How I Got Published

This month, I'm fulfilling a lifelong dream - twice! But not at all the way I had planned.

In the fall of 1995, Jenn Crowell was a senior in high school at Dallastown Area High School and applying to the creative writing program at Goucher College. As her writing sample, she enclosed the manuscript of her novel. The head of the creative writing program, Madison Smartt Bell, liked it enough to send it to his agent. She liked it enough to send it to a publisher. They published Necessary Madness.

By the time Jenn got to freshman orientation, she had already sold the cable TV rights. Her story was told in the Baltimore Sun, the Portland Press Herald and across the country.

How do I know? Because family and family friends clipped the story out of their newspapers and mailed them to me (this was 1997 - people did that!) from across the country. And I saw myself in Jenn Crowell. Dallastown was our football arch-rival (though, to be honest, it was no contest; we were terrible). I took a boy from Dallastown to prom, and he spent half the night throwing up in the bathroom, poor guy, under the influence of my best friend and her boyfriend's teasing.

I also applied to Goucher College. Jenn Crowell was living my dream.

Buttons for Solidarity with Muslims

***UPDATE***

If you want buttons to share with your community, please contact me at maryah.converse@gmail.com or purchase them here.

There is renewed interest in Peace Be With you buttons due to the recent uptick in violence against Muslims (e.g. here, here, here and this one that was actually probably not a hate crime) and the recent bombs in New York and New Jersey. I have more informational cards and literally hundreds of buttons to give away, already paid for by the Women's Alliance of the Unitarian Church of All Souls, NYC.

I am covering postage costs. If you would like to make a donation, please go to LaunchGood.com and give to a project in a Muslim community of your choice. The team at LaunchGood, led by founder (and my friend) Chris Abdurrahman Blauvelt, work with each campaign to make sure that they are both as successful as possible, and that all donations go directly where they are needed. Your gifts there will be tax-deductible.

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Recently, I gave a presentation to the Women's Alliance of All Souls Unitarian Church about some pins I made with some other New York City Unitarian Universalists made to wear in solidarity with our Muslim and Arab neighbors. These buttons are meant to say "You're safe beside me" to Muslims and other Arabs we see on the subway and elsewhere.

The Influence of Islam on my New York Unitarian Life

All Souls Women’s Alliance luncheon

I am so delighted to be speaking at the All Souls Women’s Alliance and joining a distinguished list of speakers, among them a wide range of speakers on international affairs: last month my fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Catherine with the long Nigerian last name, the month before Rev. Carol Huston on the International Women's Convocation. Last year I made extra sure to be here for Marilyn Mehr speaking about Polish Unitarians. Another memorable luncheon for me was the author of the Gaza Kitchen cookbook a couple years ago now.

So when Betty asked me to be your speaker, I was delighted. In the internationally aware tradition of both the Women’s Alliance and my own tendencies as an activist, I want to speak to you about a few ways that Islam and Arab communities have influenced me as a Unitarian Universalist and as a New Yorker.

An appreciation of Islam, oddly enough, has been part of my Mayflower-descended family since long before I was born. When my mother was a senior in high school in Massachusetts in the mid-Seventies, her family hosted an exchange student for a year: a young Afghan woman named Fakhria.

I grew up with many stories about Fakhria. One of my favorites is the first time the family took her into Boston. She looked left and right everywhere they went, and got increasingly agitated. Finally, Fakhria said, “Where are the beggars?”

She had filled her pockets with nickels and dimes, as she had always done in the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan. Her parents had taught her that as a Muslim, as a Pashtun and as the daughter of a family of privilege, she had an obligation to give to the less fortunate. She wanted to know where the homeless were in Boston so she could contribute.

I think of Fakhria often as I pass the homeless in the New York subway and am confronted with the question,

What am I doing with my privilege to serve others?

For me, that’s a theological question — maybe THE theological question of Unitarian Universalism.

Pets and Other Critters: Goats

Part 1: Houseguests | Part 2: Pets | Part 3: Goats and Chickens

It is a truth universally acknowledged that tourists love camels and goats. I confess, I’m no exception. Sid Muna commented once, as ustaadh Imad was driving us down to the Directorate of Education, “Every time we pass a herd of goats, you turn your head to look!”

I especially liked to watch the sheep and goats come home. Several families would send their goats with one shepherd out of town, perhaps as much as several miles, to graze on what brown remnants were left of the grasses and flowers that had blanketed the hillsides in April. About an hour before the sunset adhan, they would return with their flocks up the roads that radiated out of town.

The shepherds sauntered casually at the back. The first time I visited my PCV friend Lynn in her village, she described to me how her elderly downstairs neighbor clucked and tsked at his flock from behind, and they just knew whether to go left or right, to stop or move faster. The sheep and goats would trot single-file on the roadway. As they passed their home pens, a line of sheep and goats would peel off to the right or left, single-file to their dinners.

Everyone else chuckled at my fascination with goats, but it was what finally allowed me to have a relationship with Osama.

No thanks to his big brother, though! On the first night I ever spent in Faiha’, I was sitting in sid Muna’s dimly lit living room after dinner, tiny glasses of hot tea set out before us on her colorful Persion rug. Samira brought out apples, oranges and little cucumbers on small plates, one for every two people in the family room.

In the middle of our conversation, mostly in translation via Abu Alaa because my Arabic was still minimal, a head popped around the corner. He was tall, with thin cheeks and bright dark eyes, and he was asking his yumma (sid Muna) for something.

“Maryah!” exclaimed Alaa, a big grin on his broad face and an elder brother’s glint in his eye. “Look!” he said, pointing at the head peering ’round the corner. “The enemy, the enemy! It’s your enemy Osama, ya Maryah!”

Poor Osama flushed red and his head popped back out of sight. He mostly stayed out of my sight for months. I would see him at dinner sometimes, but he ate faster than anyone I have ever seen — his even skinnier sister Samira was almost as fast — and would go immediately back outside. We rarely spoke.

#25Jan 2011

I knew something was brewing when I returned to New York City after doing teaching fellowship interviews in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. That day, January 25, 2011, a magnificent snowfall had blanketed New York City. I was staying with Peace Corps friends just three blocks from Central Park on 79th, and they had encouraged me to take my camera into the park in the snow.

I just wanted to quickly check my Facebook notifications before I left. That was how I learned of the protests on Tahrir Square, half a block from our classrooms and three blocks from my roommate’s balcony.

Rumors and speculation had been flying since Ben Ali had fallen in Tunisia the month before, speculation of which dictator might fall next. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was either the most or least likely candidate, depending on who you asked.

Our Interconnection with Muslim Lives

the sermon I delivered at the Midcoast Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Damariscotta, Maine

When my mother was a senior in high school in Reading, Massachusetts, in the mid-Seventies, her family hosted an exchange student for a year: a young Afghan woman named Fakhria. One day, they went into Boston. Fakhria looked left and right everywhere they went, and got increasingly agitated. Finally, she said, “Where are the beggars?”

She had filled her pockets with nickels and dimes, as she had always done in the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan. Her parents had taught her that as a Muslima, as the daughter of a family with privilege, she had an obligation to give to the less fortunate. She wanted to know where the homeless were in Boston so she could contribute. I think of Fakhria most days, whenever I pass a homeless person on the New York City subway.

My Heart Hurt

by Erin Morrell, reprinted with permission

When I asked my Syrian colleague today how she was doing in the aftermath of the Paris attacks she looked at me and said, I am sad because now everyone looks at my country like it is a horrible place. We are not bad people, we are good people, and there are those posing to be from Syria who are causing these problems and people think my country is a bad country. Her pastor suggested that people in her congregation who felt like they could answer peoples questions should do so but if it would invoke anger within themselves they should remain calm and remain quiet until their angered passed. This made my heart hurt.

I served on the Syrian border in Jordan for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer. Many of the people who I lived with had their families split between the border when the Middle East was demarcated into different countries, so I have always felt a kin-ness with the Syrians I have met to my families in Jordan. While I was there these people cared for me. They invited me into their homes. They shared their stories and their secrets. They taught me that there is a way to be with people who are so different from you in so many ways - that love can transcend language and culture, history and politics.

Pets and Other Critters: Pets

Part 1: Houseguests | Part 2: Pets | Part 3: Goats and Chickens

Naureen fell in love with a tiny orange kitten with a nearly tragic past. Found on a roadside, a cut on his forepaw had become gangrenous, requiring amputation. The first surgery cut the bone on an angle, leaving a sharp edge that prevented it from healing and required a second amputation. While the shelter paid for the surgeries, the rest was up to Naureen, who named the runt kitten Simsim—sesame seed in Arabic—and rebandaged his tiny stump morning and night for months.

On those Saturday nights when I, unexpectedly or deliberately, had missed my bus home from Irbid and ended up at Naureen’s instead, I fell in love with Simsim, too. He would come right to me for a snuggle, and after I had left, Naureen told me, he would sit on the fersheh where I had slept and mew at Naureen, looking about for me.

A few weeks after his second surgery, though, Naureen was travelling to Morocco to vacation with her cousin and best friend. In Jordan, there’s not kennel to leave your cat at while you travel. A cat-sitter was needed, and I could not resist temporary custody of little furball Simsim.

Pets and Other Critters: Houseguests

Part 1: Houseguests | Part 2: Pets | Part 3: Goats and Chickens

Peace Corps can be a lonely, frustrating, thankless job, and the unconditional love and affection of a pet can be just what the psychologist would have ordered … if there were a psychologist in your remote village. A later Arabic classmate who joined Peace Corps because of my stories had a pet fish at her site in Mozambique. Not as cuddly as a cat, but I could see the simple, low maintenance appeal of a fish for company.

My “pet” was just as low maintenance. I had a gecko. Or perhaps a series of geckos. It was hard to tell; they all look alike, and we had a very casual relationship. My gecko was pink, about as long as my hand, and generally preferred the top-most eighteen inches of my walls. Sometimes, when I was blessedly home alone, he chittered to me in a little sound like the clatter of tiny teeth. Sometimes I tried to chitter back with teeth and tongue. Once we got to know each other better, I sometimes talked to him in my own language—unloading about my day, inquiring about his, exchanging one-sided pleasantries about the weather. He was not always there, though, and sometimes I did miss his company.

Quiet Ride on the Nile

One of my favorite memories of Egypt, even now, is on a sailboat.

It was April 2009. I was staying in Cairo with a friend, and had booked sleeper train tickets to Luxor and back, with about fifteen hours between to see as much of the archaeological wonders of ancient Egypt as I could. A little haggling at the train station got me a driver for the day, and at a price I actually thought was surprisingly fair after my time in Cairo.

He dropped me at the massive ancient city of Karnak in the thin cool early morning air, but by the time we crossed the Nile and got to the Valley of the Kings, the heat was really beginning to build.

My driver was a middle-aged high school math teacher. I have had my share of Don Juans, Chatty Kathys and creepers as cab drivers, even one groper who was not at all impressed by my threat to call my uncle/father-in-law* in the secret police if he did not pull the cab over right now! I have ample reason to recognize an exceptional cab driver almost immediately, and my Luxor math teacher was exceptional.