AS: What inspired you to write “Forugh Farrokhzad?”
TS: I am a reader and a writer at my core. I’m also an Iranian immigrant. That’s why I chose to write about Forugh Farrokhzad. My primary goal was to introduce her to people in America…. What inspires me to write the most, honestly, is topics that I feel connect with me internally, whether that be other writers or subjects or events or just my feelings in general. I think I produce my best work when I feel very strong emotions and that was definitely the case with Forugh Farrokhzad because I feel such a big connection to her.
AS: What was your writing process like?
TS: For my writing class, I had to take a piece that I had already previously written and turn it into three separate genres. My origin piece was actually my college Common App essay, which I had written about Forugh, and how I connected with her as a character, writer, and poet. I had never really liked poetry before reading her, and after [reading her work] I felt a connection to her. So my first experiment was to write the poem Forugh Farrokhzad. Then I turned the piece into a kind of theatrical op-ed, and also a photo essay that all kind of just accompany each other to make one big project about Forugh Farrokhzad. But the poem that I had submitted to the journal was the very first thing because it just came so naturally to me.
AS: Were there any hurdles you had to go through, or any big struggles to get across what you wanted to express?
TS: For sure. Writing a poem about a poet is super hard, because you often find yourself comparing your work to their work, which should not be the case, but you get a lot of impostor syndrome from about if you’re telling their story the right way, and the way they would have wanted. There’s just a lot more pressure on using the right words and the right metaphors and all of that. And with that, there isn’t a lot of information in the Anglophone world about Forugh Farrokhzad or the Iranian world. Because she wrote about such bold and taboo topics, they weren’t very accepted in the culture of Iran at the time. I wouldn’t say there’s not much good research about her, so I had very little information to go off of besides a few pieces by recent Iranian-American authors and translators.
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 