Today we’d like to introduce you to Huda Al-Marashi.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My journey as a writer has always been closely tied to my journey as a mother. I used to wait for my children’s naptimes to scribble ideas in a journal, and then when my kids started school, I designated their school day as my writing time. After years of rejection, my essays and opinion pieces started getting picked up in news outlets and in anthologies, but it took me close to ten years to publish my first book in 2018, a memoir called FIRST COMES MARRIAGE: MY NOT-SO TYPICAL AMERICAN LOVE STORY. But after spending so many years revising the same story, I struggled to find my way into another project. It wasn’t until a friend invited me to submit a story for a middle grade short story collection that I discovered a new audience that I truly enjoy writing for. Although I still occasionally write essays and opinion pieces for adults, I’ve been writing middle grade stories ever since. I love writing for readers who are still in the process of becoming who they are. It feels like the best opportunity to reach young minds and broaden their perspectives.
My next book, HAIL MARIAM launches on February 24th with an event at Warwick’s Bookstore at 7:30pm, and it’s inspired by my own experiences as the only Muslim girl in my Catholic school. I started Catholic school in the sixth grade and ended up going to an all-girls Catholic high school and Jesuit university. Like my main character Mariam, I entered Catholic school with a black and white understanding of my own religion. I was looking for areas of agreement and disagreement and trying to parse out what my faith did “right” and what other faiths did “wrong,” but over the years my religious education taught me to think beyond similarities and differences and to see the patterns you see among people of faith and within faith-based institutions. I think so much of the religious intolerance we see today stems from a lack of understanding about how religion operates in the world, and I wanted to use my own experience to start a conversation about interfaith tolerance and cooperation among young readers.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Rejection is a part of the writing life no matter how long a writer has been in the business. I still write essays that never find a home. I still try to sell stories that no one picks up. Sometimes these projects just need several more rounds of revision, but sometimes they simply don’t work. It was an idea I had to work through on my way to the next project. Although rejection is a way of life that I’ve come to accept and expect, it stings for a time, and the only way through is to commiserate with fellow artists. We remind each other that the real beauty of this craft is in the act of creating and that the only part we can control is our efforts to show up at our desks and do our best possible work.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Whether I’m writing for children or adults, I’m always looking at the immigrant experience in America and how we navigate cultural differences. Migration has become an unnecessarily politicized and contentious issue when it is a fundamental part of human existence. People have always moved throughout the world and much to our benefit–it’s how we’ve exchanged ideas and how our cultures have grown and developed. Through my stories, I hope readers will enter the lived experience of an immigrant family and see that when it comes to big relationships in our lives–with our faith, family, and friends–we are far more similar than we are different.
What matters most to you?
I think there’s nothing more powerful than feeling seen in a story. Storytelling is how we normalize our experiences and put our lives into a broader context, while also giving us starting point for meaningful conversations with each other. With my current book, I was thinking about how so many children struggle to figure out which of their rules are from their faith, which are from their culture, and which are unique to their families. There’s a line in HAIL MARIAM where Mariam tells her mother, “It’s helpful to know what you have to do for God and what you have to do for your mom and grandmother.” I’d love for my young readers to use HAIL MARIAM as a springboard for discussion with their parents and caregivers about their family’s belief system in the hopes that it will guide them toward a more nuanced understanding of faith that they can carry into their adult lives.
Pricing:
- Hail Mariam, Kokila Books, $17.99
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hudaalmarashi.com
- Instagram: @huda.almarashi
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorhudaalmarashi
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/huda-al-marashi/
