In-depth Written Interview
with Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye, interviewed in her home in San Antonio, Texas on July 16, 2012.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What's the difference for you between writing for adults and writing for children?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: When I'm writing for children, I feel I'm in a very, very precious place in my own heart and in my own mind. I was just thinking yesterday how we're children for such a shorter time than we are adults, and maybe that's why being around children always feels like times of acute alertness. I really want to ask this 11-year-old questions. I want to know what they're thinking about, what they're worrying about.
When I was working on A Maze Me, I interviewed some girls who were 12 whom I'd never seen in my life. I just asked a librarian to gather some girls, and separately, I had conferences with them at the library in a little room in Martha, Texas, a town where I didn't live. And to hear an 11-year-old say that her greatest fear in the world was waking up and forgetting to get dressed and going out in her pajamas was so somehow refreshing and endearing to me. It's as if this person has never heard about all the really horrible things in the world yet.
I need to be able to go to this space in my own mind to feel that kind of fear, that kind of worry. We all do as adults. We need to be cleansed. So maybe sometimes writing for children is a kind of refreshment, a cleansing of the spirit. A lot of the dross or the excess, the accumulated clutter of adulthood falls away.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You're incredibly diverse with formats.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I like all formats. To me, one nourishes another, and you'll be working on a very short story, for example, and suddenly some lines that want to go toward a poem come to you or vice versa. You'll be working on a poem and a line that seems more like it should be in an essay comes to you.
I always urge students to try many different genres and even try very different styles of poems, for example. Write in the style of Emily Dickinson then Walt Whitman—they are two very different animals. We should all try many things and not get confined too early in our writing.
TEACHINGBOOKS: It seems that you've often written about memory.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Memories are our wealth. Think how much we draw on our memories and how precious they are to us. We need our memories to make us whole, to keep us sane, and to give us a sense of humanity.
I always feel just to hang out anywhere and close my eyes and be with my memory for a while is just an incredible pleasure and gift. Writing out of memory is something that I was very aware of, even as a little child. I would tell myself, "You know, if you don't write about this thing that happened this week, where is it going to be to you in ten years? You may forget about it completely, and it really matters to you. So maybe you should write it down right now."
TEACHINGBOOKS: You are of Palestinian descent. Please talk about where you were born, where you have lived, and where you settled as an adult.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I was born and grew up in St. Louis until I was 14. My mother spent most of her childhood there as well, and I will always feel very close to that incredibly hot and humid, amazing, melancholy, half-wrecked city on the Mississippi.
Then we lived in Jerusalem. My father was Palestinian, originally from Jerusalem. He came to the United States as a university student and met my mother. We moved back to Jerusalem with the intention of staying there indefinitely when I was a freshman in high school. After a year, there came the Six-Day War and things were very chaotic and disrupted, and my parents thought it was best that we leave. We moved to San Antonio, Texas, a place with which they had very little connection and no jobs lined up.
It was quite a reckless choice on their part, but here I am, still in San Antonio. I was the only one of my immediate family who stayed here. I went to college at Trinity University, and I love it here. San Antonio has always been to my family a very hospitable place, which I think is its basic personality as a city. And so that's where I've lived, and been married, had our child and raised him, and so forth.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What was it like growing up in St. Louis?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I was a bicultural kid living in a very mixed neighborhood of people of all backgrounds—a kind of middle class historic neighborhood. There was a sense of possibility and of freedom and openness that even back in the 1950s and 1960s really permeated our worlds. I felt lucky as a child to have access to more than one world. There was always this sense of world stories passing through our living room.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please share more about what it was like to be in a bicultural family with immigrant families from other backgrounds all telling their stories to one another.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I didn't really know any other Arab American kids when I was growing up, but I knew a lot of kids of other backgrounds and it all was part of an interesting world texture—a savory sense of the world filled with many stories and many things. I definitely think it contributed to our ecumenical spirit as a family.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Were you and your brother around adults a lot?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: We were very much around the adults and we were also part of that very free culture in the 1950s and 1960s where kids could actually disappear for a whole day at the age of 10 and their parents didn't know exactly where they were going. They knew you left on your bike and you'd be home for dinner. I think that is something that's a little bit lost, and I feel really happy to have been allowed that freedom as a child.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Did your parents support and encourage your reading?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: We were all big readers in our house, and I felt very rich as a child because I had lots of stuff to read. I did not associate wealth with money. To this day, it seems kind of strange when people equate wealth with luxury and lifestyle and money, because I still think of wealth as how many things are stacked next to my bed that I haven't read yet. That's when I feel rich.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What influence (beyond biculturalism) did your parents have on you?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: My father started out as a radio journalist and became a newspaper journalist, so he was reading all the time. He was a phenomenally eloquent speaker of English, and he raised us with a sense of language being a gift and valuing the use of precise language. My mother was very big on exposure to culture too, such as museums, free plays in the park, symphonies and music.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What was life like in San Antonio?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: San Antonio is a city with a predominantly mixed culture attitude, and that felt very comfortable to all of us. It was and is a primarily Latino city where alternative cultures are respected and cherished.
TEACHINGBOOKS: When you were a kid, were you a writer as well as a reader?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Yes. I started writing as soon as I could write. I had a real appetite for it. To put a few lines on a paper was satisfying in a way that nothing else was. It was even more satisfying than conversation, and it made me happy. I knew quickly as a six-year-old that it was something I wanted to do all my life.
I just knew that I loved it, like somebody who becomes an athlete very young and they just feel so good when they're doing it. They know this is something they can and want to do. Writing, even at a very early age, felt very satisfying and hopeful.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please give an example of the kind of writing you did when you were young.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I just found the most fascinating document—a notebook containing a series of interviews I had done in the Middle East with my grandmother 30 years ago. My father had evidently been translating while she and I talked. I had been asking the questions in English, and then she was answering in Arabic and he was translating on the spot, line by line for me to write down. A couple of cousins translated when he tired of it; it went on for many days. It surprised me because I didn't remember doing this.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What jumped out at you from those interviews?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: In the interviews, I asked my grandmother what secret dream she had for my father when he was growing up in the Old City of Jerusalem. She said my father was the only one of her sons who always stared at the horizon, who was very interested in the British, who was very interested in speaking perfect English, and who was always looking away. She knew from a young age that he would probably be the one who would go away.
I thought she was going to say that her dream was that he would stay there with her, but she said her dream was that he would marry the Jewish girl down the block. That was so amazing.
I read the whole notebook out loud to my husband and son, and that part just blew their minds. This was way before I wrote Habibi. I did the interview before my grandmother became a refugee during this creation of the state of Israel when they lost their home and everything, which is referred to in Habibi. I didn't actually remember she had said that when I wrote the book. And it intrigued me so much because it was like taking my notion of the Arab American girl having a crush on the Jewish boy in Habibi, another layer that really was kind of in my DNA from grandmother that she herself, even those in early days and being the provincial, very untraveled person that she was, would have thought that. And that really made me proud of her, that she would have thought that when he was a child.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What was it like to be in a community preparing for war in Jerusalem?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: There was a weird undercurrent. I was attending an Armenian school with people who were acutely aware of the traumas of war and violence and massacre and so forth. The Armenians are definitely an under-sung community in the Old City of Jerusalem, but a very, very important one. I was in this school where I was the only non-Armenian student. And they all accepted and embraced me and thought it was fun to have someone who wasn't an Armenian there because they could tell me Armenian things. I was very interested in Armenian culture, and I am to this day.
But there was a nervousness and anxiety and sorrow and people worried about what would happen next. Anytime you have something very violent in the realm, you feel a constant low-grade anxiety, and you don't want people you love or places you love to be jeopardized by this craziness of violence.
I always felt like I was lucky because my father was the editor at that point of the Jerusalem Times, which was a daily in English and in Arabic, so people would often ask me, "What does your dad say," or "What did your dad say? What does he think is going to happen next week?"
I felt like we did have a little bit of a hotline to the news, but also my dad thought we should leave. That was kind of sad for all the people who weren't foreign citizens and able to leave at that point.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What was it like being a Muslim in an Orthodox Christian community?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: It was okay. Women in that part of the world were not the luckiest women going in those days. It wasn't an impossible place to be, but it was hard. I mean, some of the stuff that I wrote about in Habibi, like being constrained to not be too public about my affections… there were all these things that you took into account.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Your work has so many teaching possibilities. What are some examples of how your books have been used in schools?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: It is very important to me that people feel befriended by things that they read and that they feel closer to their own experience as well as to what they've just read. I hope that there's something portable about the text.
Teachers have had their classes read my poem "My Father and the Fig Tree," and then have asked students to write about a relative and a tree. They'll hand me a set of poems, and I'll read them and feel like I not only know something about the culture of that place, but the plant life and the people and their superstitions and their home remedies, and all these things that come through in these pieces.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you see as the curricular benefit to this sort of writing assignment?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: There's a highly transferable element about reading and writing. Assigning a responsive writing to text is one of the most encouraging things that teachers can do. I also encourage teachers to supplement students' writing lessons with material that would really give them an appetite for writing.
TEACHINGBOOKS: In Habibi, the main character was about 13 or 14 when she moved to Jerusalem from St. Louis. What would you like a teacher to know about this story?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Habibi is a mixture of fact and fiction. I included autobiographical elements in my own life, like the real Armenian school or the hat that the principal wore, but the way I told the story was fiction.
I think every book is a mixture of fact and fiction. No matter what you call it, there is always a mixture of the elements. I ground my books in things that I know and then feel free to have an imaginative storyline or poem come out of it.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How can teachers leverage your use of both fact and fiction in your writing when creating a lesson?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I would urge students to think in that way about their own experience and the ability to make a story better or contribute something else to a story or poem. We have various ways of remembering the same thing that happened, and it is interesting to read students' varied responses to the same reading.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about This Same Sky, your anthology of writings about September 11, 2001.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: This Same Sky was really quite an ambitious project for somebody who had never made an anthology of a professional kind. I'd made a lot of student anthologies within schools. I had stayed up all night typing and putting the work together for books that kids could take, but to make an anthology that really tried to span many countries and bring voices together that had a similar hope of some kind of universality linking us—some thread beyond politics, some humanity that we all shared—was my impulse with that book.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How did This Same Sky come to be?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I created that book in the throes of trauma—of the first war in Iraq, which is why I put a poem from Iraq on the back cover to say to people, "Wait. What are we doing? Do we really know one another? How dare we? What do we need to remember? All these human beings everywhere." Even though the book was not primarily political at all, maybe the impulse that led me to it was.
There's a poem in This Same Sky by a Bangladeshi poet called something like "Poetry Was Like This," and he refers to very particular elements of his own life, like the braids on the head of the girls who sat in front of him in school or the smoldering fire at his grandfather's house or a nest filled with a bird's delicate eggs. And, you know, any one of those things could be loved by a person in Bangladesh as well as a person in Missouri or Texas or Wisconsin.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk more about these shared elements across cultures and barriers.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I wanted it to be a book that was very rich with tiny particular elements, the kinds of details of life which are so often eclipsed by grandstanding and war. I often think in such a haunted way about how violence and disaster erases all the details of someone's life so irrevocably.
The preciousness and the particularities reek of human life and what we care about, like the ways we arrange our medicine cabinets or what somebody puts on their kitchen counter.
I like poetry to be particular in that way as well, but also have some larger reach that suggests that this is what poetry was to me in Bangladesh but maybe you'll be able to imagine me better if you hear the details and you realize that you have those things, too.
TEACHINGBOOKS: One of the nice things about your work is you're not focusing on the victimization and the dehumanization, but yet that contrast seems to exist in your works.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: No matter what perspectives we're raised with, there is always so much more to know, such as understanding somebody else's perspective. Often, it's the little particularities that help us have that knowledge. It's not strident like, "My saltshaker's better than your saltshaker." It's, "Hey, wait a minute, we both have saltshakers." And then wondering how things spin out from this and how things connect.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What about I'll Ask You Three Times Are You OK?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I always have had a fascination with random encounters. I used to feel haunted—even as a child—on a bus or in lines thinking I may never see this person again in my life so I had better pay attention to them right now: "Look at them closely or have a little chat, if you can. It might be your only chance."
I have met so many incredible drivers in so many places. I always take notes on them in the backseat. I had tons of notebooks in which I'd sketched these conversations out as they were happening, and it struck me that there were many, many stories here in the conversations. What they choose to talk about or what they bring up is often very peculiar and fascinating.
So, I wrote I'll Ask You Three Times Are You OK? It is journalistic in its tone and very non-fictional.
TEACHINGBOOKS: There Is No Long Distance Now is a collection of very, very short stories. It's incredible what you can share in a very short number of words.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I loved writing in the form of a very, very short story. I am fascinated by how much could be conveyed about character or situation in 1,000 words or less. I really enjoyed overwriting each story a little bit and then cutting back to what was really essential.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Have any of your very short stories expanded into longer ones?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I've had some people say they don't want to let the characters go from one or the other of the short stories in No Long Distance Now, and they ask me to write a longer book about them. I resist. Our days are so rich and replete with so many stories, every single day. A story of that size maybe will tip us into a different kind of viewing of our own day and all the stories it holds.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What inspired you to write Honeybee?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I have a great interest in our stricken honeybees with their colony collapse disorder and what its various causes are as well as the affect of pesticides on the bee population. The honeybees in Europe are dying too. There's a real scientific trauma that is just one of the many traumas that are going on in the natural world these days. There are so many questions about it, like what's really causing this, what's really happening?
The parallel metaphor for me of human beings who are living in a world of its own kind of colony collapse disorder: so much war, so much violence, people acting as if war is just a given like "we live in a time of war."
In Honeybee, I'm trying to get across the whole idea that the world is a really big hive and we're all in it and we're all part of it.
TEACHINGBOOKS: There are so many topics that you're happy to dig your soul into.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: For most of us, there are a lot of topics we care about. I don't mind being on a soapbox about the ones that are really important to me and to keep bringing them up. They're not solved, so it's always a question of how can we come back to these same topics that have concerned us all our lives, and what we can say about them now.
TEACHINGBOOKS: It seems like you're fighting misrepresentation all the time. Are you an active voice in representing Arab Americans?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I feel that anyone who despises violence would have to be an active voice and just keep speaking out or maybe speak out a little more ardently. I do remember feeling after September 11 that whereas I had often worked with kids in classrooms without identifying as an Arab American, I felt that it was important to speak out a little more personally and just quickly say, "As an Arab American person, I grew up in a house that was very gentle and disliked violence and wished for no violence and thought war was over." I have felt a little different since speaking out. Also, when all these horrible headlines are coming out of the Middle East all the time, I want to stand up for all the loveliness in every single place in the Middle East and not allow negativity to dominate.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk a little bit about A Maze Me: Poems for Girls.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: The period of life for girls at the age of around 12 years old has always been so fraught with mystery and future—wondering what's coming soon and what am I going to be part of when I'm a teenager. It's a delicate time in one's life. I remember so vividly my lack of desire to enter into an older self. I wondered how I might hang on to that last remnant of childhood. I didn't feel many books really addressed it that satisfied me at that point.
I remember looking through Emily Dickinson poems or books by women of earlier eras, trying to find things to cling on to that would help me understand aging and how we continue to carry the meaningful aspects of all of our ages with us at all times. Later, I found myself often watching girls at that age or loving to work with girls of that age and just wanting to write a book that connected to the voice that I felt was still close in my heart to being that age—all the questions you ask, all the things you are concerned about, all the things you wonder.
So in A Maze Me: Poems for Girls there was an age spirit unlike any other book I've done where I wanted to respect and honor and treasure that age of being around 11 to 13.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What about your anthology of young people's poems, Salting the Ocean and Time You Let Me In?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I love the writing of young writers, and I've always wanted to share their words with other people and let them know the capacity for wisdom and magic and terrific language that youth are capable of.
I have felt often that the voices of children are not listened to enough, and that they are cast aside. We need to hear them more; we need to know what they think. I love the idealism of youth and the melodrama of it all. It was not really hard to put those books together. It was hard to restrain myself from wanting to have a thousand poems in each book because there are so many good poems by young writers.
100 Poems by Young Poets is an anthology of poetry representing a 15- or 20-year span of being with kids. Time You Let Me In came from meeting so many young writers right on the cusp of possible publishing—college-age or a couple of high school-age writers in there—just wanting to have a collection that other young writers or teachers can use or young writers could have.
I always hope that teachers will use them as a trigger for more student writing and let kids hear them and be encouraged toward their own writing.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How do you keep up on new poetry releases?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I am always in a state of discovery. I am constantly looking for poems; my curiosity is what guides me. I've told kids that when making an anthology, I kind of feel like a detective because I am writing to so many people and looking everywhere I can to find poems that I might want to use, inviting people to send me their work. It's just an endless quest.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You write young adult-novels too.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I wrote a YA novel called Going Going. It's in support of small businesses in our nation. When you drive through a neighborhood filled with nothing but franchises and you cannot figure out where you are because all the towns look the same, read Going Going to give you perspective.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What inspired 19 Varieties of Gazelle.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I tried to gather poems relating to the Middle East that I wrote before 9/11 as well as poems I was writing immediately after 9/11 into one book. My editor felt it was important that the before and after poems exist between the same covers and that someone who was interested in an Arab American or Middle Eastern perspective could look at the poems together.
It's that idea of shining a close light on places and people that some think in broad sweeping terms as horrible. My father's favorite phrase that I've quoted so many times in my life, was, "I think we could use a little more information here." He was trying to convey this idea that we don't know everything and we're so presumptuous in our perspectives.
I wanted19 Varieties of Gazelle not to be presumptuous about culture or make a pretense that I really know what it's like to be a Palestinian refugee, but I had close access to them all my life and have witnessed that kind of trauma and the kind of beauty that persists in very difficult places and regions, even when there is some grievous problem going on.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You get to talk to a lot of teachers and librarians. What do you like to tell them?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I often urge them to trust their instincts and to sneak in a little more poetry, just a tiny sharing of a poem at the beginning of any presentation they're doing. Feel comfortable, even if you don't identify yourself as a poet yourself, feel comfortable sneaking something in that might sort of intrigue or even mystify your students for the moment. You know, I love that ability of poetry to transport and carry us away to a different place very quickly in just a few lines.
I urge people to use poems—to just put them out there in the air—I encourage that sense of exposure to poems, and to trust their own instincts, because I think all teachers and librarians have very keen instincts.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What's a typical workday like for you?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I've always been a morning writer, so I usually get up and work on things early in the morning. Then if I'm not going out to a school or if I'm not traveling and visiting with people that day, then I try to work through the day recurrently, repeatedly. I'm not a person who sits down for eight hours and works for eight hours, although I have tried that for different seasons of my life, and it's a very interesting thing to try. I do it now and then.
But I'm reading and taking notes and writing throughout the day. I've never been a late night writer though, I've always been a late night reader, like somebody who likes to spend my evenings or late nights reading—but not writing. I believe regular writing is a very, very helpful thing to do. I don't save it up until next Sunday and say I'm going to work all day Saturday. I try to be involved every single day with composition and with text, whether it's revision, or, right now I'm working on the ninth draft of a chapter book for seven-year-olds.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: When I get stuck, I usually take a walk, do chores, or read.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What is your office like?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: My tiny office has been horrifying to many people who've entered it, wondering, "How does anyone get anything accomplished in a room filled with this many books and papers and stacks of things?" but I find it very cozy and inspiring.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell students?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I like to tell students that to be a writer, there are just three things they need. One is to develop a sense of their own material, asking what they are passionate about, what do they really care about, what do they know, what seems really wacky to them that they might want to talk about—identifying their own material. Then, I encourage them to get in the habit of writing on a regular basis. Finally, I tell them to find a way to share their work, whether it's with one good friend or within their class or in an online magazine or journal.
Many students have told me they post their work in all kinds of places these days, and get very encouraging comments from people, which sounds great to me.
I always want them to think, "Wait a minute, I'm a person of words, too. Here's a person visiting my class who has kind of made a lifetime of writing things, but this world also belongs to me. I want students, as much as they are willing or interested, to realize that exercising their own powers of language and words will help them no matter what they do in their lives.
Over the years I have really tried to stress writing as a form of mental fitness, promoting mind fitness and focus. I'm always urging participation, regular notetaking, and a respect for the small increment of time. I think many adults I meet deny themselves their own writing because they think you have to have eight hours a day in which to write. I say, "No, you need seven minutes where you can sit and get in the habit of writing things down. Eventually, you'll realize that small increments of time can really be valuable when it comes to gathering your thoughts or coming up with text.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Is there anything else you think people would like to know about you and/or your work?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I have loved for years the idea of reading material about the "other"—whomever the "other" might be to you at a given time. For example, if you've never met a person from Nigeria, then I think you really need to read a Nigerian book. Or a very young kid needs to read things written by very old people.
Somebody who's living in a heavily urban, overpopulated place should read about living in a small, rural town. We should all keep reading things throughout our lives that represent experiences we haven't had because I think it makes us bigger people.
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