Local author Marjan Kamali on how she got into writing, advice to students

Editor's note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Marjan Kamali is an Iranianauthor based in Lexington, Mass. Born in Turkey, she grew up in several countries around the world before coming to the U.S. Holding a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, an MBA from Columbia University and an MFA from New York University, Kamali is the author of two books: “The Stationery Shop” (2019)  and “Together Tea” (2013). In addition to writing novels herself, Kamali also teaches writing at GrubStreet and is a Tufts parent. Kamali sat down with the Daily to discuss her work and offer advice to Tufts students.

The Tufts Daily (TD): Why did you become a writer? How did you get there?

Marjan Kamali (MK): I always loved to read. When I was a child I was a bookworm and I loved reading anything I could get my hands on, but especially novels and stories. I grew up before we had the internet, so I really appreciated how books could transport me to a different time and place. I felt like authors had this superpower where they could create this entire world and make it feel real and I wanted to have that superpower ... I always wrote, but as I grew up I started to realize I actually wanted to do it as a vocation.

TD: Do you have a few favorite books from childhood?

MK: So from childhood a book that I really loved was called “The Secret Garden”(1911). Another book I really loved was “A Little Princess” (1905). You know, I read a lot of books as a child that weren’t necessarily books or young adult books. I read a lot of the classics, like "Jane Eyre" (1847) and Charles Dickens, a lot of the British classics because that’s what my mom had in the house. Definitely loved all of those. 

TD: When you write, where do you get that inspiration?

MK: That’s such a good question. So, because I do novels, the inspiration for each book can be quite different. For my first novel, which is “Together Tea,”I was really inspired because I had been reading books about multicultural experiences and experiences of families immigrating to the U.S., but I felt I had never read a book that kind of reflected the experience of my own family's journey. I was inspired by not having the book I wanted to read, so I wrote it. I wanted to write a story that explored the Iranian American experience. After that book came out everybody was like, “Oh, what’s your second book going to be?” And I visited a lot of book clubs for my first book and at one of the book clubs a woman asked me to visit where she worked and she worked at an assisted living center. When I was there I met an elderly man who claimed all these things about his life. He kept saying he’d met the prince of Spain, he traveled with Charles de Gaulle; he kept saying these crazy things, and I just asked him his name. Later on, when I spoke to my dad, and I mentioned this man’s name — it was an Iranian name — and my dad said “Oh, he was one of our most decorated dignitaries.” He had met the prince of Spain, he had traveled with Charles de Gaulle, all of these things. I realized all of these things he had been saying were true, except it wasn’t received that way necessarily, so he became the inspiration for my second book, “The Stationary Shop." It opens with an elderly man in an assisted living center. It was an amazing experience.

TD: Do you have a favorite or least favorite thing you’ve written?

MK: Right now my favorite thing I’ve written is my second book, “The Stationary Shop” (2019). No offense to my first book, which I will always love. Right now it’s my favorite thing I’ve written because I worked really hard on it and I feel like I grew as a writer a lot, pushed myself and I forced myself to do things I wasn’t as comfortable with. I guess my least favorite ... I have so many least favorite things I’ve written. So many. Like any time you start, often times it’s not very good. So I have a lot of things that just aren’t my favorite.

TD: What’s the most difficult things you’ve experienced as a writer or in writing your novels?

MK: With both of [my novels], the most difficult part was the middle. I think for a lot of writers that’s when they give up because when you start a long term project like a novel, it’s different from writing a short story or an essay or a poem. It’s a very big unwieldy project. Sometimes you’re excited in the beginning, you get going, but then in the middle oftentimes novels hit a wall where you feel you have no idea what you’re doing, you have no idea where the story is going, you don’t even know if it’s any good. A lot of people give up, but that’s when you should actually push through. 

TD: Do you have any unique or important tips you share [with your writing students]?

MK: I always tell them there are no mistakes in the first draft. When you start doing a first draft, perfection is your enemy because a lot of people want their work to be good. Which makes sense, we all do, but it’s not going to be good right away. You just have to give yourself permission to have a bad first draft and accept that you can’t make a mistake as long as you’re writing in your first draft. You can always go back and fix things, change things, add things, subtract things. That’s something I definitely always say. 

TD: How did you get into teaching at GrubStreet?

MK: When I first moved to the Boston area I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I literally googled writing organizations in the Boston area, and GrubStreet came up. At first, I attended the big annual writing conference called the Muse and the Marketplace. I attended a few other things, like seminars, here and there. Once my first book had come out, by then I was really involved with GrubStreet. I knew a lot of people there, and I was asked to teach there. It was after the first book came out that I was asked to teach. 

TD: Do you have a preference between writing or teaching? Or do you enjoy the balance?

MK: I like both. They’re very different. I think ideally one would feed the other. So for example when I was writing “The Stationary Shop” (2019), I was also teaching "Writing the Novel." It was really interesting because for each of my classes I would have to create these craft lessons. When I would put the lesson together and I was teaching my students about something, sometimes it would trigger something I needed to do in my own writing. I think any teacher will tell you that they learn a lot from their students. It was cool to have that exchange. I think the students also appreciated that they were being taught by somebody who was in the trenches. I wasn’t theoretical, I was doing it too. 

TD: Do you have any advice for Tufts students, either in general or for those interested in going into writing?

MK: I think it’s really important to read and read a lot. With our culture today with social media and the internet, it’s easy to read in shorts spurts, like read something on Twitter or something in a little article online. But I would recommend that Tufts students take the time to unplug and just read novels. I’m a big big advocate for reading longer works and just immersing yourself in them. I think if you want to be a writer, that’s the best thing you can do. Read widely.