The Assay Interview Project: Neda Toloui-Semnani
January 17, 2022
|
Neda Toloui-Semnani is an Emmy-award winning writer and producer. Currently a senior writer with the television news magazine, VICE News Tonight, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Kinfolk, New York, LA Review of Books, The Baffler, The Week, BuzzFeed, and Roll Call among others. She’s been featured in The Rumpus and This American Life. She holds a master of science in gender and social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Master’s in fine arts in nonfiction from Goucher College. She was named a 2018 fellow with the Logan Nonfiction Program and a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA fellow in Nonfiction.
She grew up in Washington, D.C., and is based in Brooklyn where she lives with a small dog, a large cat, a chubby baby, and a man she calls Stretch. |
|
About They Said They Wanted Revolution: 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.
In 1979, Neda Toloui-Semnani’s parents left the United States for Iran to join the revolution. But the promise of those early heady days in Tehran was warped by the rise of the Islamic Republic. With the new regime came international isolation, cultural devastation, and profound personal loss for Neda. Her father was arrested and her mother was forced to make a desperate escape, pregnant and with Neda in tow. Conflicted about her parents’ choices for years, Neda realized that to move forward, she had to face the past head-on. Through extensive reporting, journals, and detailed interviews, Neda untangles decades of history in a search for answers. Both an epic family drama and a timely true-life political thriller, They Said They Wanted Revolution illuminates the costs of righteous activism across generations. |
Bryn Chambers: This book is a remarkable work of documentation, place, and character. You dedicate a lot of time to describing the landscape and lush greenery against the backdrop of political strife and of student life. It tells the story of your parents coming from Iran to the United States, and then returning to help form a new government.
You write of your father as a child: “He and the others would scale the wall to his grandfather Taghavi’s garden, which had acres of fig, pomegranate, and pistachio trees and bushes full of ripe, sweet mulberries and honeysuckle” (40). Two gardens seemingly bookend your father's life: One was the setting of his youth; the other framed his imprisonment. I'm curious about your relationship to gardens. Are gardens part of your writing process or backdrop? Do they frame your life as they seem to have framed your father's?
Neda Toloui-Semnani: Gardens are the backdrop to much of this book. I describe them throughout. My mother’s garden is closely linked to how I remember her life and her dying. Gardens are, it occurs to me now, also a reoccurring motif in Persian art and history, dating back to the sixth century, and the time of Cyrus the Great. The landscape of a Persian Garden, I’ve read, is meant to mimic paradise. It’s as close to Eden as a human can possibly get. The story of Eden, as we all know, is that Adam and Eve learned too much and were thus cast out into the world to make their way. As a reporter, I’ve always thought it was a rather rude way to reward curiosity, but that’s for another day.
My parents, like Adam and Eve, had to live with the consequences of all they learned and the decisions they made as they lived their lives—then, of course, we all do.
So, I suppose gardens do frame my life, in a way. I’m not a gardener but my mother embraced gardening when I was in middle school and turned to it as she grew sick and sicker. My husband began gardening in earnest during the pandemic, and now our home is filled with greenery. And I turn to nature, both landscaped and wild, when I need to find my way back to myself. In fact, I spent a great deal of time walking through nature trying to think my way through this book.
Though the book is a sustained memoir, your book contains some very short sections. These passages are really pleasing. One that caught my attention:
“My mother and her cousin were standing at opposite ends of the outdoor passage, talking to each other. My mother was holding on to her cousin’s son’s hand. He was just a little older than me. He let go of my mother’s hand and ran into the house. Just then, the ground began to move. It rolled hard beneath my mother’s feet. Earthquake, my mother’s cousin cried. She screamed at my mother to jump out from under the covered passage. My mother did and fell into a rosebush. The thorns tore at her skin. She looked up at the house and watched as the roof broke apart and came together with the ground like teeth gnashing. All at once, my mother remembered me, and started to scream” (159-60).
Moments like these feel really essayistic to me. Can you tell me more about these passages? What are your thoughts on the forms of essay versus memoir? Or of essayistic moments in memoir? Do you distinguish between these two modes?
I’m so glad you caught that: I find nonfiction, the craft, to be elastic and exciting. I struggled for years trying to write the memoir I thought people expected and then, over time, I realized that I just needed to write the story as it demanded to be told. Once I made peace with that it came out of me. I learned that when your work is grounded in fact, you use those facts to write almost anything—when I realized that, the writing became easier, and it spanned the different kinds of nonfiction, including the essay. The essay is always a little bit personal, and therefore a little bit memoir.
I have always been an essay writer: I love the five-paragraph essay, for example. I find the structure soothing. I love it the way a poet might love a sonnet or a villanelle—in part because there are constraints and the constraints demand creativity to navigate.
In graduate school, one of my professors, Suzannah Lessard, spent a great deal of time talking about the essay, and how it’s one of the most malleable forms for a writer of nonfiction, and truly it is. In the essay, often, you begin with a question and then spend the word count trying to answer it. The joy of it is in the winding path you take the reader on before you come to your answer—if you ever come to an answer. I find big, ambitious essays incredibly exciting to read.
Writing is often a struggle and not particularly enjoyable at the start, but, for me, preparing for and writing the first draft of an essay is the most fun I can have.
Epistolary forms also have a presence in the book, as when you frame your return to Iran via your correspondence with your mother. Tell me more about how you came to use letters and write this book as a sort of one addressed to your son.
I used the letters and emails to help show the relationship between my mother and I because, honestly, I was at a loss to explain how deep it was, how complicated, and how profound. Showing it grow and change while I was in Iran and before she was diagnosed with cancer was incredibly pivotal. Our relationship matured and we became very close while I was gone for those months—I put a lot of that down to our prolific writing to each other.
My mother was an editor and because I was a lazy writer and never figured out grammar, she was, until her death, my first reader. She was a tough editor, and she never cushioned her edits for me. As far as I know, she treated me at 12 as if I was any other writer. It was frustrating and maddening, but it was priceless training. If I got annoyed or upset, she’d just shrug and say, “If you want to be a writer you have to learn to be edited and not take it personally.” This meant that writing—the process of drafting and revising—was central to our relationship. Also, my mother died in 2010. It was a time when we still bought calling cards to talk to each other, so writing long emails wasn’t particularly weird. I always wrote sprawling letters and emails home while I was travelling. She would always respond in the snatches of time stolen from her work.
When I was trying to write about my life growing up, I wrote a version where I just tried to write it straight, like the rest of the book, but it felt insincere when I read it. It was too pat and too surface, somehow. What I wanted to do was try and capture how my mother and I grew and changed together—I don’t know if I was able to do that completely, but that was the ambition.
It's also true that I am attempting to tell the stories about two people who’ve passed away. I knew my mother wanted her story told so I wasn’t worried that she’d be upset in that way, but it felt important that the reader could “hear” her voice in sections.
By weaving our correspondence together like a sort of literary embroidery, you’re able to see so much about her character and our relationship. Obviously, it is also a way to do a time-lapse of my early life, but it also serves as a reflection, a mirror, against which the first two sections of the book are reflected.
You describe your father as “an absence of space following you around” and as a fading memory, "like smoke.” At one point, you wonder on the page about betrayal, and even address us, your readers, asking, “am I being disloyal sharing all of this with you?” How has the writing process changed your understanding of your father?
In many ways, the writing process brought my father back into my life.
While my mother was sick, I pushed him out of my mind. I was scared of losing my mother and so it felt suddenly very silly to be thinking too much about the parent who was absent, the one who was already dead.
But what I know now is that our relationships with our loved ones don’t end when they die—we grow and change and our understanding of who they are, what they said, the choices they made, etc., changes with us. Reporting, researching, and writing this book gave me an opportunity to chronicle my relationship with my father—as it was and as it changed. My first writing exercise before I started drafting this volume was to jot down how I had always thought of my father, writing drafts of the stories about him that I had grown up with. Getting these down was crucial because I knew that as soon as I started reporting and asking questions, these stories would morph and change. I’d change with them, and, by extension, so would he.
But writing all this down helped me capture a rather one-dimensional version of him, and the process of reporting and writing (and rewriting) allowed my relationship with and understanding of my father to deepen. I grew to not only love him differently, perhaps more deeply, but I grew to genuinely like him over the course of the years spent working on this book. After all, I was learning about him as an adult, hearing stories about him that made me cringe or laugh, feel proud or worried—just as I’d feel about anyone else.
Writing about him meant learning about him, and that was a true and profound gift. But then my job was to turn around and present my findings to a reader, which means giving people an opportunity to cast judgement, not just on him but also on me. It’s a tricky thing.
When describing a protest your mother took part in at the top of the Statue of Liberty, you write, “I got too comfortable with the stories she told over and over, so comfortable I didn’t ask her enough questions." What questions do you wish you could ask? And how have you reconciled with the sense of belatedness that we all feel at some point in our lives?
There are so many questions I wish I could ask my mother. About the book: what was her experience of Statue of Liberty protest? How long were they in Chicago? What was she doing in Yemen? And on and on. If I could, I would’ve sat her down and just asked and asked and asked her questions, so many questions, too many to count.
I recently became a mother, and now there are a whole new set of questions I’d ask my mom about her experience. I’ve spent a great many years without her now and I’m constantly surprised by all the ways I miss her still. It’s still unreal to me that I’ll never see her again, never hear her voice on the other end of the line.
I think how I reconcile the loss, which is really a continuing loss, is I don’t really have regrets about the time we spent together. I know that in my 20s I only had so much experience and so I acted from that place, and for a young person I did ok: I spent as much time with her as I was able. We spent years repairing hurts in our relationship. We laughed a lot. We liked each other a great deal. We were interested in each other, or at least I remember our relationship that way.
I guess, my point is even if Mom died when I was 130 years old, I’d still wake up the next day with a question that only she could answer. It’s the nature of true love and my mother was one of my dearest and truest soulmates. There’s no reconciling a soulmate’s absence; with them go all the answers to your many questions. There’s just accepting that they are gone and that somehow, they’ve integrated into the whole of you.
This book layers so much research. We encounter the diary entries in which your mother documented her illness, your own coming-of-age writings about your father, the transcript of his trial, interviews with distant relatives, and a record of your return to the country you fled as a child. What find or experience changed your perspective on the story the most? What was most exciting or surprising to you?
This book was a treasure hunt. Well, kinda. It was a detective story. Again, kinda. Thinking back over the years of research and reporting, I find I want to tell you all the various moments when my mind was blown with what I found. But, honestly, my stories might not translate.
I suppose the first major moment was when my brother and I went to his storage unit and found, tucked inside our mother’s boxes, fat files that included interviews detailing her life and documents that helped me piece together my father’s.
And when I went to Missouri on a reporting trip, I didn’t really know what I would find, I worried that it would be a waste of time. But, there is a truth for those of us who write nonfiction or fiction about the existing world: there is no substitute for visiting a place you’re writing about. Just being able to connect your senses to the story helps it come alive. Once it’s alive for the writer, it’s easier to make it feel alive for the reader. I visited Missouri S&T, my father’s alma mater, and met with an archivist who was so generous and helpful. She pulled all sorts of files, yearbooks, transcripts, course catalogues, and student handbooks for me. With her help, I found my father’s courses, classrooms, and off-campus housing, as I learned a little bit about the history of the campus and town. When you know nothing about a certain period in your subject’s life, any detail feels like a crucial discovery.
This proved true when I drove to my mother’s high school. I wasn’t sure what I’d find or if anything I’d find would be any use, but they let me see her records, and my uncle’s. I was able to flip through her yearbook—a glimpse into a life she hadn’t really shared with me. I didn’t write too much about her high school years, but that yearbook was illuminating.
Another a major moment for me, and for the book, was when I finally found Joy, my father’s girlfriend. Actually, it was my uncle who found her information while I was on a reporting trip in California. I ended up calling her after she had plugged her landline back into the wall after it had been unplugged for some days or weeks. Meeting Joy and learning about her experience of my parents and the Iranian student movement was truly one of the most important moments in my life. It was healing for me to meet someone who knew my father in such a specific, complicated, but really loving way. It was healing for me and, I hope, for her.
I don’t write about this in the book, I had to cut it out, but I spent a great deal of time leafing through my maternal grandmother’s papers and I learned she translated John Steinbeck novels into Persian. Somehow knowing that she was a linguist and had accomplished these feats of translation—something I never knew about—explained a bit why she ended up in Monterey, California, which is Steinbeck country. It was a small discovery that felt important to me. It deepened my understanding of her and her quiet legacy.
Another moment of discovery was walking through Van, Turkey, the city where my family landed after we escaped Iran. I walked to the hotel my family stayed in. I took pictures as I went to verify my findings with my family; I cross-referenced the descriptions with what my mother had described for accuracy. At the same time, arriving at the Turkey/Iran border and not being able to cross filled me with a profound sense of sadness and loss that informed the book in a really important way.
What’s next for you? Do you have a new project in the works?
I’ve been playing around with a few ideas: I just had my son in March, and the experience was more traumatic—emotionally and physically—than I had been prepared for. In many ways, it reminded me of my mother’s experience with ovarian cancer. I’ve been playing with how to tell the story through a few essays. They’re not quite ready to be put down on paper, yet, but my brain is busy working through the twists and turns. Next comes the research stage.
There are a few other ideas kicking about the back of my brain—essay, book, and television. In the meantime, I’ll stick with my day job as a writer for VICE News Tonight. I’m lucky that I get to write and make news with an extraordinary team of reporters, documentarians, editors, and animators. We get to put together some fantastic pieces of news and build out full news broadcast every week. It’s the most creative job I’ve ever had, and as a journalist that’s really lucky.
My big project, I guess, is doing my job while still figuring out how to give space for my own work, while also being a good mom, partner, friend, and family member. Tricky at the best of times, but the news cycle is … not slow.
You write of your father as a child: “He and the others would scale the wall to his grandfather Taghavi’s garden, which had acres of fig, pomegranate, and pistachio trees and bushes full of ripe, sweet mulberries and honeysuckle” (40). Two gardens seemingly bookend your father's life: One was the setting of his youth; the other framed his imprisonment. I'm curious about your relationship to gardens. Are gardens part of your writing process or backdrop? Do they frame your life as they seem to have framed your father's?
Neda Toloui-Semnani: Gardens are the backdrop to much of this book. I describe them throughout. My mother’s garden is closely linked to how I remember her life and her dying. Gardens are, it occurs to me now, also a reoccurring motif in Persian art and history, dating back to the sixth century, and the time of Cyrus the Great. The landscape of a Persian Garden, I’ve read, is meant to mimic paradise. It’s as close to Eden as a human can possibly get. The story of Eden, as we all know, is that Adam and Eve learned too much and were thus cast out into the world to make their way. As a reporter, I’ve always thought it was a rather rude way to reward curiosity, but that’s for another day.
My parents, like Adam and Eve, had to live with the consequences of all they learned and the decisions they made as they lived their lives—then, of course, we all do.
So, I suppose gardens do frame my life, in a way. I’m not a gardener but my mother embraced gardening when I was in middle school and turned to it as she grew sick and sicker. My husband began gardening in earnest during the pandemic, and now our home is filled with greenery. And I turn to nature, both landscaped and wild, when I need to find my way back to myself. In fact, I spent a great deal of time walking through nature trying to think my way through this book.
Though the book is a sustained memoir, your book contains some very short sections. These passages are really pleasing. One that caught my attention:
“My mother and her cousin were standing at opposite ends of the outdoor passage, talking to each other. My mother was holding on to her cousin’s son’s hand. He was just a little older than me. He let go of my mother’s hand and ran into the house. Just then, the ground began to move. It rolled hard beneath my mother’s feet. Earthquake, my mother’s cousin cried. She screamed at my mother to jump out from under the covered passage. My mother did and fell into a rosebush. The thorns tore at her skin. She looked up at the house and watched as the roof broke apart and came together with the ground like teeth gnashing. All at once, my mother remembered me, and started to scream” (159-60).
Moments like these feel really essayistic to me. Can you tell me more about these passages? What are your thoughts on the forms of essay versus memoir? Or of essayistic moments in memoir? Do you distinguish between these two modes?
I’m so glad you caught that: I find nonfiction, the craft, to be elastic and exciting. I struggled for years trying to write the memoir I thought people expected and then, over time, I realized that I just needed to write the story as it demanded to be told. Once I made peace with that it came out of me. I learned that when your work is grounded in fact, you use those facts to write almost anything—when I realized that, the writing became easier, and it spanned the different kinds of nonfiction, including the essay. The essay is always a little bit personal, and therefore a little bit memoir.
I have always been an essay writer: I love the five-paragraph essay, for example. I find the structure soothing. I love it the way a poet might love a sonnet or a villanelle—in part because there are constraints and the constraints demand creativity to navigate.
In graduate school, one of my professors, Suzannah Lessard, spent a great deal of time talking about the essay, and how it’s one of the most malleable forms for a writer of nonfiction, and truly it is. In the essay, often, you begin with a question and then spend the word count trying to answer it. The joy of it is in the winding path you take the reader on before you come to your answer—if you ever come to an answer. I find big, ambitious essays incredibly exciting to read.
Writing is often a struggle and not particularly enjoyable at the start, but, for me, preparing for and writing the first draft of an essay is the most fun I can have.
Epistolary forms also have a presence in the book, as when you frame your return to Iran via your correspondence with your mother. Tell me more about how you came to use letters and write this book as a sort of one addressed to your son.
I used the letters and emails to help show the relationship between my mother and I because, honestly, I was at a loss to explain how deep it was, how complicated, and how profound. Showing it grow and change while I was in Iran and before she was diagnosed with cancer was incredibly pivotal. Our relationship matured and we became very close while I was gone for those months—I put a lot of that down to our prolific writing to each other.
My mother was an editor and because I was a lazy writer and never figured out grammar, she was, until her death, my first reader. She was a tough editor, and she never cushioned her edits for me. As far as I know, she treated me at 12 as if I was any other writer. It was frustrating and maddening, but it was priceless training. If I got annoyed or upset, she’d just shrug and say, “If you want to be a writer you have to learn to be edited and not take it personally.” This meant that writing—the process of drafting and revising—was central to our relationship. Also, my mother died in 2010. It was a time when we still bought calling cards to talk to each other, so writing long emails wasn’t particularly weird. I always wrote sprawling letters and emails home while I was travelling. She would always respond in the snatches of time stolen from her work.
When I was trying to write about my life growing up, I wrote a version where I just tried to write it straight, like the rest of the book, but it felt insincere when I read it. It was too pat and too surface, somehow. What I wanted to do was try and capture how my mother and I grew and changed together—I don’t know if I was able to do that completely, but that was the ambition.
It's also true that I am attempting to tell the stories about two people who’ve passed away. I knew my mother wanted her story told so I wasn’t worried that she’d be upset in that way, but it felt important that the reader could “hear” her voice in sections.
By weaving our correspondence together like a sort of literary embroidery, you’re able to see so much about her character and our relationship. Obviously, it is also a way to do a time-lapse of my early life, but it also serves as a reflection, a mirror, against which the first two sections of the book are reflected.
You describe your father as “an absence of space following you around” and as a fading memory, "like smoke.” At one point, you wonder on the page about betrayal, and even address us, your readers, asking, “am I being disloyal sharing all of this with you?” How has the writing process changed your understanding of your father?
In many ways, the writing process brought my father back into my life.
While my mother was sick, I pushed him out of my mind. I was scared of losing my mother and so it felt suddenly very silly to be thinking too much about the parent who was absent, the one who was already dead.
But what I know now is that our relationships with our loved ones don’t end when they die—we grow and change and our understanding of who they are, what they said, the choices they made, etc., changes with us. Reporting, researching, and writing this book gave me an opportunity to chronicle my relationship with my father—as it was and as it changed. My first writing exercise before I started drafting this volume was to jot down how I had always thought of my father, writing drafts of the stories about him that I had grown up with. Getting these down was crucial because I knew that as soon as I started reporting and asking questions, these stories would morph and change. I’d change with them, and, by extension, so would he.
But writing all this down helped me capture a rather one-dimensional version of him, and the process of reporting and writing (and rewriting) allowed my relationship with and understanding of my father to deepen. I grew to not only love him differently, perhaps more deeply, but I grew to genuinely like him over the course of the years spent working on this book. After all, I was learning about him as an adult, hearing stories about him that made me cringe or laugh, feel proud or worried—just as I’d feel about anyone else.
Writing about him meant learning about him, and that was a true and profound gift. But then my job was to turn around and present my findings to a reader, which means giving people an opportunity to cast judgement, not just on him but also on me. It’s a tricky thing.
When describing a protest your mother took part in at the top of the Statue of Liberty, you write, “I got too comfortable with the stories she told over and over, so comfortable I didn’t ask her enough questions." What questions do you wish you could ask? And how have you reconciled with the sense of belatedness that we all feel at some point in our lives?
There are so many questions I wish I could ask my mother. About the book: what was her experience of Statue of Liberty protest? How long were they in Chicago? What was she doing in Yemen? And on and on. If I could, I would’ve sat her down and just asked and asked and asked her questions, so many questions, too many to count.
I recently became a mother, and now there are a whole new set of questions I’d ask my mom about her experience. I’ve spent a great many years without her now and I’m constantly surprised by all the ways I miss her still. It’s still unreal to me that I’ll never see her again, never hear her voice on the other end of the line.
I think how I reconcile the loss, which is really a continuing loss, is I don’t really have regrets about the time we spent together. I know that in my 20s I only had so much experience and so I acted from that place, and for a young person I did ok: I spent as much time with her as I was able. We spent years repairing hurts in our relationship. We laughed a lot. We liked each other a great deal. We were interested in each other, or at least I remember our relationship that way.
I guess, my point is even if Mom died when I was 130 years old, I’d still wake up the next day with a question that only she could answer. It’s the nature of true love and my mother was one of my dearest and truest soulmates. There’s no reconciling a soulmate’s absence; with them go all the answers to your many questions. There’s just accepting that they are gone and that somehow, they’ve integrated into the whole of you.
This book layers so much research. We encounter the diary entries in which your mother documented her illness, your own coming-of-age writings about your father, the transcript of his trial, interviews with distant relatives, and a record of your return to the country you fled as a child. What find or experience changed your perspective on the story the most? What was most exciting or surprising to you?
This book was a treasure hunt. Well, kinda. It was a detective story. Again, kinda. Thinking back over the years of research and reporting, I find I want to tell you all the various moments when my mind was blown with what I found. But, honestly, my stories might not translate.
I suppose the first major moment was when my brother and I went to his storage unit and found, tucked inside our mother’s boxes, fat files that included interviews detailing her life and documents that helped me piece together my father’s.
And when I went to Missouri on a reporting trip, I didn’t really know what I would find, I worried that it would be a waste of time. But, there is a truth for those of us who write nonfiction or fiction about the existing world: there is no substitute for visiting a place you’re writing about. Just being able to connect your senses to the story helps it come alive. Once it’s alive for the writer, it’s easier to make it feel alive for the reader. I visited Missouri S&T, my father’s alma mater, and met with an archivist who was so generous and helpful. She pulled all sorts of files, yearbooks, transcripts, course catalogues, and student handbooks for me. With her help, I found my father’s courses, classrooms, and off-campus housing, as I learned a little bit about the history of the campus and town. When you know nothing about a certain period in your subject’s life, any detail feels like a crucial discovery.
This proved true when I drove to my mother’s high school. I wasn’t sure what I’d find or if anything I’d find would be any use, but they let me see her records, and my uncle’s. I was able to flip through her yearbook—a glimpse into a life she hadn’t really shared with me. I didn’t write too much about her high school years, but that yearbook was illuminating.
Another a major moment for me, and for the book, was when I finally found Joy, my father’s girlfriend. Actually, it was my uncle who found her information while I was on a reporting trip in California. I ended up calling her after she had plugged her landline back into the wall after it had been unplugged for some days or weeks. Meeting Joy and learning about her experience of my parents and the Iranian student movement was truly one of the most important moments in my life. It was healing for me to meet someone who knew my father in such a specific, complicated, but really loving way. It was healing for me and, I hope, for her.
I don’t write about this in the book, I had to cut it out, but I spent a great deal of time leafing through my maternal grandmother’s papers and I learned she translated John Steinbeck novels into Persian. Somehow knowing that she was a linguist and had accomplished these feats of translation—something I never knew about—explained a bit why she ended up in Monterey, California, which is Steinbeck country. It was a small discovery that felt important to me. It deepened my understanding of her and her quiet legacy.
Another moment of discovery was walking through Van, Turkey, the city where my family landed after we escaped Iran. I walked to the hotel my family stayed in. I took pictures as I went to verify my findings with my family; I cross-referenced the descriptions with what my mother had described for accuracy. At the same time, arriving at the Turkey/Iran border and not being able to cross filled me with a profound sense of sadness and loss that informed the book in a really important way.
What’s next for you? Do you have a new project in the works?
I’ve been playing around with a few ideas: I just had my son in March, and the experience was more traumatic—emotionally and physically—than I had been prepared for. In many ways, it reminded me of my mother’s experience with ovarian cancer. I’ve been playing with how to tell the story through a few essays. They’re not quite ready to be put down on paper, yet, but my brain is busy working through the twists and turns. Next comes the research stage.
There are a few other ideas kicking about the back of my brain—essay, book, and television. In the meantime, I’ll stick with my day job as a writer for VICE News Tonight. I’m lucky that I get to write and make news with an extraordinary team of reporters, documentarians, editors, and animators. We get to put together some fantastic pieces of news and build out full news broadcast every week. It’s the most creative job I’ve ever had, and as a journalist that’s really lucky.
My big project, I guess, is doing my job while still figuring out how to give space for my own work, while also being a good mom, partner, friend, and family member. Tricky at the best of times, but the news cycle is … not slow.
Bryn Chambers is an accelerated Master’s student in English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She is a Writing Intensive fellow at her campus’s Writing Center and a recipient of the Frances Kerr Award for creative nonfiction.