Month: November 2009

I’m thrilled to let you all know that I have a short story in Dinarzad’s Children, an anthology of Arab American writing edited by Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa. The story is called “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter,” and almost everyone who has read it has mistaken it for an essay. It isn’t; it’s fiction. But this is what I get for writing in the first-person point of view.

At any rate, I hope you’ll look for this anthology in your neighborhood bookstore or library because it’s got some great writing by Rabih Alameddine, Rawi Hage, Laila Halaby, Alia Yunis, Diana Abu Jaber, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Yussef El Guindi, and the lovely and amazing Randa Jarrar, among many others.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, a writer, and we found ourselves doing that thing that writers often do: sharing horror stories about the book world. Here is one (among many) I told her. Several years ago, at a summer writers’ conference, I met a magazine editor who happened to be from the same city I lived in at the time. The editor said she was looking for slush pile readers, and I naively expressed some interest in helping out, on a volunteer basis. She sized me up, then asked, “How old are you?”

I didn’t quite understand why she asked me my age, but I answered, almost mechanically, “Thirty five.”

“Oh,” said the magazine editor. “Well, if you would like to volunteer your time, we really need help with office work.”

In a swift second, I had been reclassified from a potential reader of undiscovered gems to the person who stuffs rejection notices in envelopes. Needless to say, I never submitted any work to her. Eventually, I published a bunch of stories, then a book, and then another book. The kicker? A few years later, the editor, too, published a book. Then her publicist emailed me to ask me whether I could review it.

This month marks the eighth anniversary of my blog. The site has gone from an anonymous, sporadically updated, somewhat personal diary to an eponymous record of my literary, cultural, and political interests. But lately you may have noticed, dear reader, that I remain silent for several days on end and that my posts have become shorter. I think the reason for this is that I’ve changed my writing routine quite drastically. I used to write in the afternoon, after I’d read the day’s news, answered my emails, attended to any deadlines, and updated my blog. I figured I had to get all of the distractions out of the way so I could focus on my writing. Sometime last year, however, I realized that I could never ever catch up with email and that, in fact, the more prompt I was at answering email, the more of it I received. So I’ve been writing first thing in the morning, which means that everything else is pushed back to later in the day. Especially now that I’ve started work on my new novel. Still, I love having a place in which I can post commentary on things that interest me so this blog is not going anywhere anytime soon.