Political Horror and Community with Antioch Alum Samantha Rahmani

Samantha Rahmani recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Antioch University Los Angeles and she also has a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Rahmani was a finalist for the TinHouse First Book residency and her writing has been awarded the Cooley Writing Award, First Prize, from the University of Michigan. Rahmani was the production manager for Antioch University’s literary podcast, LitCit, and she served as the Fiction Editor for the literary journal Lunch Ticket. Rahmani works as a software consultant and is currently revising her novel silver-eyed.

I met with Samantha this past January to discuss her writing career and her novel in progress.

Sierra-Nicole DeBinion: I’ve had the privilege of reading some of your work in our past workshops together. I was inspired by your work.

Samantha Rahmani: Thank you. I think that’s kind of the point of an MFA. There are obviously a lot of reasons for an MFA, but one thing it affords you is this community of writers to say, “Oh my god, I love your work. Can I talk to you about this? Can we talk and trade work?” All that is invaluable. I didn’t realize how much of writing is being with other writers and reading each other’s work and talking about each other’s work. I think that’s the best part [of attending Antioch]. Now I have people who I’m watching their careers. I’m watching out for what they are going to write next.

SND: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

SR: I think when we talk about networking, we’re really saying, “Who’s your audience?” I love being inspired by people. I think that we’re all kind of nerds and we all love reading. So much of my writing life has been reading other people and being like, “Oh my god, this person is brilliant.” And, when you have writing friends, either through an MFA or just like local programs, you’re in the room with brilliant minds, and you can talk to them and see how they work, and they can see how you work.

I always liked writing and I think most writers probably read a lot as a kid, probably wrote a lot like I did. I entered writing programs in high school and wrote little pieces. As a teenager, I tried to write a novel and then abandoned it. I never felt like I could take my writing seriously. I think part of that was coming from an immigrant and middle-class household where the emphasis was, “You have to find a good job, financial stability,” all that sort of stuff. There’s no space to think about art or waste time on something that isn’t going to afford you a stable future. Which was why I went into engineering in the first place for a good job opportunity. So, I did that, and I did creative writing as a minor because after one semester of engineering, I was like, I cannot survive engineering school without having some kind of creative outlet, and for me, that was writing. I still wasn’t planning on doing anything with it. I was just trying to learn.

In those classes, usually I was the only non-white person and I struggled in that environment. Everyone was generous with each other’s work, but I often felt like the workshop space didn’t know how to read my work. I was grappling with questions like, “How do I handle foreign words? What is my audience? Whose experience do I center?” These were questions no one around me was discussing. Even if the workshop space could engage me on these topics, I didn’t yet know how to fully articulate these questions for myself in the first place or investigate them. So I wrote in ways that felt safe, white middle-class characters dealing with small domestic troubles, trying to mimic Salinger and other writers we were all reading

There are obviously a lot of reasons for an MFA, but one thing it affords you is this community of writers to say, “Oh my god, I love your work. Can I talk to you about this? Can we talk and trade work?”

SND: That’s interesting.

SR: That was a huge reason why I chose Antioch. I also think that at that previous stage, I wasn’t confident enough in myself as a writer to know what kind of support I needed or how to push back against feedback that didn’t help.

SND: It sounds like they didn’t know how to even approach the topics that you were delving into.

SR: Yeah, it definitely wasn’t the right space. Then, in my senior year, as one of my final credits for my creative writing minor, I took a playwriting class with José Casas, a Latino playwright from LA. His whole focus was the relationship between art in community, and for the first time, I was learning what it looks like to define and center your audience. I’d never planned to do anything with writing previously, because I was like, why would I risk financial stability? It’s just something I’m doing for fun. I think it wasn’t until that class, I was like, “Oh, this can be important.”

SND: That’s really cool. It was an eye-opener.

SR: Yeah. I still wasn’t ready for grad school then. I think I still needed to take some time to just write. Then a couple of years went by and I applied to one school. I didn’t get in, because my portfolio wasn’t ready and also because like, I think, mentally I just wasn’t ready to really take ownership of my learning as a writer. I’m glad I didn’t get in then. A year after that, I applied to Antioch and a bunch of schools, but liked Antioch in particular, and I got in.

At Antioch, I think I learned how to identify what I needed, how to seek out the kind of feedback that pushed me to become better and dig deeper, and how to push back against “bad” feedback. By that I mean the kind of feedback that can make you doubt yourself or the intentions of your work if you’re not confident enough, but also feedback that is trying to access your work in ways that it’s not meant to be accessed. Maybe I’m just a very optimistic glass-half-full kind of person. I think [bad feedback is] sometimes helpful. Like okay, here are the realities of the readers you’re going to interact with, and not all of them are going to be generous to your work.

SND: Yeah, that’s a hard pill to swallow. But it’s very true.

SR: I’m just on a rant.

[We laughed.]

SND: Would you like to talk about your process of writing and editing your novel in progress?

SR: Yeah, this book, I didn’t plan on it. When I applied to the MFA program, it was with an entirely different work, realistic fiction. I wrote a play in Casas’s class that was kind of inspired by my dad’s immigration story and I was interested in turning that into a novella in collection with other stories. That was what I was planning on working on during grad school. I was like, “Oh, cool. It’s gonna be like linked short stories, it’s going to be so poetic, blah, blah, blah.”

With silver-eyed I’ve been working with the fear of surveillance that’s deeply ingrained within Muslim-American communities. I grew up in southeast Michigan and this was especially true in the mid-2000s but still true today. I find the enormity of surveillance difficult to think of and wanted something tactile and organic to play with, which is where the idea of the moths came from.

[Rahmani laughs.]

When I started my first semester at Antioch in December 2020, I was in this social horror phase. I mean, Get Out was massive. I had seen Us and was obsessed with it. Parasite, right? The Only Good Indians had just come out. I’d been a classic horror fan in high school and suddenly there was this huge wave of social horror. In my first residency, I attended a seminar by Tananarive Due on Black horror specifically and she talked about capturing a community fear through the lens of horror. She had a prompt at the end of her seminar to take a community fear and find a way to access that through horror, which instantly sparked silver-eyed.

SND: That’s really cool.

SR: With silver-eyed I’ve been working with the fear of surveillance that’s deeply ingrained within Muslim-American communities. I grew up in southeast Michigan and this was especially true in the mid-2000s but still true today. I find the enormity of surveillance difficult to think of and wanted something tactile and organic to play with, which is where the idea of the moths came from. The image of small, innocuous things that can gather in swarms felt very visceral to me. I was feeling conflicted about abandoning my other project where I’d already spent so much time and effort, so I went to Alistair McCartney, who was my workshop leader at the time, and I was like, “Listen, I have these two project ideas. I have this project that I’ve been working on for a while and I have this new idea. I haven’t planned it out, I haven’t done anything with it, haven’t even tested it out, but I’m so excited to work on it.” He told me to always go where there’s energy, which I think is brilliant advice. Always tap into your heart and where you have the most energy. So I wrote the first hundred pages, which does not look anything like what it is now. I was stuck at that point. I had the basic premise and some characters and a couple plot points, but it felt like a key part was missing. I had Megan Giddings as my mentor for my second term and she took in where I was at, and the first book she recommended to me was from The Art of series. You’ve probably heard of it?

He told me to always go where there’s energy, which I think is brilliant advice. Always tap into your heart and where you have the most energy.

SND: I think I have read one.

SR: Yeah, so she recommended The Art of Daring by Carl Phillips. which looks at risk and daring, and how to sit with restlessness. It’s a brilliant book and completely opened up the manuscript.

SND: That’s so great. Could I ask you about your activist passions?

SR: Yeah, you know, it’s funny because I read that question. I was like, I have no idea.

[We laughed.]

You know, I don’t know. I don’t think I could narrow it down to one or two passions. I find I get kind of obsessed while working on a particular project. I focus in on a particular obsession and I write about that obsession until I’ve uncovered something true within myself and then I kind of move on to the next thing. The world is so vast and there’s so much I don’t understand and I enjoy being in a state of learning. I wish I could be a perpetual student.

SND: That’s a wonderful answer, that makes a lot of sense because we’re complex beings. We’re not central to one specific idea or passion.

SR: I find I get kind of bored just stuck on one thing for a while.

SND: That makes sense. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

SR: Thank you, I just made coffee and was like, let’s just talk writing!

You can find Samantha Rahmani’s website linked here, and her Twitter handle is @samantharahmani.