Creative Writing Program intern Ky McKenna sits down with writer, translator, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Ali Araghi for a discussion on craft, teaching philosophies, and writing in translation. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Ky: I want to formally, and finally, welcome you to the English department and to Penn State! I’d like to take this time to get a brief introduction and talk to you a bit about your writing process, maybe certain elements of your teaching process as well.
Ali: I usually introduce myself as a writer first, an Iranian writer and translator. I started off as a translator in Iran. Then, I went to fiction workshops, and I wrote my own short stories. Even though I came to the US for my MFA in fiction, the first book I published was a collection of poems that I translated from Farsi into English. So, it’s funny, because in English too, I was first a published translator and then a published writer. I love translating, but I love writing my own fiction maybe a little bit more.
Since I wrote the first draft of my first novel, I fell in love with the form. I was a short story writer before. My stories were tiny, flash fiction length. When I put the last period and at the end of the first draft of my novel, I was so exhilarated that I said, I want to be a novelist. This’s my form. That is to say, in the past couple of years I’ve been just writing novels. Well, by novels [I mean] two. It feels like I wrote more because with the first one I realized the first draft needs some structural rewriting. I slashed half of it [and] butchered the other half. It felt like I wrote two novels. With the second one I’m working on, too, I’ve done so many rounds of revision that it feels like I wrote more than one. In short, I’ve been working on the two novels and translating on the side in the past couple of years. And now I teach, too.
Ky: You mentioned that you first came to writing through the translation of poetry, and I’d like to know if you feel that poetry, or maybe just your experience with it, has affected your writing process or the way you approach prose. I’m really interested in how the two practices overlap.
Ali: I actually started off as a poet. The joke is that everyone is a poet in Iran. I was one of those poets when I was 18 or 19. I wrote classical Persian poetry with meter and rhyme. And then I think it was in early college when I decided I wouldn’t be a good poet, and in a very sentimental move I threw out everything I had written by then. That was the end of my poetry career. And then I became interested in translation, and I started translating from English into Farsi. I published three collections of short stories in Farsi. Then I started writing my own fiction. I went to fiction workshops in Iran, then published a short story collection. It was a little before I came to Notre Dame, about 2010, when I founded an online literary journal. The goal was to translate and publish Persian fiction in English. I translated some fiction for that journal. But after some time, the team and I incorporated poetry and works from other languages also. So, I began translating poetry from Farsi into English.
Once in the US, I started writing in English, and that meant that I lost a lot of the strength I had in my native language. I could do some gymnastics in Farsi that I couldn’t in English. When I’m looking back at my writing, my earlier fiction was lighter on plot and heavier on wordplay and language games. That is the effect of poetry I can detect on my earlier works. My writing is more plot-based now, more narrative heavy.
Ky: You mentioned that you found a love of the novel as a form instead of the short story. […] Do you find yourself more comfortable with the opportunities it has for your writing process?
Ali: It’s interesting, I didn’t think of myself as a novelist when I was in Iran. Maybe it was too intimidating, too large of a form to tackle. Maybe I didn’t see myself as a writer of that caliber. I wanted to come to the US to give myself the opportunity to really become a writer.
One thing I learned in my MFA program was that writing standards were different even with the mere word count people put on the page. I realized writers worked harder than I was used to. If I meant business in this new context of the American literary market, I had to be much more prolific. That was one change.
[Another] culture-specific difference was that in Iran you could be taken seriously as a writer with short stories. Here, I learned that even if you’re George Saunders, people will ask, “Where’s your novel?” It seemed a fiction writer was defined by their engagement with the novel.
But other than those external factors, I was fascinated with the amount of time that the form gave me to explore the characters, to develop the world, and to immerse myself in it. The novel felt like a bigger challenge than a short story, and I love a good challenge. You have to create this large structure and cast of characters, setting, voice, POV. Everything has to make sense. Part of my love for the form comes from that challenge.
Ky: Isn’t there a piece of your novel (The Immortals of Tehran) where when the character writes truer, more beautiful words, they start to burn on the page? That’s something that’s stuck with me since you spoke about it. And I’m thinking of it at the level of the word. You fit the plot of your novels together in a way that’s like building blocks, but then at the level of the word, if you get the exact word, do you ever think, “Oh, yes, this is what it’s meant to be. This is the correct line, this is the correct phrase?”
Ali: You can see part of my love for poetry in my novel. The main character is a poet. Poems can have literal effects on material and non-material things, like paper and revolutions. Yes, I’m always thinking about the right word. My thesaurus is always open. When I write or revise, I try to read for diction, but sentence structure, too, to create a kind of rhythm and cadence.
Ky: [Do you like revision, the lengthy part of the process, or do you just find yourself sitting in it more often than just writing and getting it on the page?]
Ali: I used to hate revision, when I was a younger writer. I had to learn that writing is rewriting. Revision takes time, but it’s necessary. I go into the story without an outline, so my revisions take rather long, sometimes plot-level or structural-level. And that’s dreadful. I’m always excited about starting a new project, facing that blank page and trying to discover what the story is, what the plot is, who the characters are. That adrenalin rush as I explore is addictive.
Ky: In your teaching, how do you frame revision? Is it more about your students getting their ideas on the page and playing around and fleshing them out, [or] does everyone write one thing and then spend the rest of the semester honing and rewriting it?
Ali: I do ask my students to revise stories and submit them for their final portfolio. But the main goal in my classes is to produce writing, more than revising. There are short lessons about revisions here and there, but not a lot. I mostly want to make my students excited about being able to create, rather than bog them down in a revision process that could go on and on. I want to instill the love and thrill of writing in my students.
Ky: I’d like to ask about your teaching philosophy then, about what you feel is the most important part. I feel like you may have answered it in that you just want your students to get excited about the process, or maybe the act of creation, but if you could talk a bit more [about it]?
Ali: I think it is important for my students to learn how to read like a writer. You can’t take classes and attend workshops all your life. At some point you will have to learn how to teach yourself craft as you read other writers. To teach my students what to look for when they’re reading is one of my goals.
In my introductory class, we start by reading stories and introducing some elements of craft to the class (character, voice, plot, etc.), and we try to find how the stories we read handle those elements. We develop a shared language to discuss fiction. Some students are a little intimidated to write, to express themselves. We start with shorter exercises to break the ice. In the meantime, I emphasize that this is not a right-versus-wrong kind of class (as opposed to something like math or physics). I introduce the idea that fiction isn’t necessarily about truth as much as it’s about persuasion, and I also emphasize there is actual power in that.
Ky: Final question: if you could teach a special topics course, or completely structure a course of your own making, what would it be?
Ali: One of my dream courses is a fiction workshop where the writers are not native English speakers. The writers would come from and write in different languages. Parallel with that class, there is a translation workshop. Translators who work with these writers render their writings into English. A simpler version of this would be a course where writers mainly work in a language other than English, but they have some English so they can self-translate, and so we could workshop those works in the class. That’s one dream course.