10 Questions for Nayereh Doosti
- By Franchesca Viaud
Seyyed Gholam Hossein Shabdari Kermani was blessed with a clitoris on his right nipple, or at least that was his pickup line. This is a story about him. At the raw age of five, he discovered pleasure while playing with a pink screwdriver in an empty garage, where his balding father and seven potbellied uncles played soccer and scored lazy goals between two stacks of bricks. It was a nice and sultry Gulf evening, their yolk-hued Seleção Brasileira jerseys dotted with perspiration, their knees scraped, sweat dripping down their napes.
—from "Things She Wouldn't Tell," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
In my teens, I read lots of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Carver, and Lahiri (alongside a healthy dose of YA series). And not because I was an obnoxious teen, but because those were the kinds of books I often found in my school libraries or on my sisters’ shelves. And though these days I’m trying my best to catch up with more contemporary writing, I think it’s impossible not to admit the influence those writers had on my work, considering I began writing my own stories just as I began reading those writers. And I’m not sure if that’s an influence on style or content necessarily, but on the urge (to attempt, at least) to tell stories that can move one the way theirs moved me. I think Jhumpa Lahiri in particular had a significant role in encouraging me to write because of the possibilities it introduced me to: stories that were beautiful and touching and challenging, and contemporary too. I was reading all this in an Iranian context where there wasn’t a large readership for contemporary fiction, in translation or not, and everything felt outdated, even if incredibly moving. I think this has changed a bit in Iran over the past decade or so, but for my fourteen-year-old self, Jhumpa Lahiri was the first introduction to contemporary fiction that felt engaging. Her work allowed me to imagine worlds and stories that could take place around me, with characters and settings I was familiar with. It made me realize I didn’t need to be in nineteenth-century Siberia to tell a good story. And I think for that, Jhumpa Lahiri will always remain a sentimental influence at least.
What other professions have you worked in?
I’ve worked in libraries, museums, classrooms, homes, and other places, not always by choice but by virtue of my visa status.
What inspired you to write this piece?
“My Wife” started with an old draft I wrote a long time ago that I’ve worked and reworked over the years. What inspired it, like most of my stories, was a (terribly-written) scene it used to open with, but I’m thankful to Sigrid Nunez’s workshop and my writer friends for making me rethink that opening and allow the story to stand on its own. Now it seems to have been inspired by many things, but really, it all began with a stupid scene I was excited to expand.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
For a long time, it used to be images from my childhood surroundings: Iran, Shiraz, the Persian Gulf, but most of that has faded for me now. Still, sometimes, as I desperately try to remember more of my childhood, consciously or subconsciously I return to those places of my past and hope to recall them in the fictive realm, but that’s becoming harder and harder with time, and the stories resist my nostalgia and try to expand in the present. Still, I think elements from those places will always creep into my stories in images and flavors I no longer actively seek.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
Googoosh, Googoosh all the way! Googoosh on the happy days and on the sad days. Googoosh in anxious tears and in quiet boredom, on the inspired days and on the blank page. Googoosh to procrastinate and Googoosh to dance and write to. There is so much crushing nostalgia that comes with Googoosh that it’s impossible not to want to write, not to try to reach and bring forth to the page whatever old, repressed image, feeling or memory her music can access in me (and in many others who grew up with her music).
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
These days, thanks to my partner, I am trying to learn how to deritualize writing as much as I can. Otherwise, I think I would write so rarely, because I love routines too much to be able to function outside them, and once the coffee is cold, the hair not tied the way I like, the alarm not loud enough and the tea lacking the rose petals, then I’m just always fixing the disrupted routine. It’s helped me to start writing without pouring myself a cup of tea, without stretching my wrists and reading the news and so on, and this, I’ve found, has let me get more words out. (Though, the routine-lover that I am, I do agree with many others that there is writing, poetry even, in waiting for that water to boil, in watering the plants, in combing my hair and in sending a text or two to my mom before sitting at my desk. So I still do that sometimes, but it’s been nice to practice not to depend on them.)
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
Ideally, I would want my first reader to be my partner. It sounds quite romantic. But in practice, I despise my drafts too quickly and too viciously to dare to share them individually, and so the most reliable sharing space for me is always a group scenario, a formal or informal workshop, where I can get a wide range of opinions and feedback that allows me to remove myself from the story as much I like to.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
Music, probably, and only because I have absolutely no musical talent and failed every single time I tried to learn an instrument. So I really would like to know what it’s like to play an instrument (these days the setar) well.
What are you working on currently?
Some short stories and translations here and there, and a terrible novel. Though I think of myself as a short-story writer, it’s felt as if I need to be working on a novel to be taken seriously in the publishing world.
What are you reading right now?
Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, alongside Middlemarch. As I said, I’m trying to catch up with contemporary fiction, but I also have a long list of classics I’ve always wanted to read or reread, so I try to read in pairs. The pairing is not always intentional, but sometimes an interesting coincidence.
NAYEREH DOOSTI is a writer and translator from Shiraz and Booshehr. She graduated from Amherst College and holds an MFA in fiction from Boston University. She is the recipient of the William Faulkner Literary Competition Short Story Prize, Epiphany Magazine Breakout 8 Writers Prize, the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, and a GrubStreet Literary Grant. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany, The Common, and Nowruz Journal, among others. Her Persian translation of Aleksander Hemon’s The Book of My Lives will be published by Goman Press in Tehran in September 2023. She is currently working on a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley.
