By Claire Dietz
Students from abroad, especially Russia and the Middle East, have a unique opportunity to spend two weeks in Iowa City, where they will have the chance to write and grow as individuals.
In conjunction with the International Writing Program, Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St., will host a reading at 7 p.m. today by writers Dora Malech of the U.S., Karim Alrawi of Egypt, and Alisa Ganieva of Russia.
The three will also be instructors for the Between the Lines program, which brings high-school-age students from around the world to Iowa City for two weeks.
Ganieva, who hails from Dagestan, a Russian republic on the Caspian Sea that borders the nations of Georgia and Azerbaijan, recalls her first time visiting the Midwest during her stay at the International Writing Program in 2012.
“It was the first time for me to be in Midwest America, to see the farms, the fields, the Amish,” she said. “I feel quite at home in Iowa City. Last year, I was invited as an instructor for Between the Lines; I was really surprised to see the same people on the streets, the same restaurants and cafés. I really felt nostalgic about it.”
Ganieva, the author of The Mountain and the Wall and The Bride and the Bridegroom, calls the development of each pupil “interesting and attractive.” She said the two weeks in Iowa City would change them.
“They’ll come here with their own baggage of experience or absence of experience,” she said. “Coming into touch with people who are in the start of their life and careers, and who knows, maybe they won’t become writers, but nevertheless it is very useful for them just to know the world.
“I think truly brilliant pieces of literature always suggest different perspectives and different ways to interpret situations. I think at the end of these two weeks, most of them will come to this conclusion and will start thinking this way.”
For Malech, the author of Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean, the program “really facilitates cross-cultural understanding and connections.”
“[The] groups coming together with a kind of common ground that all of the high-school students are really interested in creative writing,” she said. “Literature is a way to promote empathy and an understanding, connection with people.”
The evening’s final reading will come from Alrawi, the author of Book of Sands, and a former writing instructor at the American University in Cairo. The novel, which won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, tells the story of a father and daughter who take to the road to escape persecution during the Arab Spring.
Since Alrawi began working on Sands, the book has undergone monumental changes, including a total rewriting of the plot. When he first set off to write the book, it was set in Egypt and was about Alrawi’s time teaching there.
“One of the observations I had when I was there was the uneven social development of the country, not just social but wealth as well,” he said. “You would be in a remote village with no road, no running water, barely any electricity, people living almost 200-300 years ago, but everyone has cellphones. That contrast between a society with very modern technology and very medieval ways of life and thinking interested me.”
However, once the Arab Spring began, Alrawi said he realized he needed to write a new book.
“When the Arab Uprising began, I realized everything was changing,” he said. “[So] I went to Egpyt, spent 16 of the 18 days of the uprising there.”