Immigrant Strong: March 2025 Issue
Upcoming reading, and writing on mixing accents, an immigrant mother, and a visa year
Hi there,
I’m on my way to Los Angeles for AWP’s annual conference and hope to connect with some of you there! I’ll be checking my e-mails and instagram account. (I’m also on Bluesky, but need to get in the habit of going there more often).
Save-the-date: On April 8, I’ll be reading at the Must Love Memoir Reading
Series on the Upper West Side. It’s free and open to the public, so come out!
I won a thing :) I got an Artist Fellowship from our state arts office. And the first thing I thought was how lucky I am, since our federal government is dismantling funds for the arts and humanities, not to mention life-saving humanitarian aid, scientific research and health studies, environmental protections, food and housing programs for the vulnerable, and so on and so on. Our tax money is instead funding inhumane and unlawful deportations and more tax cuts for billionaires. I hope you are doing whatever you need to do to resist this fascism, take care of yourself and others, and keep on writing and creating. And please read this piece by the brilliant, Bosnia-born Aleksandar Hemon—written in 2018 for LitHub, but still very much relevant: Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight.
Book
Nada Samih-Rotondo’s All Water Has Perfect Memory is a coming-of age memoir that takes us from the author’s roots in Palestine to her birth country of Kuwait before moving to Rhode Island in the United States. I met Nada at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing’s conference last year and glad I read her debut, in which she weaves research about her ancestors and ancestral land with personal narrative about growing up as an immigrant and a woman of color. I especially enjoyed the book’s hybrid nature and lyrical feel, and appreciated the amount of research that went into writing this memoir.
Essays and Interviews
I’ll start with Jenine Abboushi’s beautiful piece that I think many multilingual and accented readers of this newsletter will enjoy. For Guernica, here is Joli Petit Accent.
“Mixing accents produces new language. But what fuels this ingenuity and wit is pain, even trauma: the loss of and longing for specific worlds of belonging, and the trying experiences of in-betweenness, of living in gaps. Playing with languages and accents is a way of transforming the unseen, continuous labor of constructing emotional bridges between worlds lost and gained.”
In Electric Literature’s An Undocumented Farmworker’s Quest for Happiness in Europe, Berlin-based author and curator Celina Baljeet Basra discusses her debut novel.
“After struggling for some time to find this voice, I also grappled with the question of how to write this story, which is not my own. There are touching points in my family history maybe, and of course a lot of research and interest over many years. But still, this was the way I knew how to write it, because I feel some stories—especially those of flight or migration—can best be told in a scattered way.”
Beatrice Motamedi penned this great piece, Suburban Swing Voter, for Bending Genres.
“This is when it dawns on you, what could happen to lettuce and strawberries and grapes. To the highway crews and the delivery trucks and the poultry plants and the laundry service and the taqueria that saves your life every Friday night; to the cooks and the house cleaners and the carer who did what you couldn’t bring yourself to do, that is, diaper your father and feed him and listen, more patiently than your highly paid therapist would, to the same story told nightly, one thousand and one times.”
This was a difficult piece to read—John Manuel Arias dives into his immigrant mother’s yearnings for Harper’s Bazaar. Here is Martha Stewart, My Mother the Hoarder, and Me.
“When my mother locked me in the basement as punishment, I would read the playbook by which she and so many other immigrant mothers lived. In the dozens of magazines, boiled down like a sauce, was the secret to being American: appearances. Because for a woman from Uruguay who had escaped a military junta of terror and the corpses of university students washed ashore, the chance to be American and to appear American were two separate hurdles.”
I had the pleasure/hell of being on an OPT visa twice, so this piece definitely resonated. For Electric Literature, here is Shubha Sunder on Writing an Immigrant Story Through the Lens of a Visa Year.
“The title, it’s so bureaucratic. The acronym is very important. It’s kind of like a dog whistle—everyone who’s been a foreign student in the U.S. will know immediately what this title refers to, but if you weren’t a foreign student in the US there’s no reason for you to know what Optional Practical Training is. That’s why the letters O-P-T are highlighted [on the book cover]. So it’s just weird and interesting I hope. Optional Practical Training [represents] the shock of arrival, it’s the cold plunge when the immigrant is dropped into the host culture and has to fend for themselves.”
It was devastating to read this piece by a writer and activist killed by A Russian missile in 2023. For LitHub, here is You Cannot Go to Your Country: Victoria Amelina on the Start of War in Ukraine
“I guess when the world ends, some people cry, some scream, some go silent, some swear, and others recite poems. To be honest, I swear a lot too. Over time, I will also learn to laugh a lot again. The end of the world isn’t as quick as everyone imagines; there’s time to learn. Yet there are no instructions.”
I’ll read anything Viet Thanh Nguyen writes; for the Paris Review, here is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s piece on Horrific Surrealism: Writing on Migration.
“It is safe to say that perceptions of migrants are contradictory. In their countries of origin, they are sometimes celebrated for having embarked on adventures and sometimes criticized as having abandoned their homes. In the countries of their arrival, they can appear as terrifying threats in another people’s history or be welcomed as fresh blood. If they face hostility and suspicion, migrants might feel the need to insert themselves into their new nation’s chronicles of conquest. The migrant’s heroism can then harmonize with their host nation’s self-image, as well as affirming that nation’s hospitality and generosity.”
I’ve included Sejal Shah’s work in this newsletter before; here is a piece she wrote for Wellesley Magazine, A Rogue and Necessary Kindness.
“I’m thankful to those who, when they hear something, say something. To those who, when they hear something, do something. I can’t find this patient’s name, but what’s not lost is this generous, gracious gesture, going out of your way to help an immigrant who is faltering, tangled in paperwork. Thank you to her and to Amb. Keating. Thank you to my father who told me enough of this story for me to get down the bones. Now I don’t know where those flags are, but I remember the importance of asking a good question, of being interested in others’ lives, of doing what you can do to help someone else, these rogue and necessary kindnesses.”
For The Adroit Journal, here is A Conversation with Aria Aber, who was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States.
“Berlin, like any metropolitan city, is incredibly diverse and has many faces. There is, for instance, the immigrant and refugee community on the one hand, and the very rich and thriving club scene on the other. Those are perhaps the most famous and extreme cultural pockets of the city, and the ones I’m most familiar with personally.
Nila made sense as a protagonist because she can easily navigate both worlds; she can code-switch and shapeshift and deliver accurate observations about both milieus without veering into judgment or caricature, while still brushing up against facets of the city she doesn’t know that well.”
Thanks for reading,
Vesna
About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, children of immigrants and refugees, and others living between countries and cultures. 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 for Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024, Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and Catapult, among others. I was a Writer in Residence at Hedgebrook (‘25), participated in Tin House (‘24 and ‘21) and Kenyon Review (‘24) workshops, and won the Poet & Author (‘24) and Parent Writer (‘20) fellowships from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find me on Instagram and Bluesky.
Vesna, congratulations on your Artist Fellowship! Thank you as always for these amazing round-ups of incredible writing. Safe travels and enjoy AWP!
Look for me at AWP!