Vince Vasudevan: What were the stories that inspired you to write?
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: When I was in undergrad at the University of California San Diego, I took classes in Latin American literature. Professor Jaime Concha introduced me to the Latin American Boom period writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Mario Vargas Llosa. I fell in love with that period of literature because of the wildness and political charge of those novels, and that’s when I started writing pretty seriously. I also had the good luck of studying with writers like Eileen Miles and Rae Armantrout when I was at UCSD. They had a very strong creative writing undergraduate program.
VV: At UCSD for undergrad, you double-majored in Latin American Studies and Creative Writing, presenting an honors thesis on “Representations of the Feminine in Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo.” How did these two authors influence your outlook on storytelling?
AV: I think they both gave me tools for telling stories where the political interweaves with the personal in deeply affecting ways. I was also really interested in the figures of women in those books. I was trying to understand my own identity as a woman who grew up under gender apartheid in Iran, and so the representation and voices of women–whether they were subdued or had access to other dimensions of reality–really fascinated me in those two books in particular.
VV: I think you mentioned in class that you speak four languages (Farsi, English, Spanish, and Italian). Has being a polyglot and seeing how other languages operate influenced your writing?
AV: Yes, I often feel like I’m writing in English but thinking or feeling in Farsi or Spanish or Italian. Also, reading in Spanish and Italian, where you encounter paragraph-long sentences, has been really interesting. English is such a straightforward language but it’s very elastic—it’s very pliable. I’ve enjoyed bringing knowledge of my other literary traditions into my own voice as a global anglophone writer.
VV: Your debut novel, Fra Keeler, was released in 2012. Most recently, your works were selected for The Best American Short Stories two years in a row (2023 and 2024). How has your writing process evolved over the years?
AV: Every book I write is very different from the last. But in all of my work, I am asking questions about what it means to be a female intellectual in the world. My novels also share a transnational quality. Call Me Zebra moves between the United States, Iran, and Spain. Savage Tongues moves between Iran, the United States, Spain, and Historic Palestine. What ties together these two last books is this impulse I have to keep writing journey narratives, narratives of place and displacement, but I think that as I’ve matured and changed as a writer, I’ve become more emotionally direct and less intensely cerebral. I think that’s something I’m seeing in the short stories to some extent.
VV: This semester in our graduate fiction workshop, we read through Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Amir Ahmadi Arian’s Then The Fish Swallowed Him, and Brandon Hobson’s The Removed in preparation for the Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance panel, where you were in conversation with the aforementioned authors who flew out to Notre Dame, and graciously gave their time to meet with our MFA students. Briefly, can you talk about how you founded Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance?
AV: Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is a culmination of my thinking about exile and its relationship to writing. What the series is asking is what it means to be human and to deal with questions of displacement and erasure, particularly with regard to the Middle East, which is like a vanishing landscape because of sanctions and war and extractionism in the age of empire. It’s been really important for me to think critically about what novels and writers across different exiles are doing to document questions of identity, memory, and landscape and how the work of writers who are doing this might be reinventing or innovating the technology of the novel and pushing the frontiers of what’s possible when we’re practicing the poetics of witness, and also how these writers across coalitions are speaking alongside one another in generative ways. The series is also asking formal questions, in terms of what are the ethics of aesthetics and how far can we can push the novel as a form, what can it contain, and what can it reflect back, especially when you have these kinds of high stakes questions about migration, erasure, war, etc.
VV: There’s been an ongoing debate (probably for all time) on if all art is political. What responsibility do writers have to engage with politics not only in their works but in their lives?
AV: That’s a hard question to answer because every writer has to answer that question for themselves. I think that writers are engaging with the public, and they are writing through different qualities and kinds of crises, whether the text is a domestic narrative or a narrative that’s global and transnational. The question of what it means to be a person in the world informs every novel that’s ever been written, regardless of genre or scope. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a writer who isn’t political. Language is political, and the way we choose to engage with it, and how we choose to represent characters…these are inherently political decisions that have downstream effects. Even if a writer says their work is apolitical, I think sometimes that’s the most political work of all. As a writer, I feel a great sense of social responsibility, but I wouldn’t walk around the world saying that every writer should or must feel a certain way.
VV: For readers just getting started on Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s works, where should they start?
AV: Because of the historical moment we’re in, I’d recommend Savage Tongues since it deals with questions of identity politics, specifically in zones where there are partitions, such as gender apartheid in Iran and ethnic and religious apartheid in Israel. It’s an auto-fictional novel in the feminist tradition, and it’s a challenging novel, but I also hope that it can be inspiring for readers who are trying to understand questions of gender, sexuality and religious identity both in the Middle East and beyond.
VV: In your opinion, what distinguishes the Notre Dame MFA program from the rest?
AV: We are very committed to bringing international students into our program, and we’re really committed to diversity. I think the other thing that distinguishes us is that we are a very aesthetically diverse faculty, and we encourage our students to have aesthetic diversity. We work hard in the classroom to teach students how to read work on its own terms and to come into their own, regardless of what makes them excited as readers and as writers.