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Episode 302: Neda Toloui-Semnani
226 Plays3 years ago
Neda Toloui-Semnani (@Neda_Semnani) is a journalist and author of They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents (Little a, 2022).
Social: @CNFPod
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
The Role of a Writing Coach
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey CNFers, if you're looking to get into shape, sometimes you hire a personal trainer and they help you stay accountable, check your form, etc. Likewise, if your writing needs a boost, needs a form check, that little something something in your corner to say keep going man, keep going.
00:00:20
Speaker
Consider letting me help you out. If you're working on a book, an essay, a query, a proposal, and you're ready to level up, email me at brendan at brendanomerra.com. Hey. And we'll start a dialogue. I'd be honored to help you get where you want to go. If we're going to do advice from people, let's talk about Coco Chanel and you always remove one accessory before you walk out the door.
Introducing the Podcast and Guest
00:00:52
Speaker
Well alright, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? Today's guest, for episode 302, is Netta Touloui-Samnani, author of They Said They Wanted Revolution, a memoir of my parents. It's published by Little A. Here's a little blurbish of the book.
00:01:17
Speaker
From a daughter of Iranian revolutionaries, activists, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers comes a gripping and emotional memoir of family and the tumultuous history of two nations. Boom. It's a wonderful memoir told with journalistic rigor and tenderness. It's of a genre of memoir that I really love, which I've really come to love, which is more of a quest.
00:01:41
Speaker
The author is not necessarily at the center of the story, though she is the narrator and that, but she's more of a guide, the storyteller, and she's on a hunt for answers to fill in the gaps. I think of Lily Danziger's Negative Space or David Carr's The Night of the Gun.
Netta Touloui-Samnani's Memoir
00:02:03
Speaker
There's discovery there. It's not navel-gazy.
00:02:07
Speaker
I loved it. And in the middle part of Netta's book is some of the most gripping storytelling you might ever come across.
00:02:14
Speaker
Two stars. Just kidding. Just kidding. Five stars. Before that, let's do some housekeeping CNF-ers. I want to remind you to keep the conversation going on Twitter at cnfpod or at Creative Nonfiction Podcasts on Instagram. You can also support the podcast by becoming a paid member at the Patreon crew, patreon.com slash cnfpod slash
00:02:38
Speaker
As I say, the show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Members get transcripts, chances to ask questions of future guests, which is a lukewarm thing. Maybe I won't even put that out there anymore because it just doesn't seem to be getting any traction.
Engaging with the Creative Nonfiction Community
00:02:52
Speaker
Anyway, special podcasts that are in production. So, fun things. Some coaching too, depending on your tier. Go Window Shop.
00:03:01
Speaker
You'll be helping the audio magazine, the writers who get paid as a result of their submissions. Consider supporting the community in that way. I know it's a big ask. We only have so much income at our disposal, so there are free ways to support the show, like leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify.
00:03:25
Speaker
written reviews for our little podcast that could go a long way toward validating the enterprise for the wayward CNF for sailing by in the night. We got a nice flood of some written reviews, got like three new ones in the last week which was amazing.
00:03:39
Speaker
And I read one of the new ones last week, and I'll read a new one right now. This one from Tracy in Japan titled, Grateful to have found this, enjoying this podcast, a new find for me, and learning a lot from it. Even after having listened to only a few episodes, I love the blend of discussion about craft, writing as a career, and each author's subject matter.
00:04:00
Speaker
I've been craving more podcasts that are high quality and that discuss technique, and I haven't found quite the right one for me that focuses on just CNF. Until now. That was her. Until now. It sounded like I added that, but she said that. You know what's bonkers?
00:04:23
Speaker
And that's an amazing review, thank you so much Tracing Japan. You know what's bonkers is, I've been doing this show nearly 10 years, and people still stumble across it, and they're like, holy shit, where was this? Why haven't I heard of this? Fact is, we stumble on things when we're supposed to, and CNF Pod will keep on being there for you to trip over. In a podcast Meet Cute, I hope you'll tell your grandkids about one day.
00:04:47
Speaker
show notes, and my up to 11 monthly newsletter can be found at brenthedamara.com. Once a month, no spam. Last I checked, you can't beat it. Just saying.
Netta's Journalism Career
00:04:58
Speaker
A little more about Netta. She's a senior writer with the television news magazine Vice News Tonight. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, numerous, including The Washington Post, Kinfolk, New York LA Review of Books, The Baffler of the Week, Buzzfeed, and Roll Call, among others. Geez, are there more?
00:05:16
Speaker
She's been featured in The Rumpus and This American Life. She holds a Master's of Science in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Master's in Fine Arts and Nonfiction from Goucher College. Where have I heard that before? She was named a 2018 Fellow with the Logan Nonfiction Program.
00:05:36
Speaker
and a 2017 NYSCA slash NYFA Fellow in Nonfiction. She grew up in Washington DC and is based in Brooklyn, where all the writers are, where she lives with a small dog, a large cat, a chubby baby, and a man she calls Stretch.
00:05:52
Speaker
I know, you know, I should've asked her about that. I remember reading about that, I'm like, you know what, I should ask her why she calls the man Stretch, and I never did. Oh well, maybe next time. You can find her at nettasemnani.com, or on Twitter, at Netta, N-E-D-A, underscore semnani, S-E-M-N-A-N-I.
00:06:21
Speaker
She has the single greatest Twitter avatar I have ever seen. Anyway, stay tuned for my parting shot at the end of the show. This interview was part of a live zoomie I did in conjunction with Goucher College's MFA in nonfiction, and I'm happy to share it with you right now. Wait, now.
Writing Techniques and Insights
00:06:44
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Oh, Hank is telling me I need to say the magic word.
00:06:56
Speaker
writing advice ever came across was a very short line by David Finkel. And it was, if reporting is always getting the name of the dog, writing is knowing when not to use the name of the dog. And I love that. And I'm sure that appeals to you on some level as a journalist, but I wonder if for you, what is some of the best writing advice that you've ever come across? And you can even riff on that Finkel quote.
00:07:20
Speaker
I mean, I think, I actually think that's a great quote. I mean, I remember I tend to, um, I always think that you should be, I mean, I think, you know, the best writing slash reporting advice is always show up because that's like 90% of it. You need to kind of
00:07:39
Speaker
I mean, we can do a ton of reporting on the phone and through research and stuff. But and, you know, Lord knows that's how I did most of this, you know, did most of the work of this book. But I do think that Finkel's point is beautiful and well taken that like, actually, you do need to know the name of the dog.
00:07:59
Speaker
because it tells you something about the dog and it tells you something about the owners. And then you can kind of build the world around that. The creative part is in the writing, I think. I mean, not I think, I know that is the creative part is figuring out how to paint the picture in a way that it comes alive for the reader, for the audience.
00:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, and especially true, too, is you can do all the gathering you want, and you need at some point or another to show some degree of restraint. And that is really hard when you've done a ton of legwork, you've done all this reporting, you've gotten all the names of the dog, but then realizing, okay, is this really necessary? Is this an oar in the boat that's going to row this thing forward? And I think that's really hard.
00:08:48
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hard to do in early drafts and even sometimes harder to do in later drafts when you really love some of these things that you've really that you've worked so hard on.
00:08:56
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I agree. I definitely. Yes, I think ultimately what you're saying is one must edit, which I believe like if we're going to do advice from people, let's talk about Coco Chanel. And you always remove one accessory before you walk out the door, which is a piece of advice I find sometimes difficult to take when I especially love an earring or something. But
00:09:24
Speaker
I do think actually writing for TV has been the most helpful for knowing when to pare back, because so much of writing for TV, and I'm sure this is true for audio, but I don't write for audio as much, but I think when you're writing like a long-form piece or a magazine piece or a feature piece for a newspaper,
00:09:47
Speaker
You do, those early drafts are all about dumping everything you know, or at least my, everybody has their way of writing, but mine is like, I want all the details and then like you said, and then it's about going and scaling it back and kind of like, you know, doing it, pulling back, pulling back, pulling back, pulling back. And I think writing, learning how to write on deadline and learning how to write for different media also helps you
00:10:17
Speaker
know what to cut and maybe what's, what you're, you maybe don't feel as precious about some of your darlings. How have you learned to cultivate or even develop that firewall between the generative writer that needs to get all that stuff down and the editor who's going to come in later and rewrite the heck out of it and maybe even lop off 25% of all that stuff you just did but in service of the story in the end?
00:10:47
Speaker
I think there is no better editor than giving yourself time and space. I think people don't do that enough. I think there's something about, I don't know, I don't know if it's like a work ethic thing or I don't know what it is, but sometimes I watch writers
00:11:04
Speaker
toil and like really just like sweat over the laptop. And my job as the editor is really to go in and be like, close the laptop, go for a walk. And they, you know, my writers sometimes bite me on that. But I really think there's no way for you to know what you need without space, what you need in the story. Because also, you don't have
00:11:28
Speaker
I guess that's like a long way of saying this is all a long way of saying like you need perspective. That's the, that's the firewall is perspective. And, and distance and space also checks your ego a bit. You're not so attached to all the words because then you can come in fresh the next day or an hour later or a week later, or, you know, a year later and be like, Oh, I understand what I was trying to do.
00:11:53
Speaker
And like, thank you, past my me, past writer. That was very, very helpful. But I think you missed the piece. You know, you've been talking about this dog the whole time, but really it's the kid that's been taking care of the dog. That's the story or vice versa.
00:12:08
Speaker
And I've been working like hell on a book proposal for a biography and a lot of the research I'm doing is newspapers.com and it's a lot of just type something in, get all the results, copy, take pictures, screenshots, all that stuff. And it's all good and it's all going in to the well. But on some level it kind of feels somewhat lazy. It's just that you can type in anything and it finds out, okay, save that.
00:12:34
Speaker
But ultimately I think, and I think this might appeal to you given your journalism background and certainly mine as well, is that the real goal is finding the work and the research that you can't Google. And I wonder if maybe you can speak to the importance of some of that boot leather reporting that you can't Google.
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think, well, speaking of just like what you had said before about like feeling almost guilty about just like putting a thing, putting words into a machine and it spits out. There's something about it that feels like too easy or something. Like you're cheating in a way. Like almost like you're cheating. And then you realize that actually you spent a lot of time
00:13:16
Speaker
like a lot of times searching through like combing information and it that's what becomes that's what gives you the expertise to as you say know what to like you know cut away you know and newspapers.com I'm not
00:13:32
Speaker
Sponsored by them, but they are a treasure truly. It's amazing what you're able to do but you know what I find that Things like microfiche or going to the archives or so much of that's online now or you know Something like a ancestry or a newspapers comm what that does is really help you kind of an aggregate like you can
00:13:58
Speaker
It doesn't necessarily, unless you're like doing a very serious like investigative piece where you're looking for that one kind of needle in a haystack. What it does is it like helps paint a picture of a period or time or, you know, an issue as it were, but the shoe leather then comes in, for example.
00:14:17
Speaker
You know, I did a lot of research in the book about a certain period of time in Berkeley, California. So I had just done like a ton of that type of research that you're talking about.
00:14:29
Speaker
and like a ton of archival research, both the easy and the difficult, you know, easy in quotes and the difficult kind. But I think it made such a difference to be able to go to Berkeley, California and, you know, not just walk around. I mean, I went back and forth there as a kid, so I was familiar with it. But I had people who were there at that time who were involved in this movement
00:14:53
Speaker
take me around literally street by street. I sat with them in various coffee shops. We drove and drove and drove around the town and they were able to point out where the city had changed or where this was the house where we sat down and we decided to start this group.
00:15:14
Speaker
Then I was able to pull some of those details because when you're recreating something that not only were you not there, but there's not a ton of information about it, there's not a ton of academic literature around it, you're creating something out of air. Those details, I remember the house that somebody had shown me had been redone and it was beautifully painted and it was gray house and it had these red painted
00:15:43
Speaker
these fresh red stairs painted. There was something about that detail that it felt important to me because it felt like something that we had been living in the past, in this recreated past, and now I was able to give the reader something I'd latched onto a picture in their head where it suddenly grounded them. I couldn't have done that. I don't think I could have done that without being there, without being shown around, without spending so much time talking to people about
00:16:13
Speaker
a period of time that is long gone, no matter how many documentaries you watch, you're never going to know it. You know what I mean? How do you find the connections between the present and the past? I think that's what this type of writing
00:16:29
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And I know for me, and maybe this is true for you too, that when it comes to the research, you can do all that sort of archival stuff, newspaper stuff, but it doesn't really start to feel like something uniquely only you can do until you start interviewing the people. And you're like, this is someone I'm in front of.
00:16:49
Speaker
getting information, asking questions through my lens and my taste, and filling up my notebook or my recorder with things that only I have gathered. And at that point it really starts, at least for me, the fuel tank really starts to fill up and I'm just like, oh wow, this is, I'm energized by this.
Personal Growth Through Writing
00:17:06
Speaker
And I wonder if maybe you feel that way too.
00:17:08
Speaker
I mean, I think the best part of our job is the sitting down and being able to lose yourself in somebody else's story and really like, yeah, you use a phrase filling up your tank. Like it's.
00:17:25
Speaker
you as the interviewer only matter in so much as you are teasing out information. But whatever day you've had doesn't really matter because it can't in that moment. The person across from you and the bigger story that you're trying to get to, that relationship is so intimate and it's so special and it really comes down. There are some really extraordinary interviewers
00:17:54
Speaker
who are out there, you know, someone like Finkel, I think of like Eli Sazlow's work. And you can tell the skill of their interviewing because of the beauty of the portraits that they're able to paint from those details, that you're able to get, like you said, in those conversations. Because you go into an interview, hopefully having prepared, but you know, the dirty secret is actually sometimes you don't have to have prepared.
00:18:23
Speaker
You just have to go in as curious as you possibly can be and ask and keep asking questions until the person and that person will, you know, lead hopefully lead you. I mean, not completely, but like the story comes from that curiosity, I think, and that and the other person being willing to answer and being giving.
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah, and there has to be a certain measure of comfort, especially when you're interviewing for scene where you have to ask sometimes really inane details that, you know, I'm always like, listen, I'm sorry, like I'm a stickler for detail, but do you remember what you were wearing? Do you remember the sounds of the room? What was smelling? What was the last thing you would cook that day? I don't know. Just things are just coming off the top of my head. And they look at you like, what the hell are you talking about? Why does this matter?
00:19:14
Speaker
And to me, it all matters. And I wonder if maybe you can speak to that degree of granular interviewing that's building scene where you have to kind of preface the person to be like, listen, just bear with me as I get these details. You're nicer than I am. I was going to say, I think the difficulty there is not losing the connection. Because I think, you know, I find the interviews, especially when it's that immersive, really
00:19:44
Speaker
Like I feel like just exhausted, like depleted, like to my bones, exhausted afterwards. I mean, I think it's also like staying connected with somebody that long. I mean, we normally don't do that in our lives. Our brains are going this way and that way and the other way. And then, you know, obviously it's a journalist. You're always like, it's my recorder working, my writing as fast as you can. But especially I find when I really need those details are when
00:20:11
Speaker
When, when this is like a pivotal part of their story and I know it is like, I know this is like a moment of deep. Whatever trauma in some cases or excitement and others like this is a point where the action has to slow down. And so I need them to be able to stay in that moment, go back to that moment. And I need them. And this, I think is, is really difficult.
00:20:39
Speaker
but I need it not to hurt them. I need to make sure that they, because like you said, I always think people don't ask enough about what did it smell like? What was the texture of the air? Because sometimes when you're in that place where something that's big or something that's critical has happened,
00:21:02
Speaker
your senses kind of heighten in that moment and you don't even realize it. So what you're asking is for them, and you can see that in the way that you tell stories. If you get in a car accident, you talk about it's slowing down, the world's slowing down and then speeding up again. So the trick is to try to get people to stay in that slowness and focus a bit.
00:21:24
Speaker
and not too long because you don't want to hurt anyone but like what you know what did it smell like what it was the the sound of like
00:21:33
Speaker
Or was there a sound of shattering glass? What was the furthest thing that you can remember? Is there a color that stuck out to you? Do you remember if your teeth chattered? Those type of things. I think the trick is for me, because I'm so scared about ruining somebody's day or accidentally forcing them to have another therapy session that they maybe didn't budget for, that it just has to be super quick and then you go.
00:22:02
Speaker
And then you leave that topic and you kind of come back if, if, if you see them, yeah, I guess be stronger about it or, or feel, if they're okay about it, then you can linger. But, but those are, yeah, I mean, those are the best parts when somebody can remember something like, um, the smell of barbecue on the day their dad left, for example.
00:22:22
Speaker
then you have an entire scene. You just need a few details. And the best part is you like literally something like that. You have the tone of their voice. You have how they answer your questions. They don't even need to say a whole lot.
00:22:38
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And with this book that you wrote, I believe you started essentially the reporting or the research or the idea of it was probably what, 2013? Is that right? So where are we now in that timeline, eight to nine years later?
00:22:55
Speaker
You talked earlier about time giving you perspective and time being a friend in the editing process. How did time help you from the inception of this project to where it ultimately got?
00:23:11
Speaker
I think, I mean, that in some ways is, and that's probably, I think it's a good question. I think this book is kind of, most books are, but this book was birthed because it took so long. Like I think it needed, I needed to grow up during the writing of it.
00:23:36
Speaker
There was a lot of reporting that went into it, but there was a lot of my own work that I had to do. I had to figure out how to write this book that didn't really make, when I tried to describe it to people, I didn't have the words for it. So I needed time to kind of wrap my head around.
00:23:59
Speaker
the ambition around it. And, you know, the other thing is I think a memoir, which, you know, this book is that is a snapshot of a period of time for the author. And, you know, I started this book about three years after my mom passed away, and I'm ending it that
00:24:23
Speaker
or ending it, like it's coming out into the world when she's, after she's been gone for about 12 years. So I also think the perspective of spending, of really like sinking in to both grief and then coming out of like that acute grief was really helpful. Cause this is a book in some ways that is about a grieving. How do you grieve people that are, how do you tell, keep people alive? How do you pay tribute to your ancestors?
00:24:51
Speaker
I mean, that's what I think in some ways journalism is. It's a paying tribute. It's a posterity.
00:24:58
Speaker
It's a record keeping, you know, I find it to be pretty like a secret undertaking in some ways. So I think I needed to come to that. I wasn't so sanguine about it. I wasn't like a wise woman about it. I was really frustrated and angry for a lot of it that like, why was it staying so long? Why couldn't I do this faster? Why couldn't I rate it faster? Why couldn't I sell it faster? Why couldn't, why was this happening?
00:25:24
Speaker
What was wrong with me? What was wrong with me? But I think I was just thinking about this today. One of my mom's old friends called right before this and her reaction and several people's reaction to the book has been so moving that it did occur to me today that this book softened over time. It deepened over time because it had the space to
00:25:50
Speaker
It had the space to work its way out of me. I don't know if that makes sense, but it needed to work its way out of me and it couldn't be rushed, you know. How did, and granted this was very far along in the process, but how did becoming a mother yourself inform maybe the final stretch of this book?
00:26:11
Speaker
I think it informed the framing. I mean, literally, it informed the framing. That's how it's framed. But I think because I was finishing the manuscript while I was pregnant, and not only while I was pregnant during the protests, the racial justice protests of 2020 during a pandemic, and as I was covering the 2020 election, there was a lot of churn happening. There was a lot of
00:26:38
Speaker
social and political unrest. There was a lot of history happening. And this is a book that isn't both informed by history, but it's a meditation on what that means. And then of course, like I said, it's a book about grief. And so it's a book about my parents. So what happens
00:26:56
Speaker
So I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, what does it mean now that I am about to become a parent? And I remember I would, one of the climactic parts of the book is we escaped from Iran when my mother was seven months pregnant when she escaped from Iran with me.
00:27:15
Speaker
And I literally was writing the last scene of the book. It was right after the January 6th insurrection. And, you know, I remember my son just moving around in my belly as I'm both covering the insurrection and as I'm writing the last pages and there was something incredibly profound and
00:27:38
Speaker
somehow it grounded me but it you know it just I don't I don't know that I actually have the words I felt it felt faded and I'm not somebody who uses that you know it sounds very magical thinking but
00:27:55
Speaker
But it felt somehow faded that it should take that long because Rumi needed to be, my son needed to be a part of this somehow. It also helped me think through what I meant about the generations being connected. Because until Rumi, until my son came into the picture, I was the hard stop. And what Rumi did was continue, like there was a suggestion of a future, another generation after me.
00:28:23
Speaker
Yeah, when your grandfather, or your great grandfather, I think, chose the surname, it essentially put a little clause on the sentence of where you say like, when my, I guess grandfather, I'm sorry, when your grandfather chose it, we began to be what we would become, a clan of wanderers and seekers, determined dreamers, moving through a too real world.
00:28:49
Speaker
And I just I love hearing that and I wonder like when you when you think about that and what your grandfather essentially forged and how the how room he's able to sort of carry that to you know what what goes through your mind when you're writing that sentence and then maybe even just hearing it reflected back to you. I remember writing that I mean that scene is yeah my grandfather when he was quite young.
00:29:11
Speaker
walking from Semnan to Tehran to try to work and I think it was 13 at the time to find work and at the time he had to decide our last name because there wasn't something that people had in Iran at that point.
00:29:28
Speaker
One of the things that really struck me about that scene is I think there was something so American in the kind of capital A American myth of go west young man. And in my head, that rhythm of the go west young man was like playing over and over again in my head. And I think some of that cadence comes out, I mean, hopefully the that was the
00:29:51
Speaker
The cadence of walking, of moving, that kind of rhythm of moving forward was part of the prose in that section. But yeah, I mean, for me, that section, one of the things that I tried to tease out was how closely connected the myth of America is with the myth of Iran and with all of our mythos.
00:30:16
Speaker
So that was a scene that I really, I mean, I was very close to my grandfather. I loved him. I used to say he was my soulmate. So that section felt like such a privilege too, because I got to be with him in my head for a little bit. That's one of my favorites that I can go back to. And I just feel like maybe he is somehow folded into those words and I get to visit him.
Memoir Writing and Journalism Skills
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah, of course. And when we had our little pre-chat last week, I was talking to you kind of about this tool that you were essentially able to use, which is kind of like a journalistic detachment, I think, which allowed you to tell a very personal story of people very dear to you with
00:31:03
Speaker
Not objectivity, but I think some distance that allowed you to tell the story in the truest, you know, rawest way possible. And it goes to a sense, and I love this kind of memoir where the writer is really on a quest of some sort of discovery. I think of Lily Danziger's Negative Space, you know, David Carr's Night of the Gun.
00:31:24
Speaker
And in this too, as you're trying to piece together your parents story. So, you know, how, you know, maybe you give us a sense of, you know, using that journalistic detachment to tell a personal story. It's still a memoir, but it's not a you're not as forward. Your parents are very much forward and the movement and the time and the scene is the forward. So maybe you can speak to that. So you cut out a little bit. But I think I think I got the gist of the question. Like I.
00:31:53
Speaker
Um, yeah, how I, I think being a journalist really, I don't know how people can write memoirs without being a journalist because it is so, I don't know how you, I don't know how people do it. I mean, they're my hats. I mean, it's true admiration because I think the tools of journalism saved me in so many ways. I you're right about the, um,
00:32:21
Speaker
Sorry, I live in New York, so of course there's going to be sirens. It's an audio seasoning. Yeah, so the tools of journalism gave me a little bit of distance.
00:32:38
Speaker
And they also, uh, yeah, so they saved me. They were able to kind of insulate the core of me during some of the more difficult parts, but they also, I think they also gave me a false sense of safety in some ways. Um, I spent some time thinking, um, with some of the more difficult sections that, Oh, well, I'm a journalist and I know how to, um,
00:33:03
Speaker
I know how to hold myself with some distance and I can just like work this scene to death until I get it right. And actually I would forget that this is something I wasn't just writing about.
00:33:18
Speaker
you know, your father, I was writing about my own father. And even if I was writing about your father, I would, you know, writing something that can be, you know, that's about somebody dying the way that my father was, did die, can be very, you know, difficult and harrowing. And, and it's, you know, so even if I was writing about a stranger, I would do it differently. But, but I didn't, it didn't have
00:33:43
Speaker
the experience maybe, and maybe I didn't have the self-awareness to know that journalism doesn't, that distance won't save you from being human. Like you're gonna, your heart's gonna break anyway. So you just have to be just exceedingly careful with yourself.
00:34:03
Speaker
But the book is structured where that journalism is really kind of front loaded. I mean, it's all through, it's woven all through, but it is that distance, that like distant first person is really front loaded. And as the book goes from talking about the years I don't exist when
00:34:26
Speaker
When I'm recreating things, the voice, the point of view kind of becomes more and more intimate and then ultimately more fragmented because then you're inside of me. As the reader, you're in my brain, you're with me. It becomes harder to tell a linear story when you get too close. For sure.
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, and speaking of the structure of the book, like you front-loaded with a lot of the context of the geopolitical context of which your parents sort of parachute into. And then that the big middle chunk is this really harrowing recreation of the escape from Iran. And the third chunk is a lot of emails and journal entries and everything.
00:35:15
Speaker
Well, Jordan, maybe you can just walk us through how you went about structuring this book to tell it in that manner. And yeah, with special attention to that middle section, because that was a really harrowing and gripping writing and reading for that escape. That was amazing stuff.
00:35:34
Speaker
Oh, thank you. Um, yeah, that middle section took about four years, I think to get down. Um, it started with, I'm going to start with that part of your question. Cause I think that section was, I wrote it while I was actually at Goucher. I wrote the first draft. Um, and it was, I had been given a recording of my mother, a long recording, like eight hours or something.
00:36:03
Speaker
where she went into detail about it. So the first thing I did was transcribe that and kind of just like try to get my head around her version. And then she's the only person that had passed away at that point. I mean, everybody else is still alive of my family who was involved. So I was able to, what I then did was essentially go through each person's version of what happened, version of events.
00:36:34
Speaker
And then this was, that was the first version was just doing that was like figuring out where things overlapped. It took me a long time, maybe.
00:36:46
Speaker
two years to figure out, because everybody's memories were just different enough, I couldn't get a timeline. But this goes back to what you were saying before about knowing what details to leave in and which ones to take out. I find when something is meant to be propulsive, when it's supposed to really grab you, actually then you want the writing to slow down.
00:37:14
Speaker
You don't want to give people too many details because their brains will pick up where you left off. And I remember I figured this out when I was reading C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In my head, it was this whole different thing. But when you go back to read it, the writing was so spare, actually, and there wasn't a ton of details. My brain had filled everything out.
00:37:39
Speaker
you know, everything out. So I really took that as a model. And I remember any time the sentences got too long in that middle section, I would cut them in half. And I just kind of went over it and over it and over it. You know, a couple of years later, my aunt found a diary of hers that she had written right after the escape. And that had like a ton of details. And then my brother had
00:38:10
Speaker
taken a bunch of videos from the last year of my mother's life. And in one of those, the family had come together for Thanksgiving. I think it was Thanksgiving. And everybody who was in the escape sat around and talked about it. And so I went through and teased out some of those details. And yeah, so that section was really about, like you said, filling it up with detail, but then just going through it over and over and over and over until there was almost
00:38:39
Speaker
that there was, so then your brain would like latch on when I said a red Sudan, a boxy red Sudan or something about the car, because that is the only thing that you had to kind of grab onto.
00:38:55
Speaker
Yeah, and then there's the very short sections that you write in, which are probably during that, which I found pretty propulsive and like bite-sized, but also just animated with the energy of the page break. Also, because those sections might be, I don't know, three or four hundred words at a crack, and it's just like one toehold, one handhold, and here we go as you advance this.
00:39:17
Speaker
that's really the aid of this harrowing quest, really, and journey to get out of the country. Was that something on your mind, too, that you wanted to have these bite-sized elements of blocks, almost like story blocks, as we advance? Yeah. I mean, I think how you said it about the handheld, I wanted the reader to feel like they were essentially
00:39:46
Speaker
like moving themselves through the story. I mean, you had asked about how I structured it before. And honestly, this is one of those books that I don't know how I could have done it outside of just like rearranging the pieces until they fit. You know what I mean? Like it was a real moving each fragment around.
00:40:11
Speaker
Obviously, I don't think it reads like it was sitting down and writing it start to finish. It was almost each section I wrote differently and then smoothed it out in the editing process. The hope is that it feels almost like a Russian doll.
00:40:37
Speaker
that the layers you peel away are not maybe onion structure more that you like peel away one layer and then the next layer and then the next layer. But yeah, I mean, I knew I had, it had to be three sections. I knew that. I knew I had to be before my parents. I had to be when they met to the revolution, then it had to be them going back to Iran.
00:41:03
Speaker
And then so it had to be 79 to the escape, which was 82. And then the real question mark for me was what happens when we get back? What happens when we come back to the States? How do I tell the story of my life, like my personal life in a way that
00:41:28
Speaker
feels accurate and is something that I could actually do, but also felt true to the story.
00:41:37
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a moment, too, where, you know, talking about breaking up that whole part, too, like there's a long, you know, a long section of many sections of that journey. And then you get a lot of those details from your uncle, who, you know, came over and really facilitated matters for everybody. And then, you know, you break in at one point, you're just like,
00:42:00
Speaker
you know, thanks for getting us out of their D, who you've heard in the book. And then it's just kind of like back to that. It was just, it was just kind of a nice little like hat tip and a little way of that we break out of the narrative they were telling to come to the current day, but then we're kind of like back into it. It was like, I don't know, like, well, you know, what, as a creative decision, like, how did that pop into your head?
00:42:21
Speaker
You know, that's a good question because it felt so important. I mean, I think a lot of this book is also me acknowledging how many people
00:42:34
Speaker
We are all, all of us rely on people, right? To like help facilitate whatever's happening in our lives. And in this case, my uncle had to come over and he, he put himself at risk for, for us to be safe. And he, you know, I mean, one of the things that really, and the story is obviously I, I scaled it down.
00:43:01
Speaker
because it could be an entire book on itself, I think. Then my aunt and uncle who were stuck in Turkey, they have a whole other harrowing story that happened to get them out of Turkey. First of all, I wanted to remind people that this is stories that people are telling me, that I haven't made these wholesale, but also that this is
00:43:30
Speaker
This is a story of a family. And part of that is like the comfort and the intimacy of staying up late into the night with your uncle and then stepping back and being like, thanks for coming to get me. Like, you're my uncle. Like, thank you. And, you know, because it's, I mean, in some ways.
00:43:53
Speaker
The everyday things that we do for each other, we spend a lot of time, especially as journalists, harping on all the bad things we do to each other, and we should. But I do think sometimes it's nice to step out and be like, yeah, thank your people, man.
00:44:09
Speaker
But speaking of your uncle and speaking of the the journalistic rigor that you exercised in this like there's there's a moment to where you're sort of at the at the border I believe in Turkey you're looking to get on an airplane I think and
00:44:25
Speaker
and your aunt has a very forged passport. Your mother remembers your brother being very goofy and being like, ah, he's being goofy, like focus, would you? But, so that's her point of view, but what really was going on was he was trying to create a distraction because that passport that your aunt had was so fake, just to get her to Spain. I think that's where she needed to go, so it was just like,
00:44:54
Speaker
the fact that you're interviewing these different people, you get all those different perspectives that, oh, this is how one person saw it, but this is how it really was going on. I thought that was just really, you know, just really good legwork on your part.
00:45:07
Speaker
I felt like that was really important for me because when my mother had told that story, it sounded painful to her. And I remember feeling like it was actually kind of like a beautiful symbolic moment.
00:45:27
Speaker
I could see how that would play and it would be kind of like devastating and sad. And then when I asked my uncle about it and he remembered it so clearly, it changed. I mean, this goes back to what you were asking, like, what is the, how does the leg work? How does the gumshoe reporting change? How does asking questions change it? All of a sudden it made it so much more interesting to me that there was, it like brought all these textures. This was like.
00:45:53
Speaker
This was an emergency situation. Everyone's like just trying to figure out how to survive, you know, to survive, literally. How do you escape? How do you leave this one country and then get to a place where you're safe? And we are all, you know, I say this in the book over and over again, we only have a certain amount of information, each one of us.
00:46:16
Speaker
And so, yeah, so that just seemed like to me to be like this perfect moment where you can be standing right next to somebody having the exact same, you know, the exact same moment you're living through the exact same moment and your understanding of it is just so different. Like it's night and day and at the same time.
00:46:39
Speaker
there is so much love there, you know, like that you, yeah, there's just like this, it's just like a rich tapestry of what it means to be family and human in that moment.
00:46:52
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a moment too early in the book, and then you echo it much later, where knowing the world that your parents were from and that you were born into, you ask if he, meaning your father, knew this was what was going to happen. Why did he decide to have a family?
00:47:15
Speaker
And that really broke you down and broke your heart at this moment in the book. And then you ask yourself that same question at the very end of the book, too, in the world that, you know, you've brought you've started
Life Choices and Recommendations
00:47:26
Speaker
a family. And so, you know, what how how is that question ping ponged in your head from, you know, from your parents to you? Yeah, I mean, I think I think this is when you asked earlier what has becoming a parent, how has that changed the book, I think.
00:47:45
Speaker
I mean, even you asking that question like made me want to just put my head down and weep. I don't know if I made, I don't know. I mean, I remember when Joy told me that story about my father being so determined and so sure that he was
00:48:04
Speaker
He was going to go back to Iran and like, you know, he was a revolutionary and who knows if he was going to make it. And I can just see like so many young, like it's like the pinnacle of the young kind of idealistic man, woman, you know, going to change the world come what may.
00:48:20
Speaker
And then, of course, you know, 10 years later or something, he has a kid. And, you know, I know what that means 10 years after you say one thing to be, you know, an adult and you have, I mean, a different kind of adult, you have a whole different, you know, span of events behind you.
00:48:41
Speaker
understanding of the world and life is both less complicated and more complicated than you thought it was going to be. And then here I am. I still don't know how to reconcile the choice of I have this beautiful baby who
00:49:01
Speaker
just seems to have so much fun being alive. And my heart kind of breaks because I know the world that he's the world that we all live in, you know, I mean, specifically in this moment with like the political divisions and climate change and, you know, the rise of authoritarianism and
00:49:23
Speaker
the pandemic and my heart just, uh, it just, I don't know. I, so to answer it, but I, I don't know. I mean, part of me also has hope. It's so dumb, but I have so much hope still. And I think that that's, whenever I think about it, I think, well, you know, he's not wrong to love being alive. It's, it's a beautiful thing. And, and we need good people to make sure we survive.
00:49:50
Speaker
There is a part in the book, later in the book, where you write this way of coping, exploring and indulging my curiosities has never left me. It's a fundamental part of who I am and how I navigate my world. It's why I'm the person I am. It's why I am a writer.
00:50:06
Speaker
And maybe in there is your little nugget of your writer origin stories. Maybe you can just kind of give us a glimpse as to that coping, exploring, indulging curiosities, that core of you that made you become a writer. So how did you lean into this mess that we're all in?
00:50:23
Speaker
So one of the things I'm going back to an earlier question you asked, like, how did time change this book? I think, you know, going back to having perspective, I realized, you know, I was telling the story of this is
00:50:39
Speaker
when I was trying to write the story of my relationship with my father, which I can only know only in pieces. And one of the things that really struck me was my dad spent so much time telling me stories, helping me tell stories like you would make these cartoons and we would tell these stories, this is what I've heard, tell these stories together. But I remember that. I remember the cartoons. I remember how important they were to me. And then my grandmother, when we came to the States,
00:51:08
Speaker
same thing. She would just sit with me and have me tell stories and tell me stories, have me tell stories. My grandfather, the same thing. And one of the things I realized was like that, that is essentially what this book is. It's a telling and retelling of stories over and over again. And that is how we make as writers, you and me make sense of a world that is
00:51:31
Speaker
I mean, that's how poets do it. That's how artists do it. The world itself, I think, feels so big. And so you can't kind of get your head around it or your arms around it. And so I think my writer origin story basically starts with those young moments of just trying to make sense of things that just cannot make sense to a child.
00:51:58
Speaker
The only way that you can do that is by sitting down and telling the story as you know it in one way, which I tried to relay in the book, but you tell the story one way and then you come back and you find you are saying it again and it changes the way that you go about telling it changes. It solves for something else.
00:52:28
Speaker
Does that make sense? Oh, for sure.
00:52:33
Speaker
Yeah, there's getting into, yeah, it's just, I get it. It's a hard question to answer because it's ongoing, it's developing, it's who you are, it's baked into who you are. Even when you have an email there from your mom who's correcting your grammar in your email, it's just like, oh, that's a really funny grace note that tells everything you need to know about your mom and a little bit about your dynamic.
00:53:01
Speaker
and everything and probably something you're like, oh, come on, really? You're going to nitpick two versus two here. It's a typo, mom. Oh, my God. Are you kidding me? You know, the great joke on her is that she passed away and the daughter that didn't know grammar is now an editor and a writer.
00:53:20
Speaker
So, Netta, a lot of times with these conversations, I like to bring the airliner down for a landing by asking guests for a recommendation of some kind to the listeners. And that can be anything from a brand of coffee to a pair of socks. It can be professional, personal. It can be both. So I'd extend that to you, Netta. What might you recommend to the listeners out there? Well, can I recommend two quick things?
00:53:45
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And it doesn't have to be quick. You can elaborate all you want. All right. Well, I just finished the latest Sally Rooney, which I really enjoyed. It was a very quick read in like that best way. And people haven't read her. They should. Normal People is one of my favorite books of a few years ago. And I ended up making a friend on the plane because he loved it so much. So I highly recommend both Normal People and
00:54:14
Speaker
beautiful world. Where are you? But my very it's not even guilty because I take it very seriously is reality television. All right. Season two of Love is Blind is bonkers and insane. And it really brings people together because I've spent more time
00:54:36
Speaker
talking about the first however many episodes. I'm not sure it's, listen, I'm a connoisseur of really like, just, I have, I have a, in my family, in my household, we spend a lot of time watching dating shows. This is, I want to be very clear, very troubling in some ways. But if you want good television, if you want to see people making like,
00:55:05
Speaker
What seems like pretty not, you know, like authentic reactions, this is it. And there is a very specific scene where people are sitting at a bar and tea is being spilled and I have never, it's like watching the, like a tanker crash and it's, I've never seen anything like it. My head was in my arms and I could not believe what I was watching. It is.
00:55:34
Speaker
highly recommended piece of television.
00:55:37
Speaker
But it's great to have stuff of that nature that really, even if it's trashy TV, to unplug from things and just to turn your brain off and just watch something like that. And it can be nourishing content or it can just be something that is just there for pure entertainment so you can just really veg and turn your brain off. Oh, for sure. I mean, like, this is not the Great British Bake Off, which is like a very comforting reality television program. Right. This is, like I said, it's
00:56:07
Speaker
It's a lot. It asks a lot of us as human beings to watch the show, but it washes over me. It's been a hard work week and I've just like fallen in. I've like sunk into my couch and let the show wash over me. So my recommendation is trash. Awesome. And I'd add a recommendation too, which is on your Twitter account is to get a good look at your Twitter avatar picture. It is the best picture I think I've ever seen.
00:56:36
Speaker
Oh, I thank you. I very much appreciate that. I love that picture. Very nice. Well, the book's incredible. I burned through it over the weekend, and it was a treat and a treasure to read. But for the podcast audience, of course, for people who might not be familiar with who you are and where to find your work, where can they find you online and get a little bit more familiar with you and your work?
00:57:01
Speaker
Um, yeah, I write for Vice News. So if you, um, head over to vice news.com should watch us on Vice TV on Showtime. Um, I'm on Twitter at, uh, Netta N E D a underscore some Nani S E M N A N I. Um, so follow me there. And my website is Netta.com.
00:57:26
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, I look forward to a chance we get to do this again, Netta. And once again, thanks for the work and thanks for the time. This was wonderful. Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was so fun.
00:57:47
Speaker
as is standard operating procedures that was a toe-tapping good time in the mosh pit that is cnf pot check out they said they wanted a revolution by netta to louis and nani gives you some great us oranian context that is pretty damn illuminating complicated shit man this world the us is like a bull in a china shop only the china shop is earth
00:58:13
Speaker
As with anything above my pay grade, I'll stuff a sock in it because I don't know what I'm talking about. This is not a novel concept by any stretch, but this past week has been particularly frenetic at C&F Pod HQ. I'm spazzing out about this book proposal. It's coming along, but my tires spin quite a bit as I kind of don't know. Sometimes I already should be doing the sample check now or trying to find a through line with the chapter outline. Or how about my overview?
00:58:43
Speaker
You know, all that stuff. If you've written book proposals, you know what it's about. If you haven't, well, at some point or another, you'll deal with it, and good luck.
00:58:54
Speaker
I do coaching, by the way. I'm keeping the pod machine in motion. My day job is what it is. I always find myself, as Cal Newport might say, contact shifting.
Productivity Tips for Writers
00:59:06
Speaker
Jumping from one reactive moment to the next. Email here, Twitter there, IG there, texting here, doodling over there, reading here. Oh shit, maybe I should meditate to calm my anxious brain. Well fuck, that 10 minutes didn't work.
00:59:20
Speaker
Anyway, I've used this metaphor before. It's like I'm afraid electrical wire just whipping around. Or maybe it's more like there's afraid electrical wire just whipping around me and I'm trying to dodge it. And I think that's more it. It's more reactive in that sense. And I don't know what will happen if it actually made contact. And so maybe it's a shitty metaphor. But I think you kind of get the idea.
00:59:45
Speaker
So, to address that, I've been doing this thing, you know, time blocking, which isn't a novel concept. Ben Franklin famously did it. Peter Drucker did it. And Cal Newport is popularized the idea with his, you know, his Deep Work book, but his time block planner. I don't use his actual planner. I have too many things of that nature, as is notebooks and so forth.
01:00:10
Speaker
I just use a field notes notebook and I draw the grids in it. The premise is you give every minute of the workday a job. You budget time, literally. For instance, today, and maybe I'll post this on the gram for shits and giggles, it's
01:00:27
Speaker
you know, six to seven is just like Meditate Journal and podcast stuff. And I'm still in that time block in the second for a few more minutes, so I'm still going. Seven to eight is some book work. Eight to nine is some more podcast stuff, probably transcripts and a little admin.
01:00:47
Speaker
From 9 to 11 is day job stuff, so morning meeting. I have to work on the Friday and Saturday page. There's another staff meeting from 11 to about 11.30 noon to 1. I work on the Sunday page from 1 to 2.30. I got to pick up letters at the office and go to the library. And then from 2 to 3 I got to work on something for the Salem newspaper and then I'll end the day with some email.
01:01:15
Speaker
And I have some few things that I'll do in the evening, but I'm just going to stop there. And I color code my pod, writing freelance working green, day job in red. If things change, you pivot from the plan. You just draw more blocks to the side and X out the ones that are no longer relevant.
01:01:34
Speaker
I liken this to a head coach's call sheet, football coach. You know that color coded thing you see the coaches refer to during the game, covering their mouths, etc. They go into the game with a plan for every situation. That said, they have to pivot based on what the other team is doing. Same goes for a time blocking. The day can throw things at you and you can adjust.
01:01:54
Speaker
but you still have that initial plan. So what this really helps me with is decision fatigue. Instead of worrying about what to do with a certain 30 minute or 60 minute chunk, I'll just scribble in, yeah, seven to eight, pod transcripts and admin, done. That's it for that block, nothing else. See it through, move on.
01:02:14
Speaker
Newport has a video about how he time blocks and the fundamentals of it on his website, which I found really helpful I've watched it a few times over the few months as I Move from one thing to the next because I can't stick with anything. I have the attention span of You know Me huh
01:02:37
Speaker
I feel much more in control of my controllables this way. I'm sure you have your own systems, but if you're susceptible to even the most minute distractions and struggle with focus, you might want to give it a try. Even if just for a few hours, say on a Sunday, like on a day you know you want to get some writing done.
01:02:53
Speaker
and you're putting a little pressure on yourself for like, this is my three hour block of the week where I actually get to work on my thing. You could say seven to eight, you know, just your writing, eight to nine, some research that maybe comes up as a result of the writing you did and you're like, oh, I need to fill in some holes. And then nine to 10, maybe you read, you know, built into those blocks is like a little transition period, like maybe a five to 10 minute walk at the end of each block. That way you're not just shifting from one to the other without a breather.
01:03:22
Speaker
Give it a try. It's helping me a bit. My problem, as I already said, is that I'm very much a shiny new objects kind of dude. So I hope to stick with it. Hope it helps because it's hard out there. Everything is trying to compete for our attention, whether it's podcasts or social media, TV. We are under attack and bludgeoned by the almighty algorithm.
01:03:49
Speaker
Something to think about. In any case, see you in efforts. Stay wild, and if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:04:15
Speaker
you