mia's questionnaire responses

Your Name: mia susan amir (Yup the lack of capitals is intentional)

What you like to be called:  mia
Your email: mia.susan.amir@gmail.com

Your birthday: August 31st

Your genre(s):  I started as a poet and remain influenced by that sensibility but for the past 7 years the majority of my work has been in prose, and is almost always creative nonfiction. I am also a performer and vocalist and those mediums of expression impact all of my work, even when not explicitly visible.

My grad thesis: A memoir temporarily titled A Memory of Sand and Silence.

Why you are a writer:  A mentor named Chris Abani a few years ago posed a similar question to the participants of a workshop he was facilitating which I had the enormous privilege to attend. He asked "Why do you write?" My answer then was, "To exorcise pain." "Whose pain?" he asked. "Ancestral," I replied. "Your parents?" he pressed. "Also." Since that time the answer has become more specific and vague, nuanced, and broken, but at the bottom I think I am still writing towards the same fundamental impulse: which is also towards the question, how do we repair a broken world?

Also I believe as Thomas King says, that, "the truth about story is that’s all we are,” and I am interested to think about this with you all beside the question of what the role of the storyteller (which is to say writer) is in this very special historical moment in which we live.

First thing you ever wrote: I don't have a clear memory of the first thing I ever wrote, but what stands out is a story that my mother used to tell about a grade one project I completed for mother's day. According to her, I wrote with "the best handwriting in the class," "My mother likes lipstick and sweaters!" Neither were true. I guess from an early age I was wrestling with what constitutes truth in the context of nonfiction. ;)

What your writing practices are? How often? How long? Where? With? Etc.: I am currently writing everyday, even when there is no word count, but when I do count the words, there are usually approximately a minimum of 2000 a week. I contribute to a private blog sometimes daily, and at minimum weekly, which I participate in with one creative collaborator. We offer each other regular feedback, on what is working, and what isn't working, in each other's work.

Anything else you wan to tell us? I'm super excited to work beside, learn with, and support each of you in this journey we're about to undertake. Let's live into the work, which is to say, live it!