Katie Kitamura
Interview with Sima Qunsol
Sima Qunsol was selected as the winner of Washington Square Review’s New Voices Award in Fiction, selected by faculty judge Katie Kitamura, for her story, “The Dinner Party.” As part of the contest, the winner had an opportunity to be interviewed by Kitamura. The following is their email exchange.
Sima Qunsol lives in Amman, Jordan. Her work can be found in Wildness, Eclectica Magazine, Rusted Radishes, and Poetry Ireland Review.
KATIE KITAMURA: Could you share with us the origins of this story?
SIMA QUNSOL: Three years ago, I had dinner with my family during a thunderstorm. It was November, a little early in the year for a thunderstorm, and it was unlike anything I had experienced before in Amman. People in the city tend to turn inwards when it rains; they want to stay in, cancel plans, but I’ve always associated rain—especially rain that arrives after long spells of dry weather—with a kind of tender openness to the world. It seemed that no matter what we spoke about over the dinner table that night, our conversation would invariably return to the weather, directed by the incessant thunder outside. Somehow we all began sharing, as if on cue, anecdotes about thunder and lightning. Some of the stories were funny, other ones morbid. At least two of them involved an absurd death. There was a vulnerability to the stories we told, as if each one revealed a little secret that the rest of us didn’t know about.
On the way back home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how each one of us had had a close encounter with lightning, or knew someone who did. I wrote all the stories down, and in the following days started asking everybody around me if they had their own stories to share. They all did. Again, there was that fleeting vulnerability, those intimate admissions that slip into each story.
“The Dinner Party” was initially born as a way to archive these stories, but then it grew into a life of its own. Most of the stories I collected never made the final cut. I actually remember asking a family member if I could use their story, to which they offered a firm no.
KK: At one point, Grace thinks to herself that the dinner party is “one big counting game to which she has arrived too late.” Dinner party stories are a genre unto themselves. Are there any particular dinner party scenes, in fiction or film or theater, that were a reference for you?
SQ: I am fascinated by stories in which ordinary settings are suffused with an urgent sense of meaning, of clarity; stories that send you into a deep contemplative state and make you feel like you’ve undergone some profound and mysterious thing. I don’t know what it is about dinner parties that makes them the perfect setting for such stories.
The first example that comes to mind is “The Dead” by James Joyce, which I have read and reread countless times since coming across it in university. This story was my first encounter with magic in literature, and by magic I mean that quiet, intrinsic awareness that there is something else operating below the surface, a kind of elusive, decisive force that haunts you long after you’ve finished reading. How can a story be so alive and so ambiguous?
“Where You’ll Find Me” by Ann Beattie is another brilliant example, although it takes place not during a dinner party but in its orbit: in the hours leading up to it, at the threshold of the house inside which the party has already begun. What I love about this one is that its characters are constantly telling smaller stories to each other, stories like magic spells that leave you wondering what the larger story is really about.
Then there’s an episode of the show Six Feet Under, “Time Flies,” in which a blue bird flies into the kitchen and disrupts an already-tense birthday party. The guests debate whether it’s a good omen or a bad omen (“It’s not an omen; it’s a bird”). They spend the night shutting doors and opening windows in hopes of driving it away, all the while navigating a volatile choreography of confrontations with each other. The episode unfolds, really, like a play.
KK: Weather is also a big part of the story, not simply in terms of creating the story’s extraordinary claustrophobia, but in terms of the thematic and narrative arc as a whole. Was this component of the story in place from the beginning?
SQ: Absolutely. The story was born out of a thunderstorm, after all. Before the characters and the plot were fully fleshed out, I wrote scattered descriptions of the setting, which was vivid to me from the beginning. These descriptions formed the skeleton of the story, and they all had to do with rain.
I mentioned “The Dead” earlier, and it goes without saying that the snow falling throughout that story was a big influence on my own piece, even though I wasn’t necessarily conscious of it as I wrote. I’ve read the final passage of “The Dead” so many times that I often find myself reciting it in my head like a poem, like a prayer: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Isn’t that one of the most breathtaking lines in literature?
KK: Can you talk about the role of the theater in your story?
SQ: I hadn’t always intended for theater to be a prominent part of my story— for a while I experimented with different reasons a group of people might get together for a meal: a birthday, a family function, a supper club—but it just so happened that I was writing during a time when I was surrounded by a lot of theater performers.
I’m also quite drawn to stories that have something to do with theatre: novels such as Magda Szabo’s The Fawn and Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost; Lucy Caldwell’s short story “Hamlet, a Love Story”; movies like Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, which makes an appearance in my story; and of course, there’s your novel, Audition, which I gulped down with a hunger last summer. I just love exploring that delicate tension between a performer and the role they play, as well as the intense bond that forms between actors on stage. In my story, Omar and his theater troupe are very intentional when it comes to building a collective rhythm. In comparison, his relationship with his wife Grace is tended to with less care. There is something jarring, for Grace, about witnessing this attunement that her husband shares with other people. It is less a matter of jealousy, and more of an acute loneliness borne out of the fact that she is repeatedly forced to be a spectator to this bond—this secret—that she can never be a part of.
Of course, Karma doesn’t make it easier for her, reminding Grace that there is something private and sacred about what they do during rehearsals, that “nothing off-stage matters” when they are acting, which brings us back to those murky lines, to that delicate tension between real life and play. The story is full of murky lines: how involved should Omar be in his mentor’s widow’s life? How involved should Grace be in Omar’s theatre life? How involved should both of them be with Grace’s family?
KK: This story relies heavily on dialogue, which is expertly handled. How do you think about dialogue in fiction?
SQ: I generally tend to sway towards writing interiority, and it always takes an active effort to pull myself into the “moment” of a story, to write action and dialogue. When I do write dialogue, my biggest challenge, as an Arab writing in English, is language. In “The Dinner Party,” the characters are naturally speaking in Arabic, but the story is being told to us in English. Sometimes the dialogue comes about intuitively; other times, I am translating in my head or speaking out loud as I write. What I have to weigh is how it sounds in both languages: if it’s accurate in Arabic; if it’s coherent in English; whether I want to prioritise grammar or lyricism or colloquialism. Generally, I enjoy clunky English that betrays another language lurking behind it, which I don’t claim to do perfectly at all, but it’s what I aspire to in my writing.
KK: This is also a story about the central couple’s return to Amman, after an extended period abroad. How does the complexity of this return factor into the story?
SQ: I can picture Grace and Omar leading a small and unmoored life in Dublin. Omar is tired of his dead-end job; Grace feels nothing towards hers. What anchors them is each other. Once they are taken out of that controlled environment and new elements are introduced into their dynamic, the balance invariably tips. Their move back to Amman rewards Omar almost instantly. He is back on stage, among new and old theater friends. Things are less clear for Grace. We don’t know if she still has any friends in the city, or how she feels about being back. In fact, we don’t know much about her beyond her acute desire to be seen, to be part of something. The couple falls out of sync as Omar’s life takes on new dimensions, and Grace remains static.
It’s worth noting that Omar and Grace’s spiritual exhaustion with Dublin comes in the context of many friends and peers of mine returning to Amman after years of living in Europe or North America. They’ve all expressed a sudden disillusionment with life abroad, an urgent desire to be back home. Upon returning, they often find themselves in a city quite different to the one they remember.
KK: What are you working on now?
SQ: I’m currently working on a short story collection set in Amman, as well as my debut novel, which follows an artist residency in the middle of the desert as it gradually descends into chaos.
Sima Qunsol lives in Amman, Jordan. Her work can be found in Wildness, Eclectica Magazine, Rusted Radishes, and Poetry Ireland Review.