An Indies Introduce Q&A with Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh

Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh is the author of Zan: Stories, a Summer/Fall 2024 Indies Introduce adult selection and a July Indie Next List pick. 

Kristin Saner of Fables Books in Goshen, Indiana, served on the bookseller panel that selected Ehtesham-Zadeh’s book for Indies Introduce.

“Each story in Zan is powerful, deep, and nuanced, providing a needed window into the complex lives of Iranian women today. A must-read,” saind Saner.

Kristin Saner: Hello! I am Kristen Saner, co-owner of Fables Books, a used and new indie bookstore in Goshen, Indiana. And today I'm so excited to be here with Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh to talk about her debut book, Zan: Stories.

Suzi was born in Washington, D.C., to an Iranian father and an American mother. She moved to Iran at age five and grew up in Tehran under the Shah. She returned to the U.S. to attend Stanford University, and when the Islamic Revolution started brewing shortly after she graduated, she moved back to Iran and plopped herself down in it.

She later received an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. As a lifelong English teacher, she has taught in schools and universities on three continents, but her permanent home is a 6-acre farm in Woodstock, Georgia. Her fiction has been published in numerous publications, including The Georgia Review, Gertrude Press, and Fiction International, and she’s received an honorable mention for The Best American Short Stories 2018.

So, Zan: Stories is going to be releasing on Tuesday, June 11, and it provides a deep and nuanced view of contemporary Iranian women as they navigate a crucial moment in their nation's history.

Suzi, my first question for you is: how did this collection come into being? Did it start with just one piece, or specific story, or an idea?

Susan Ehtesham-Zadeh: That's a tricky question! I'm in my sixties. So in some ways this book has been coming into being for a very long time — for six decades. But I guess the first story was written in 2004 after my father died. My Iranian father, after he died, I felt like all of Iran was going to die with him if I didn't start writing some things down. I've always written. I was sort of a consummate diary-keeper as a child, but after my father died it became more serious, and so I wrote my first story. My first published story was “Dying in America,” which is the story of my father's — a fictionalized version — of my father's death.

After that story had some success, I applied and was accepted to BU, and there I had the great privilege of working with Sigrid Nunez and Ha Jin, and other amazing writers. My writing started to take shape there. And then the final spark or catalyst was the women's movement which began in 2022, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And that movement was very moving and very stirring. That kind of gave me the vision to put this together as a collection; before that it was just sort of loose stories. So the premise for the book — which is stories about Iranian women in Iran, and in the United States, and elsewhere — came about because of the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests.

KS: Awesome! Do you have a favorite story within this collection, or one that if you could only pick one that you want everyone to read, it would be this one.

SEZ: Gosh, that is another tough question. It's kind of like asking a parent, “do you have a favorite child?” It's awful. It's an awful question to answer. I think parents would say, “I love all my children equally, but differently.”

I don't think I love all my stories equally, but I do love them all differently. Some of the stories are very personal, and so the first and last stories which frame the collection — one is called “Zan,” the other is called “Zendegi” — those were written very recently, and those are inspired by the women's movement. In those I was experimenting with the second person, which is a really difficult thing to pull off. I'm not sure how well I pulled it off, but I am proud of those, and they deal directly with the women's movement and my feelings about it.

I think the story “Aab,” which is about swimming, is another personal favorite. I know this sounds strange, but all writers have their — the thing they do that helps them write. For me, it's getting in water. A lot of my ideas sort of flow into my brain when I'm moving through [water]. So that story is about swimming and about water. I feel like it's really condensed, and I think it says what it needs to say in very few words.

The story “The Baboon” is probably my most evocative, but when I give that story to people, they tend to overinterpret it and see symbolism when it's not necessarily there.

And then, I’ve got two more — sorry, I know I'm talking about all of them!

KS: No, I love it.

SEZ: Yeah, the story “Venus Furtiva,” which is about a burlesque dancer — that one tends to be popular when I show it to people. It's a heartbreaking story. And I'm really fond of it, because I think it does a good job of capturing a part of the immigrant experience that is really hard to capture, which is the colliding ideals and narratives that Iranian women have to deal with, and how they have to internalize all that. And of course, she chooses to engage in a sort of secretive rebellion, and it makes me really sad for her, for that character.

And finally, the question about which one would I show people. I think I would show people “Azadi” for a number of reasons. It's the most conventional, the most accessible. It's kind of a girl-meets-boy story. And everyone has said, “Oh, that's a great story.” It's more plot-driven than some of the others. And right now, I think it would be really resonant because of the hostilities between Israel and the United States, and that story has a romance between a Jewish man and an Iranian woman. And so, I feel like that would be somehow poignant.

I'm not sure how well I answered your question, but —

KS: No, you did great! You did great. I do agree like, I think the way you laid it out that starting with “Zan” and ending with “Zendegi” went really well. It framed the collection really well. You introduced what you wanted to say, and then you get into all these other stories, and then you ended with what felt fairly reflective — that last one almost felt like an autobiography.

SEZ: It is to a large extent autobiographical, not entirely. But yes, I was pouring a lot of my feelings about the Women, Life, Freedom movement into that story, including some survival skills type feelings that I have, and the difficulty of being away when that movement is taking place. And yes, it is very personal. Not 100% autobiographical. That would be a mistake to call it that. But many, many parts of that story are taken from my own life. We all do that, right? Writers all borrow from their own experiences. 

KS: There's usually things that get cut out of books or left out of books. Was there part of the editing process that was really easy to accept and say, “Yep, that doesn't need to be there,” or were there things you wished you could have kept, but couldn't for various reasons?

SEZ: Editing is my worst nightmare. I really hate it. It's because I am a perfectionist, and so I tend to just keep tampering and tampering and tampering until I mess it up. So, the process of editing is very, very painful for me. But I keep thinking about the artist Rodin inviting people into his studio and hacking off pieces of his sculptures. And that's when they came to life. I do recognize that editing is where the work is born. So I know it's important. I dislike it, but I work hard at it.

I had some very good notes from my editor, Michelle Dotter, who's excellent. A lot of what I had to let go were the places where I'm a little too overtly political or too overtly — preachy isn't the word — didactic. Where I'm too heavy-handed with the message, so I had to let some of those parts go. I also have a lot of stories that have male protagonists, and I would have loved to put some of those — because I think they're some of my better stories — I would have loved to put some of those in this collection. But of course, with this new framing of the collection as stories about Iranian women, I had to let those go, so that was painful. But I have them! Maybe they’ll see the light of days somehow, somewhere. 

KS: Yeah, another collection all focused on Iranian men or, I don't know. During that editing, since some of these stories were published in other places, did you have to re-edit them to put them into this collection? Or did they come straight in?

SEZ: To some extent. Some of the ones that have appeared elsewhere, I adjusted them a little bit, but not very much.

KS: I find it interesting that you said that, you felt like what got edited was your overt political statements, because I feel like this did a really good job of laying things out in a way that was accessible for anyone, no matter where you come from looking at this situation.

SEZ: Oh, gosh, I hope so. Yeah.

KS: And I can't speak to everyone, but that's what it felt like to me, as I was reading it.

SEZ: That is wonderful to hear.

KS: In the preface of Zan: Stories, you state that “No single book, whether fiction or nonfiction, can ever claim to fully capture a whole reality, much less one as complex and important as the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom) movement that's going on in Iran.” So how do you think your stories capture this movement, even in pieces?

SEZ: Some of the stories are directly about that movement and inspired by that movement. The story “Stealthy Freedom,” for example, which is the second story in the collection.

KS: I love that one.

SEZ: That story is about women ripping off their head scarves. Actually the title of that story comes from an actual Facebook page and Facebook movement which predates the Women, Life, Freedom movement by a couple of years. (By eight years, to be exact. It started in 2014.) But in that story, women are engaging in rebellion. They are starting to protest. It's one of the few stories that deals directly with that movement.

My last one — which I've already talked about — deals with my own tangled emotions about the about the movement. But I think all of the stories are about the movement, because all of the stories are about Iranian women, and about their sisterhood. About the shared feelings they have about their country, and oppression and repression and suppression in their country. And their struggles with redefining themselves as women.

That exists for Iranian women no matter where they live, because we live in a changing world, and they have to push back against all the ideas about womanhood that were ingrained in them from birth. All Iranian women living today are doing that and that's part of the process, so in addition to being an external revolution, there's also an internal revolution. So in that sense, I would say the whole book really is about this movement, because it's about Iranian women and their fight to be seen for who they are and to be free.

KS: Are there ways in which working with fiction — as these stories are all fictional stories — helps you present this reality and this connectivity to the movement that is easier to absorb than if you were writing nonfiction?

SEZ: It’s easier for me to absorb because I'm a fiction nerd, and I think that stories are always a powerful way to deliver meaning and to deliver messages. Some people would find it easier to read nonfiction about this movement. But for me, fiction is just so important. It's my element, so it's obviously easier to work there. I did do a lot of research for the book, and there are obviously elements of reality and truth and factual information in the book. I channel all that into a narrative and into the story, and I hope that the meaning comes across well when I do that.

KS: You talk about the research, what kind of research did you do? Were there things that surprised you, or things that were hard to research?

SEZ: Hmm! Anything about the way women have suffered in Iran, and anything about Iran in general, and this regime and the way that it treats people, is painful to read about. I put some facts of that kind in the book, although I had to sublimate a little bit with that. But it's painful to hear about women being in prison. It's painful to hear about women being executed. Obviously, the death of Mahsa Amini started this movement, and that's very painful to read about. There were moments when yes, it was very painful to do research.

KS: For those who want to learn more about the experiences and lives of Iranian women, what resources or books, etc., would you recommend?

SEZ: You know I might be imagining this, but I feel like the work of Iranian artists is kind of having a moment right now. Sanaz Toossi’s play English won the Pulitzer for drama, and she's an Iranian American writer. One of the best books I've read recently is a book called Martyr by Kaveh Akbar; he's an Iranian American writer also. Those two are not about the women's movement, but they are about Iran, and you definitely come away with a sense of what life is like in Iran.

I don't know if you're familiar with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series. She's a graphic artist. That goes back to the Iranian revolution, but she has a new book — which I'll confess I have not read, but I'm sure that it is powerful — it's a graphic collection of essays. That one, I have no doubt, will be a very good way of informing yourself. And then there's a book that is nonfiction that I keep going back to again and again called What Iranians Want, and it's by Arash Azizi. He's an Iranian scholar living in the United States and teaching at Clemson University, and that book starts with the women's movement, but it  goes backwards in time and traces it to its roots. And it looks at more than just the hijab issue. It looks at other grievances that Iranian women and Iranians in general have.

One last thing I have heard — and again, I have not seen this because I don't believe it's been released in the United States — but I have heard that there is a new film that that got a twelve-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival by an Iranian filmmaker. He was sentenced to 8 years in prison and managed to escape, and the film has actual footage of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in it. So I'm dying to see that film. I'm sure that's got to be a very, very powerful resource. Very current.

KS: Yeah! I guess my last question is, what do you hope readers will take away from your stories?

SEZ: Everything! There was a strong incentive for me to present a fuller picture of Iranian women. I don't want them to be reduced to hijab, which is something that often happens in Western media. We see that as their only issue, and we see them as just these heavily cloaked women. I wanted to depict them as they are. They are like all of us, they dance, and they laugh, and they sing, and they love their children, and they have weaknesses and vulnerabilities. That's one thing I hope that readers will take away. I want them to sort of gain a place in the human family because they're women, just like all of us, and they're human beings, just like all of us. And I wanted them to be filled out a little bit. So that's one of the messages.

I don't want to be very didactic, and I'm hoping my stories aren't didactic, but of course I do want to teach some things. I'm hoping that readers will learn a little bit about US involvement in Iran's affairs, which is a longstanding thing and not always clean. So I've touched on that a little bit in places.

I'd like to believe that there are also some universal messages about gender identity and parent-child relationships and love relationships and generational issues and the patriarchy and repression and all kinds of other things. But ultimately the thing I want readers to take away is — this sounds really corny — I want them to feel some kind of love and sisterhood. I want them to understand that the women's movement affects us all. The women's movement in Iran affects us all, and that we're all joined together somehow.

That was kind of a dramatic ending. 

KS: No, it was perfect 'cause everything you just said it feels like that's what I came away with when I finished reading. It was, these women were more real, they weren't just caricatures, they were my sisters who I've met on the street every day. And yeah, I learned more.

SEZ: Well, thank you. I think good books should enlarge our minds, but also our hearts.

KS: Yeah.

SEZ: I think you should come away with some emotion, and I hope that happened. I know it probably happens in some of the stories more than others. But that is a very fond hope of mine.

KS: Well, I can't say everybody will read this the way I did, but I don't know that there's a single story that I didn't like in there, so.

SEZ: Oh, thank you so much for saying that, that means a lot. I truly appreciate it.

KS: I am very excited to share it with our store and with my friends and family, so thank you.

SEZ: Excellent. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.

KS: You as well.

SEZ: Okay, have a great afternoon.

KS: You too.

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Zan: Stories by Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh (Dzanc Books, 9781950539932, Paperback Short Stories, $17.95) On Sale: 6/11/2024

Find out more about the author at suziehteshamzadeh.com.

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