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Ep. 23. Saleem Haddad, Floodlines
113 Plays6 days ago
In this new episode, I talk to Saleem Haddad about his novel Floodlines (2026), which came out yesterday, Feb 12.
Saleem Haddad was born to an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father. His writing spans novels, short stories, essays, and film and television. His debut novel, Guapa (2016), won the Polari Prize and was awarded a Stonewall Honour. His second novel, Floodlines, is published by Europa Editions.
Episode references:
- Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World
- Stephen King, On Writing
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
- Clarice Lispector
Saleem's Book recs:
- Fernando Pessoa (trans. Richard Zenith), The Book of Disquiet
- Yasmin Zaher, The Coin
- Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (trans. Hazem Jamjoum), No One Knows Their Blood Type
Find Saleem on Instagram and at his website.
Follow the show on Instagram. Please leave feedback here.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Books Up Close'
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close, I'm Chris Lloyd. This is the close reading show for writers, readers and anyone interested in language.
Meet Salim Haddad
00:00:09
Speaker
In today's episode I talk to Salim Haddad about his new novel Floodlines.
00:00:14
Speaker
Salim was born to an Iraqi German mother and a Palestinian Lebanese father. His writing spans novels, short stories, essays, film and television. His debut novel Guapa won the Polari Prize and was awarded a Stonewall honour.
00:00:27
Speaker
It's a brilliant book. You should have read it by now. His second novel, Floodlines, be published by Europa Editions in February. Welcome, Salim. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
00:00:38
Speaker
I'm serious. I've been screaming about Guapa for years to everyone that will listen. Great. Thank you. that That's really, you know, it's funny because I feel like Guapa is something of like a cult hit, like people who read it really, really love it and kind of, or maybe those are just the people that I'm exposed to. I don't know. but but And ever since I've been waiting for book two. So now it's here. It's here. yes It's here. Before we delve into this one, Floodlines, which is also a beautiful cover.
00:01:08
Speaker
People won't see it, but I've got it right here.
Salim's Journey to Close Reading
00:01:11
Speaker
What do you think about close reading? How do you feel about it? What's your relationship to it? Well, i've I've taught a few seminars around global queer literature, and so we've done some close readings during during those seminars. um But I guess my introduction to it would have been when I was in London and I began to seriously take up the idea of writing fiction, I took a six week course with the author Jonathan Kemp.
00:01:38
Speaker
And that was the first time that I was exposed to close reading. And it was really useful as a practice to learn, ah to break down the architecture of a narrative in order to understand the mechanics of it, how it's working, what the author is trying to do.
00:01:52
Speaker
how style, the choice of words can tell us so much about either the emotional landscape of the character or the story. And so that's kind of my first exposure to close reading.
00:02:07
Speaker
I've never done it on my own writing, by the way. so I'm slightly nervous about that. No, I don't think you need to be nervous. I think it's always a, I mean, everyone that I've spoken to so far has found it strange, but then they're like, wait, I wrote this. I did that. Did I mean to do that? I don't know. And there's something quite fascinating for me about that.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, because for me as a writer, I work, and I edit from a very subconscious gut instinct. So I don't often go back and try and understand the machinery underneath ah in a more analytical way, but I'm excited to do that now.
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah,
Exploring 'Floodlines'
00:02:42
Speaker
we'll find out. So the passage I've chosen is from like quite near the beginning of the book. It's like three pages n And we'll dig into that, but like we're in the one of the main characters minds.
00:02:54
Speaker
For those haven't read it yet, we kind of flip between different people in this family. And this is like a really early on kind of like flood of ideas from this character at the very beginning. And i thought it would be an interesting part to talk about. so I wonder if you'd be okay reading it first and then we can delve in. Sure. So this is, it's kind of a polemical interior monologue of this character called Nizad, who is a war journalist. And it was triggered, this monologue was triggered by a phone call with his mother, where she asks him if he's had any work trips recently.
00:03:27
Speaker
And this, I think, is about maybe a third or halfway through the monologue. With the right spin, a government could push the news of a massacre off the headlines.
00:03:39
Speaker
How could he tell his mother that it was more moral to sell his body than to sell his soul for some bullshit idea of the truth? He no longer believed that journalists were truth seekers. They were carriers of the apocalypse, scavengers for a story, desperate for clicks, exposing global misery to pad their pockets, leading the masses down a whirlpool of clickbait, the curators of an assembly line of death that floated down social media feeds and quickly disappeared until everyone forgot what it was they were so angry about, only that they had a fireball of rage inside of them, throbbing and ready to explode.
00:04:14
Speaker
He saw it in his own feed, the way news drifted down his timeline like the flow of a river. Death, fires, war, floods, famine, sex, malour children and yemu malnourished malnourished women in Beverly Hills, swiping left, swiping right, chat rooms, saunas, jerking off to a sea of changing faces, sucking off one man, fisting another.
00:04:35
Speaker
What else to do in this ungovernable world but master control over his body? What an achievement. The glaciers were melting, but he completed 50 double unders without breaking form.
00:04:46
Speaker
Palestine was being disappeared, but he doubled the weight of his snatches in a month. The Islamic State dissolved the concepts of Syria and Iraq, but his quads were indestructible. The Assad regime was starving hundreds of thousands, but if he ate nothing but boiled chicken for three days, he could glimpse the outline of his abs under the right lighting.
00:05:05
Speaker
How could he tell her that sex was salvation? Thank you so much. And the passage keeps on going, by the way, but I thought we have to like draw a line at some point. And the next line is quite intense. And I was like, maybe we'll just, we'll, we'll just stop here. We'll stop there. Yes. I had to fight for that last line to be, to be kept. Oh, really? That's interesting. Yeah. Well, listeners, when you get to the book, you'll, you'll see what we're talking about, but this real kind of like flow of language of ideas. Like it's really early in the book to be so kind of like immersed in this character's like point of view and his world, right?
00:05:42
Speaker
And I'm interested that it is in like third, person like all of these sections are in third person rather than first. And I don't know whether it'd be worth starting there, right? At what point did you feel that you wanted to do kind of like dipping in through kind of focalization rather than like I?
00:05:57
Speaker
sure so Actually, like you mentioned, this novel is written from multiple POVs and multiple multiple characters ah within the family. And I had the most trouble with Nizar's POV.
00:06:11
Speaker
And first person was not something that I wanted to do for him. I wanted some distance between the reader and the character because Nizar himself is quite closed off in some ways and he has all these walls up. And so the first person POV wouldn't work for for what it was that I wanted to do.
00:06:28
Speaker
And initially, I actually wrote his chapters in the second person perspective. So you. So this this monologue was and initially written in in the u And I felt that that gave some distance, but it wasn't giving me what I wanted. um So I ended up settling on the close third POV, which works better because it's in line with the other characters, which were always very clear to me that they were going to be in the third person.
00:06:54
Speaker
So i I think it works because, you know, there's it creates some distance, but the reader is also absorbed into the character's consciousness because it's a very close third POV.
00:07:06
Speaker
And i think if I had written this in the first person, i think, especially for Nizar's perspective and particularly for this section, i think it would have been maybe a little bit sentimental and pleading with the reader. And I think by not having an eye in there, it's a conversation between Nizar
Narrative Techniques
00:07:25
Speaker
and himself.
00:07:26
Speaker
So there's kind of this alienated perspective where he's observing himself rather than telling someone else about about himself, if that makes any sense. Yeah, interesting. Because we are like, i I don't know, when I read this, you read quite quickly through this section, right? Because it's this long kind of drawn out, but it's over like two and a half pages with like no paragraph breaks whatsoever. And you really kind of get sucked in. But you have to also remind yourself as a reader, like, wait, wait, wait, like, I don't agree with that. Or like, that's not my position, right? That's This other person's position, i think there's some really interesting play between like, yeah, oh, I agree. Like with the right spin, a government could push a newsmaster off the headlines. like yes, we know that.
00:08:04
Speaker
But then like later on being like, this terrible thing was happening, but now my body's like really ripped, And you're wait, wait, wait, what is this moral universe you're drawing us into, right? And I think there's something quite interesting about using that close third person yeah to do that with the right spin.
00:08:20
Speaker
The right spin is his language, right? It's in his ah language, not the narrator. how could you tell his mother it was more moral to sell his body than to sell his soul for some bullshit idea of the truth, right? You can hear his language filter through the narrator, which I think is like fascinating when authors do that. He no longer believed that journalists were truth seekers and so on, right? Like you really get a sense of his moral universe, his viewpoint really early on here.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. and And I think it's important to remember that he's a journalist. And so I think he tries, um like, I think what is happening in this passage is that he's trying to create a distance between himself and his thoughts. But there's this tension there because you can feel him get lost inside his own thoughts. especially the longer ones that kind of drift in. And then you see
Writing Style and Impact
00:09:10
Speaker
his emotion kind of punching through what he is trying to provide us. While he's trying to provide us with this quite clinical analysis of the situation, you can see the the rage and the frustration kind of punch through the narrative at various points, even as he tries not to. He gets emotionally swallowed up by it. Yeah.
00:09:30
Speaker
Yeah, and, you know, it's almost like he's following an idea down. He has to, like, take the idea as far as it can go, right? You know, like, now he's started to be like, well, look, sex is an escape, right? It's a way to, like, embody when the world feels so disembodied.
00:09:44
Speaker
But it's almost like the argument he's telling, he's almost convincing himself to, right? He's having to, like, he's like, let me take this thought to the the end. And then you're like, well, we've gone really far here, Nizar, from where he started off. Yeah. And I think partly it's because he is also aware of his own, I wouldn't say hypocrisy, but he's aware of like the the logical conclusion of the fatalistic conclusion of this argument that he's kind of, this rabbit hole that he's kind of fallen into, this self-optimization in the face of global collapse.
00:10:14
Speaker
So even when he says, what an achievement, that's kind of, you know, there's ah there's a bitter irony in that. And he's almost making fun of himself because he knows that this is ridiculous, but still does it. Yeah. What an achievement is a great little, with like the exclamation mark as well, right? What an achievement you like, is that irony? Is that him? Like how, yeah, how much of this story that he's telling does he believe, right? Because ah most of the novel, you know, to zoom out just a tiny bit from close reading is about what people believe in, like what kind of stories they're willing to tolerate in the world, what stories they tell about themselves, about each other. So like ah it's really interesting that we begin here with the kind of the stories that he doesn't believe anymore, right? that That the government might spin or that other journalists might spin and then how you narrate the self, right, in relation to that.
00:11:03
Speaker
And he's doing it also in a very like lyrical way in parts of this, right? Mother, more moral, cell, cell, soul, bullshit. Like there's lots of alliteration. There's lots of sibilance running throughout here. i could pull out so many examples. Carriers, apocalypse, scavenger story, pad pockets.
00:11:21
Speaker
Sound wise, he's really pulling us through or you're pulling us through. and And it's always interesting to think like how much of that is part of his like rhetoric versus how much of that is like you like pulling us into his mind and like tricking us a little bit.
00:11:36
Speaker
So, I mean, I think I i actually wrote this quite late in the in the process. So I had already written pretty much all of Nizar's storyline by then. And then this came to me a few years ago, maybe like two years ago. And I and i wrote it down very, very quickly, this this whole thing. And then there was a lot of editing to to make sure that I could get the rhythm and emotion that I wanted. So lots of moving sentences around, coming up with different words to make sure also that the sounds were the sounds that i wanted.
00:12:08
Speaker
And initially, this section came in and in the later part of Nizar's narrative. And then when I was editing, I realized that actually this would be a very good introduction to Nizad as a character because also it leaves the reader with questions about how did this person become the way that he is. So within the first three pages, you already have this clear insight into into this tension and this complexity within the character. Yeah, I think when I read it, I was like, did Salim write this in one foul swoop? Because it feels so unfolding, right? And it is this extreme of thought and feeling. it It feels like one of those things that feels supernatural and unfolding. But as you've just said, actually, it requires a lot of moving around, a lot of like word changes and stuff. It's quite an interesting, it's a great thing to see like the effect of it and the work behind
00:13:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the melody and the beat was something that was very important for me when I was writing this, because there was kind of a beat that I was working towards when I was writing. And funnily enough, ah my editor when I was working with my editor on on this passage, she was working with a very different beat in mind. And so there was this point of tension initially where the edits that she was doing were disrupting the beats that I had grown accustomed to. and I was working on rules of three, and then she preferred to work with with like a two beat. so i
00:13:34
Speaker
an example. So like in the original passage, I had written swiping left, swiping right, chat room saunas, jerking off to a sea of changing faces, kissing one man, sucking off another, fisting a third. Where she cut that last bit. So it says jerking off to a sea of faces, sucking off one man, fisting another. And she wanted sort of the shorter beat, whereas I wanted something that it was a bit more run on.
00:13:58
Speaker
So a lot of it was very much working with this internal beat in my head around the... Yeah, which is like really fascinating, right? as a In one part, he's kind of describing how journalists are, we'll come back to the metaphors that he uses for them, but there's kind of like the stream of information, right, on our social media feed, the way news drifted down his timeline, like the flow of a river, death, fires, war, floods, famine, sex, which he's seeing as a bad thing, right? It's kind of like gathering, amassing of different things, but then he does the same, right? He then lists two sentences later, all of these sex acts, right?
00:14:31
Speaker
And then he gets us to like Palestine and Syria and Assad. You're like, wait, the very thing that you hate about social media, right, about the kind of way that news is delivered to us is now the thing that you're replicating in your language. So that beat thing, that rhythm is quite interesting. Yeah,
Themes of Dehumanization
00:14:46
Speaker
definitely. I mean, I think the run on sentences were really important, especially the run on sentence about the the one that starts with they were carriers of the apocalypse and talking about social media feeds, et cetera.
00:14:57
Speaker
I feel like that I really wanted that sentence to do what the social media feed itself does. Right. So there's like a heavy, heavy, like extended cumulative sentences and then they kind of run on and then you kind of forget what the first part of the sentence is, which is kind of what he's saying, you know, so it kind of mimics doom scrolling in a way.
00:15:20
Speaker
And I wanted this kind of breathlessness and saturation to come through. But on the on the on that comparison that you're talking about, where he talks about the glaciers melting, but then he can do 50 double unders, et cetera. I think for me, it was...
00:15:35
Speaker
I think it was something that I had begun noticing. And I think there's a lot also theoretically that's been written about this, the self-optimization in the face of global collapse and the kind of rise of like fitness influencer culture and health and health culture and that kind of thing, especially as the world is sort of exploding and, and you know, the glaciers are are literally melting. And so I kind of wanted to to bring that out in a sense of, for him, it's in the face of this uncontrollable world. The one thing that he can do is control his own body. And that's kind of the philosophical hinge of this passage, where sexuality and fitness become methods of controlling your environment. But there's also a lot of hypocrisy there, which he is aware of being a journalist. And so I think he's kind of jumping between the two.
00:16:25
Speaker
right and this thing about control just made me think you know obviously the book is called flood lines right and there are various floods that we get introduced to both literal historical metaphoric and so on but like it's interesting that formally you're also working with the kind of flood of language really early on which i think it makes also a really good sense that this is at the beginning that actually the flood of thought the flood of language in its uncontrollability even while he's trying to control his body which which doesn't work right for him like it doesn't actually solve the thing he thinks he's he's trying to solve and like i'm interested in the kind of metaphors that you use in that bit like they were carriers of the apocalypse scavengers for a story they led masses down a whirlpool of clickbait the curators in an assembly line like it's such a mishmash of metaphors of images right from like the natural to the
00:17:14
Speaker
technological to the i don't know to like workers and stuff and I'm really interested in how he's pulling from all these different kind of registers so there's there are I guess three things right that I was working with here in terms of imagery one is the I I wanted there's the sense of dehumanization that's happening in this passage so he's dehumanizing journalists and kind of vilifying them so you see them as like you know scavengers, carriers of the apocalypse, etc. So I kind of wanted wanted that imagery to be there. And there's a certain, of course, like a capitalistic logic to it as well, like for them to pad their pockets, etc. So suffering becomes something that is commodified.
00:18:00
Speaker
And I also wanted like linked to that capitalist image, this industrial image, so so something like assembly line of death. But then I wanted this idea again to go back to what you were saying about floods. I wanted this imagery of like things like especially water based metaphors that will kind of demonstrate something that's a bit uncontrollable. So whether it's talking about a sea of faces or a whirlpool, I don't know if he oh he talks about a river of something at some point, a river of death. I'm not sure. So there are these three things that I was kind of working with in the in the text, in this passage specifically.
00:18:38
Speaker
I'm always interested when language moves around. One version of a metaphor could easily just follow the same kind of like natural images. Right. But here you're really like pushing them against each other in a way that makes us, I guess, look at them a bit differently or makes that makes makes us look at them as metaphors.
00:18:55
Speaker
right? That these are metaphors of his that he's really, really like, not overselling, but really pushing what journalists are, right? Carriers of the apocalypse. Not just like harbingers, but like carriers, like they're the ones bringing it to us. Scavengers for a story, not just...
00:19:11
Speaker
They're not just out there finding them. They're scavengers. But you also did this for so long. these are like This was this is was your career. And part of the novel as a whole is like trying to find the truth, kind of, of this family, right? Trying to figure out there are so many lies and hidden things that we find out by the end.
00:19:28
Speaker
that it's like, are these all bad things, right? is is Is someone looking for a story? Is someone trying to give us information? Always the curators of an assembly line of death.
00:19:40
Speaker
Do you know what mean? Like there's these real extremes for him that ah very early on you're like, yeah, to hell with journalists. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is that what I believe?
00:19:51
Speaker
it's too far Yeah. um Yeah, because I think for me, the novel or one of the key themes of the novel is around the stories that we tell tell ourselves of our past in order to absolve ourselves or justify our actions or make it easier for us to wake up in the morning and get out of the house. And what happens when we're confronted with alternative versions of that history, which I think is something that is very common.
Personal Narratives & Identity
00:20:18
Speaker
And for Nizar, I mean, so i I was never a war journalist, but I worked in aid work. So I worked in war zones. And one of the first things that you that you learn in war zones is that there's no one single narrative of what's happening. Everyone has their own narrative. And And when you're in the midst of that, it's a very confusing and scary idea to be able to hold space for these different narratives rather than kind of try and find a single truth amongst them. And I think that Nizar is really at the, you know, he's a burnt out journalist and he's kind of tired of carrying the complexity of all of these different narratives. And I think this is a very easy narrative that he's allowed himself to
00:21:00
Speaker
to fall into, even as he, as we know by him saying what an achievement, he doesn't believe in it himself. He realizes it's simplistic, but it's the one thing that in that moment in time allows him to get up in the morning and continue his his day.
00:21:13
Speaker
Is that the the idea of like, there's no one version of this story? Is that why you wanted to tell the novel through these multiple narrators? Is that is that part of that? Definitely. I mean, I think it was I don't think I could have written the story from a single narrator's perspective. It just wouldn't have have worked. And I wanted to have the close third person rather than like an omnipresent narrator, because I wanted the reader to also go on that journey as well, where you're in the in different characters' minds and then...
00:21:46
Speaker
slowly the wider canvas is clear. At the end of the novel, you have a sense of the wider canvas, but when you're in the novel and you're reading from one perspective, you're only getting a very zoomed in detail of the thing. And then slowly the picture is built, the picture of this family is built for you.
00:22:03
Speaker
once you Once you make your way through the novel, it starts to click into place like ah like a jigsaw puzzle. Yeah. And the people who, i don't know, this is just me, the people who you immediately feel sympathy with, like that changes. And the people who at the beginning are like, oh my God, I know this person, this is, you know, like this person is doing my head in. But by the end of the book, you're like, oh wait, actually, no, I'm with them now. Like their politics and now my politics. There's quite an interesting, there's some interesting circles that go around. Well, for me, it was about, it was a process also because I had to understand the motivations of of the characters. I needed to understand why they behaved this way. So it was a process of discovery for me as well, as I was writing the novel to understand, like, why is this character so adamant about this one particular thing?
00:22:49
Speaker
And just kind of, and then I work through her story. And then I understand, oh, this is this is why, this is her emotional logic. This is what made her who she
Salim's Writing Routine
00:22:57
Speaker
is. So was it was a process of discovery for me as a writer that was very fun as well.
00:23:02
Speaker
good Yeah, and then you definitely feel that as as the book goes on. The line that also kind of stands out, we've gone from malnourished children in Janmuk to malnourished women in Beverly Hills, which is like already an interesting, ah you know, comparison.
00:23:17
Speaker
The very next sentence is swiping left, swiping right, chat rooms, saunas, jerking off to see if it, you're like, okay, we're in a very different register and world, right? With kind of like these explicit details.
00:23:27
Speaker
Next sentence, what else to do in this ungovernable world but master control of his body? We go from that really fast list of sex acts, as you were saying, to a much slower sentence, right? The sentence slows.
00:23:40
Speaker
And what else to do in this ungovernable world? like much longer, like you really have to slow down, right? And this ungovernable world, like that's like one of the novel's theses as well, right? But it's interesting that like he uses that language here after coming from sucking off one man fisting another, which is so like blunt and direct.
00:23:59
Speaker
Right. To this much different language. I'm interested always in those. Yeah, those contrasts. Well, so the irony of something like malnutrition that appears as both a war crime and also like a lifestyle pathology was always very interesting to me because i I would see it on my own social media feed and it would just be very bizarre that, you know, these two things that are kind of similar, but also like on the extreme sides of of inequality. And I kind of wanted to bring that to to this.
00:24:32
Speaker
But i i think putting together, for example, the idea of malnourished children, and then bringing in like this discussion of sex, I think also is very, very uncomfortable for obvious reasons, and kind of makes the reader feel this sense of like this real sense of tension, or this is not right, these two things cannot be so close together in the narrative. But actually, so much of it mimics also the way that we like experience a lot of this imagery online. When you're scrolling through your social media feed, you kind of you know go from these pictures of these children that are suffering really horribly. And then you jump on to this like image that is meant to make you feel aroused.
00:25:14
Speaker
and And it's a very uncomfortable feeling that you're left with, even at a very subconscious level that you as the viewer might not necessarily be aware is happening. And I wanted the text to do something similar. And it definitely does. I mean, I mean i experience that every day on social media. I'm like, this is is whiplash, right? It's like the whiplash of content. And I think it's interesting for you to formalize that on the page as well, right? To turn that into like a formal question. and and you do it most through this thing, but this ah also this other thing. And you've got one, two, three, four of those buts in a row. The glaciers were melting, but he completed 50 double unders. Palestine was being disappeared, but he doubled the weight.
00:25:51
Speaker
this repetition of the same sentence structure as well, I think is really like, it's for emphasis, but it's also like, it makes it more and more uncomfortable. Like usually, you know, like a repetition of emphasis is like, oh, we really make the point stronger. But the more you build up of these comparisons, the more like, oh, icky I feel, the more confused I feel about this politics. Right. And I think it's a really interesting a structure to to use. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I and coming up with the examples for that was also very interesting because I needed to again, I was working very subconsciously, but I just needed to think like how, what could work? I mean, somewhere more clear, like, you know, the Islamic State dissolved the concepts of Syria and Iraq. So you get the sense of these massive countries that are just overnight suddenly
00:26:40
Speaker
announced that you know they've they've disintegrated versus his quads, which were indestructible. So kind of those those were more obvious. And the same thing with like the Assad regime starving hundreds of thousands of people versus him starving himself so that he could glimpse his abs under the the right lighting.
00:26:58
Speaker
So there was a lot that I was trying to also do to to find relationships between the two images enough so that they don't seem too out there and kind of unrelated.
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. But even so, they still feel like intense, right? They still feel awkward. And they're even like this sound play, right? Of like the the quads, that S that links to like the Islamic State and even like Assad and Abs. I don't know, in the same thing, you've got like the even these like sound bouncing around, which I think is really interesting.
00:27:31
Speaker
And then you've got those four in a row. And then how could he tell her? his mother that is that sex was salvation again these rhetorical questions that he's asking himself through the narrator right these these but the like a really big question of but sex and the body it does cut through it does make sense for him in in this senseless world and you're like yeah no that is a good question even though everything you've just said is absolutely wild you know and And as I say, like it goes on for another like half a page before he but before it then snaps right back into the dialogue with his mother, right? we We go from this like digression. It's not like in real time. You imagine him just pausing right on the phone and like having this long drifting thought. I just think it's a really interesting, that turn from the building up, building up, building up, building up to this really piercing question. You mean the piercing question that ends this passage that we're looking at? How could he tell her that sex? Yeah, yeah, of this passage, yeah. Which, you know, obviously there's some more repetitions that come after it, right? That they, that he, that he, how afterwards, like you get more of the repetition as it goes on, but this sent this question almost like punctures some of that rhetorical work.
00:28:41
Speaker
And it brings us out a little bit, but I mean, it brings us back to the, what triggered it, which is, you know, brings us back to the maternal, but it also brings us back to the conversation with his mother, that this is all, all of this thought process is happening.
00:28:56
Speaker
while he's trying to find a way to answer his mother's question about you know why well what what his last work trip was or whether he should even tell her that he no longer does war journalism yeah i wonder was there anything you noticed in this passage when we picked it is there is when you're reading it back or like now because i don't know it's obviously like a long gap right when you finish writing a thing and then it comes into the world it's a strange gap but like how do you see this passage now I don't know. i'm i try as much as possible not to like, you know, with the exception of what we've just done for the last 20 minutes, I try not to like, analyze my own work too much. I really like this passage overall. i think I'm very proud of it. And I remember being proud of it when I first wrote it, because I felt that it captured something that I was frustrated with in my own life, and that I couldn't articulate, even as I realized that it was a flawed argument. I just wanted the character to to have that argument and hold on to it.
00:29:55
Speaker
I think, again, i think for me, the passage, I mean, obviously it works with a lot of imagery, but for me, there's something that I i saw it as as as like, again, music, as a beat. There was a tone that I was trying to go with, whether it was where I put the commas or the type of sounds that I wanted to to make and what that would signify. like kind of There's a lot of cynicism there, but there's a lot of punching as well, like clicks, scavengers, pockets, quads, those are punchy things. But then there's a lot of S's as well to kind of that has this kind of sneering feeling. And I think that kind of as I was reading through it now, I was aware of of that, of the musicality of that as well.
00:30:43
Speaker
It's fascinating. Yeah, I want to turn a little bit to ask you about your writing because you obviously said you obviously do some really interesting editing work
Teaching Writing and Political Context
00:30:50
Speaker
and you worked your editor closely in in this passage. But like, do you have a particular setup when you write? Are you typing handwriting? Is it the same time of day? Like, what is your writing life?
00:31:03
Speaker
i I tend to write early in the morning. That's when I feel like I'm at my clearest. So if I'm working on something, then I will try to consistently wake up very early in the morning and do a couple of hours of work of writing before switching off and doing other things. So that's kind of how I like to to start my day.
00:31:25
Speaker
But I usually don't go for more than two hours a day for a number of reasons. I have other Lots of other things that i that I need to be doing. I work, I'm a freelance aid worker now, so I don't have the nine to five that I used to have, but when I do take on a project, it's very intensive. And so it's very hard for me to maintain a consistent writing routine through that project. But what I try and do is my my partner travels. And so when he travels, I often go into hibernation and friends know that they're just not going to see me. So I i move all of my stuff into the living room and i just immerse myself completely in writing during that period. And I try to go once a year, i treat myself to like a personal writing retreat for five days. So I rent a house somewhere in the countryside where I can just immerse myself in reading and writing. So it's a mixture of trying to do regular early morning writing work, as well as then these periods and blocks of quite intensive one week writing.
00:32:28
Speaker
do you save like the editing for like those intensive bits or are you doing it as you like daily as well? are you just like get it out and then come back? um It depends. every Every piece of work is different. But usually those one week periods are when I do a lot of very intensive editing or when I'm starting the editing process, especially because that requires kind of taking a step back, looking at the piece as a whole, figuring out how things move in certain ways. And that process doesn't lend itself well to like the the two hours a day writing period that I often have. so So I try and arrange my writing retreats for that time when I need that space to be able to take more big picture.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. And you type rather than handwrite? I do both. So i if I'm feeling stuck and I just want to often free write from the perspective of the character, i will do that by hand. So i have I have different notebooks for different writing projects and I'll just i'll just do a lot of free writing in that notebook.
00:33:30
Speaker
But a lot of the time also my thoughts come to me when I'm on the move. And so what I've done is I've created WhatsApp groups for each of my writing projects. And then I will send i'll send myself an idea the different WhatsApp groups because then it's organized a bit more. And I find it more trustworthy than like a notes app or something because I've lost work through the notes app. And I just so I have these WhatsApp groups that are kind of labeled the name of the project. And then I use those to send myself ideas and thoughts.
00:34:01
Speaker
And you do end you're typing that or like voice notes and stuff as well? Both, depends. Yeah, it depends where where I am. and And sometimes when I'm driving, I'll get an idea and then I'll have to like, you know, try and figure out to send myself ah a voice note where I'm just talking into into the, by myself to the car, into into the WhatsApp. This is fascinating. I love to know how people how people do these things. You said a bit earlier about like your, the creative writing kind of course you took. Were you thinking about writing long before that? Or was that like the first moment that you thought like, oh, I can do this as a thing? but like, were you thinking about it as a kid? Were you a reader, a writer?
00:34:37
Speaker
I was, i was always a reader and I was always very interested in storytelling. So I would kind of create with like my Barbies and my He-Man toys, I would create these storylines, i remember. And i remember in high school, I got into drama. I went to high school in in Jordan and we didn't have writing or creative writing. That was not really an option for us. But there was drama and that was my way to get into storytelling. And so I i was very much into like a theater geek as ah as a kid. And I remember reading a Midsummer Night's Dream because I had the idea to adapt it for a school play.
00:35:17
Speaker
And I just remember that was really where I realized, wow, I love this idea. I was working with this beautiful, magical story that was very indulgent, which is kind of what I like. and And trying to work within the constraints of like this amateur school play was very interesting because I had like five characters, five actors that I needed to work with. And that's when I realized I loved it. But I i didn't really, you know, my father, was the idea of becoming a writer was not something that I could ever even bring up to him. And so I ended up studying economics and going down that route and then going into aid work. And and it wasn't until my mid-twenties that I started to think about writing as something that I could do and not just kind of admire as something for other people to do.
00:36:07
Speaker
But i always loved to read. i was always a reader. i was going to ask, do you teach any lessons on creative writing that you'd want to share here? I do occasional workshops. And what I like to do, it's not it's not creative writing in the traditional way. it's I like to give a little bit of a spin on creative writing. So again, it goes back to close reading. So I like to to use close reading as a springboard for understanding the mechanics and architecture of writing that is useful for creative writing workshops, because then we can look at how a certain passage advances character or
00:36:45
Speaker
how to write dialogue in a certain way using real examples. I don't do it in a sustained way. ah So when opportunities arise or doing a seminar or a workshop, then I enjoy doing them. But I often find that when I'm in that creative writing or when I'm in that teaching headspace, i can't write.
00:37:08
Speaker
I don't think i could it's something that I could be doing on a regular. I admire those that can, but it's not something I can do. but like kind of separate worlds in a way yeah for me very much there's this book called craft in the real world by think his name is matthew salasis that is very interesting because i think it takes a political slant a stance or slant to a lot of creative writing concepts like that you would find in a creative writing workshop and i think it's very That's kind of what I use to help me think about how to structure a creative writing workshop in kind of an interesting way, one that incorporates politics a bit more in how we think about character and dialogue and setting and that kind of thing.
Inspirational Books
00:37:53
Speaker
on that that book is a really good suggestion but there are other other essays or books that you turn to on writing as practice are there things that you go back to or find useful there's nothing that i go back to i remember reading i mean this is a bit cliche but it's just i remember it being an amazing book on writing by stephen king i just uh when i first thought to myself that okay maybe this is something that i'd like to pursue i remember reading that book and i and i do love stephen king's ah books and it was i think it was just fascinating it was really fascinating and also inspiring about like the the grit that you need as a writer and the consistency and the discipline that's required i think that you know it's it's captured so well and you can just tell that this is someone that loves
00:38:40
Speaker
stories and and it really comes through and it's a very exciting book for any aspiring writer. And I remember Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott also being useful for me when I was writing. And I think it's, again, it's it's very much about about the need for discipline, but also empathy when you're writing.
00:39:00
Speaker
i think those are some that I that i recall fondly. i don't really return to many of those kinds of books though and reread them. I probably should. No, no, no I mean, you're doing well with whatever you're doing, but um it's always interesting to like see those texts, both of which are great. I think they're great. The Lamont book has got some like mad stuff in it, but I think it's also, she's a cranny too about writing. You know, she's like, well, this isn't some mystical thing. It's just like, it's a work. Just go do the work. What do you want from me? Like, I think there's um there a real prosaicness about her that I quite enjoy.
00:39:32
Speaker
Okay, my last question I ask everyone for book recommendations. You can recommend new things, old things, things not yet out, stuff that you can't stop rereading.
00:39:43
Speaker
hit me with as many recommendations as you want.
Recommended Reads
00:39:45
Speaker
Okay, so I think, I mean, one of the books that I always push onto people is The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. I think it's one of the most beautiful pieces of literature. And I just find it so, and you know, they teach it,
00:39:59
Speaker
to Portuguese children in school and I just find it so amazing like and what a gift to be to be taught uh such an like a soul expanding book I find it when I was writing the early drafts of floodlines I would wake up and read a little bit of the Book of Disquiet every day because I just feel like it's consciousness expanding. So that's one that I would really recommend.
00:40:24
Speaker
I had a lot of anxiety. i suffered from like quite debilitating anxiety for about two years. And Pessoa was one of the few things that really helped calm me and kind of expand my sense of self.
00:40:38
Speaker
I see it as like, it's it's not just lyrically beautiful, it's also just just so expansive and surreal and and philosophical. What other book could I recommend? So there's there's the book, The Coin by Yasmin Zahir, which I absolutely loved. It's a book about this wealthy Palestinian woman who lives in New York City, who slowly becomes obsessed with cleanliness.
00:41:04
Speaker
And on the surface, it's you know hugely readable and pleasurable. But I think underneath Lurk something that's pricklier and harder to pin down. And and what what I really loved is this tension that Zahir sustains between meaning and meaninglessness in the novel. So it's as if the novel is constantly daring you to over interpret it and then quietly slipping out of your grasp every every time you you try and do that. And I had the chance to speak with her for a podcast and that resistance became even more apparent when I was in conversation with her. You know, she's very kind of hesitant to analyze her own work or explain her own work or try and make the illegible legible.
00:41:47
Speaker
And i think the book is just a very interesting one. And I guess the final book that I would maybe recommend is one that I'm reading at the moment and and it's lesser known, but I'm absolutely loving it. I'm reading it in Arabic, but but it's already been translated into English. In English, the title is called No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Al-Hayat.
00:42:09
Speaker
And it's a very slim novel, but it it packs up a story about a a woman who, after her father dies, she discovers that her blood type is different from her dad's in a way that could not have been inherited from her father.
00:42:28
Speaker
and And she has a very, very complicated relationship with her father, who was in the Palestinian resistance, but in the diaspora and He's a very complicated character. She's a very complicated character. The family is very complicated. So it's about identity and especially Palestinian diaspo diasporic identity.
00:42:47
Speaker
And it's about what it means to belong when you grow up in the in the diaspora. But there's a real emotional intimacy to the narrative that I'm very, very much enjoying. And that's what I'm looking at.
00:42:59
Speaker
That's great. Three lovely recommendations. Yeah, all three of those are good. So when you're writing, you do dip into reading others? Because and there are some authors I've spoken to that when they're in the middle of a project, they won't read.
00:43:11
Speaker
the If they're writing prose, they won't read prose. Or if they're writing poetry, they won't read poetry. But you find sometimes it's helpful. um I mean, for Fernando Pessoa, also in that particular book, there's no real narrative. I think what I struggle with is more narrative.
00:43:26
Speaker
because I find it confusing when I'm crafting a narrative to then have this other narrative inside of me, um or kind of competing with what I'm trying to. So I think that's what I struggle with. I then move towards more lyrical, stylistic novels. I like Clarice Lispector, for example, is another example of a writer that I would read if I'm working on the first draft of something where I, she, you know, she doesn't work too much with, with plot and the story isn't really there. It's more about the the vibe, so to speak, that I really love about her and the ideas.
00:44:03
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. and No, always like interesting to know. Salim, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and speaking with me today. Thank you. I absolutely loved it. Thank you so much, Chris.
00:44:17
Speaker
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00:44:29
Speaker
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00:44:42
Speaker
This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.