will be released Nov. 19. The book is now available for pre-orders from bookshop, amazon, the Toronto-based publisher (with the coolest name!) and other places where books are sold. I returned from Croatia in August and my essay, “Sea creatures,” encapsulates many of my feelings about what it means to travel there with my daughter but live across the Atlantic. (If you are in New York, Astoria Bookshop plans to carry the book!)

• FESTIVAL: I’ll be attending the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday—shoot me a note if you want to try to meet up!

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Book

Priyanka Mattoo’s debut novel Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones takes us to some of the 30-plus places the author has lived in, including her native Kashmir, Saudi Arabia, and her current home in the United States. The memoir-in-essays is a beautiful and funny take on the changing meaning of home that has instant appeal for many of us living diasporic lives. Mattoo, a mother of two whose jobs include founding a women-led podcast network and working as a talent agent, examines what it means to lose your homeland, and search for belonging in other spaces.

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Essays and Interviews

I’ll start with Itoro Bassey’s beautiful LitHub essay, Writing Between Worlds: Navigating My African and American Identities on the Page.

“What steers my writing, is a quest to find the we. My experience straddling both Blackness in America and alienation from my parents’ homeland has made me crave literature where those of us living within the African Diaspora, and those on the outside, can learn about and from each other. It isn’t about writing in a way that only humanizes Black people to white people and non-Black people eager to learn about different experiences—it’s also about telling stories where Black people, no matter where we find ourselves, can be witnessed by each other.”

Vanessa Hua takes us along her journey in The Great American Family Car Ride for The New York Times.

“The incident became a part of our family lore, diametrically opposed to what little I knew of my parents’ upbringing in China: a wartime childhood on the run, ahead of the invading Japanese forces and later from the Communists. Their families fled to Taiwan, and eventually my parents landed graduate fellowships that brought them to the United States.”

I enjoyed this interview in The Rumpus, We Live In History: A Conversation with Nicolás Medina Mora by Elizabeth Gonzalez James.

“When I first moved to America, I knew very little about Mexico. More than most of my college classmates, sure, but not much more than what you learn in secondary school and absorb by osmosis growing up in the country. When I got to Iowa and realized that I was expected to write about Mexico, it dawned on me that I couldn’t rely on memories from long ago, dinners, and high school classes. And so, I started reading about Mexico seriously. My project of giving myself a Mexican education became even more urgent after Trump got elected and I began to realize that, in the eyes of the American government, and as it turned out, in the eyes of an American I loved, I would always be defined by the county where I was born.”

Here is a must-read piece by Huda Fakhreddine, Intifada: On Being an Arabic Literature Professor in a Time of Genocide, for LitHub.

“There is no hope for us as a human race if we do not confront the double standards, the deep-seated racism of all our structures of life, our delusional notions of democracy, human rights, peace, empathy, solidarity and so on. They are all hypocrisies if they include some and exclude others. And there is no exclusion more glaring and damning than what the world has now accepted as the “Palestine exception.” There is no hope for us if we do not heed the reckoning Gaza is calling us to now, the reckoning Palestine has been calling us to for the past 76 years.”

Yasmin Roshanian interviewed Porochista Khakpour for The Rumbler, brought to you by The Rumpus.

“Iran, in almost all my books, becomes a symbol of an impossibility. It’s always tied to yearning, and longing, and characters wanting to go back to a homeland that they’re separated from. I wanted there to be a real distance between Iran and Iranian-America.”

I love coming across a familiar byline. I met Mayur Chauhan during an online Tin House workshop this year, so it was lovely to see his piece A Little Bit of Everything in KHÔRA magazine.

“The man who gave me a haircut in his new shop called himself Jordan, after his country. A big guy. I smelled nicotine from his hands as he cut my hair. He took my picture to remember me the next time I would call. He has old customers of his own, he said. I was a walk-in, he didn’t say. He hasn’t been back home for fifteen years, he said. He wished it wasn’t so, he didn’t say.

How is it home if he’s here? 

Why is home where we are not?”

Thanks for reading,

Vesna

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About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, and children of immigrants and refugees. For more info, here is a Q&A I did with Longreads about the newsletter. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.

About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then immigrated to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits in the human rights and international affairs fields. I have written about my immigrant experience for the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and Catapult, and have essays forthcoming in Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, and Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024. I participated in Tin House and Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshops, and won the Poet & Author and Parent Writer fellowships from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find me on Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe, or twitter, @vesnajaksic.