Alexa Yasemin Brahme is a New York-based writer and the author of the novel “Good News,” which launches May 5, 2026 — today! “Good News” follows Maggie (Müjde), an artist in an MFA program working on a major painting while navigating both her Turkish family’s expectations and her relationship, which gets even more complicated when an ex pops back into her life. It explores the struggles of establishing a creative career and a strong sense of self, and has one of my favorite sibling relationships that I’ve come across in contemporary fiction. Alexa has a BA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University, an MFA in Fiction from The New School, and currently works as a bookseller at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, where she runs events.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

I didn’t take a writing class until later in my college career, but I remember thinking in high school that I wish reading counted as an extracurricular because all I wanted to do was read. That was the first bell going off, but I didn’t fully realize it until I took my first writing class between my sophomore and junior year of college. I had an amazing writing professor who was so encouraging and he believed in me so much that I thought, I guess I can believe in myself. I’ll thank him every day for the rest of my life.

What’s your relationship to Turkey?

My mom is from Ankara and she moved to the US when she was seven. I had Turkish grandparents who were so lovely and adoring and I felt very close to them. I went to Turkey for the first time when I was ten, then went back 20 years later when I was 30 with my mom. We had the best time. We stayed in Istanbul and visited an old family friend and it was amazing. I feel very connected to it culturally and I love Turkish people. I love that side of my family. I’m also half Swedish, so it’s a very mixed background, but I feel very connected to both of them. Getting to visit Istanbul has been really important to me.

Did your parents teach you languages growing up, or did you speak English at home?

We spoke English at home because that was their common language. Three languages at once would have been hectic. I wish they had done that, obviously. I wish I was fluent in all those languages, but we spoke English at home and both sets of grandparents spoke a little Swedish to us, a little Turkish to us, but nothing that really stuck. It’s all canım, şeker, you know.

Did you do an MFA right after college?

I didn’t want to go straight into the MFA after graduation because I didn’t want to write about college. There was all this advice around not getting an MFA, that it wasn’t worth it, that you shouldn’t pay for it. I thought, Okay, let me go live some life. I know I want to be a writer. I’m going to live in New York. That’s where the writers go, so I have to go there.

I worked at a literary agency for two years. I was at ICM, which is now CAA. It’s a big agency and was my first corporate job.

The job was amazing. My boss had wonderful, kind clients who I got to work with and I saw how books are made and bought, so it was really educational for me. My boss was so supportive of my own writing career, and came to my first reading in New York where I read a short story. That was really formative and built my understanding of, this is how it’s going to work. This is the practical step-by-step of how it’s going to get done. I remember an agent saying to me, talking to me like I was going to become an agent, “Oh, you know, when you sell your first book,” and I thought, “When I sell my first book, it better be my own.”

That job was really demanding, and I had to find time to write on the side. That’s when I realized that an MFA is space and time to write, which was what I needed. So I started applying.

When you graduated college, did you already have the seeds for what would become “Good News”?

No. I was grasping at straws. Right before I started applying for MFAs, I had this idea of a scene and I didn’t know what it would be a scene from. I’d never thought of writing a novel in college, all I wrote was short stories. So I thought, maybe this is a short story. I wrote this one scene and then realized that there was more. It’s just going to keep going. Then I realized it was going to be a book. That’s how it got started. But it was not premeditated. It was almost like an accident.

What was that scene? Was it representative of a theme you knew you wanted to explore?

It happened subconsciously. I wasn’t aware that I was working with themes at all.

Before I started writing “Good News,” I wrote this short story about a woman in a relationship. She feels very distant within the relationship and very disconnected from herself. She’s trying to find her true self within the confines of work, relationship, and society. This girl was really suffering because she didn’t feel that she was honoring herself. Not that that was articulated. It was more a feeling of dread, pain, or sadness of not being connected to yourself. I think that came through in the novel, too. Maggie, the main character in “Good News,” is really trying to honor herself and fighting against all these forces. So that was present in that short story and that bled into the book. But I didn’t know that I was carrying it through.

Do you remember any of the books you turned to that helped you out?

To write intimate scenes, I turned to Sally Rooney and Sheila Heti. Those two come to mind when I think about how to do this artfully, in a way that’s not horrific and cringeworthy. I also read the endings of some of my favorite books, like the endings of “Invisible Man” and “Either/Or.” I read maybe the last three pages of 20 or so books. What I realized was that most of them don’t have the perfect last sentence. It was more that it wouldn’t have mattered how they ended it because I loved the whole book anyway. So it took a lot of pressure off the last paragraph.

Did working at both an agency and a bookstore give you a lot of insider knowledge?

What I learned as a bookseller is how much an impact a bookseller can have on a book’s life. I have a staff pick at both my stores, “The Wilderness” by Ayşegül Savaş. It’s a very slim, small book and I know that if it’s shelved in a section, it’s probably going to get lost, only because of how small it is. I wrote a little shelf talker, and we’ve sold 200 copies. I hand sell it all the time because it’s a beautiful book and I’m happy to give it to everyone. And that’s just me. One person. Imagine anyone else who is really passionate about a book and they’re selling it for their whole shift every day. It can really make a difference. I’m very grateful to indie booksellers for what they do.

If you didn’t have an MFA, would you be the same writer you are today?

The MFA gave me an amazing community and mentorship and I don’t want to imagine a world where I don’t have that. I don’t want to imagine a world where I don’t have these amazing women I met in my cohort who have read so many passages and held my hand through so many of the highs and lows. That is invaluable to me.

Then, there’s the mentorship. To still speak to professors and get coffee with them and to have that listening ear, guidance, and perspective is amazing. My thesis adviser is going to be the conversation partner for my book launch event and I couldn’t have done it without her.

I was very focused during my MFA and very attuned to my work. I knew exactly what I wanted out of it. I wanted to work with specific professors and I got to do just that. Also, the seminar classes exposed me to books that I would have never picked up or read, and those were very important and influential.

Did you have to undergo any mindset shifts in order to see your project through to the end?

I learned that I needed breaks. I remember getting very close to my MFA graduation, and so close to the end of the book. I was working on a scene and I just was like, this is never going to happen. This scene is horrible. It’s so bad. I can’t even commit it to writing and I don’t even know what comes afterwards. What’s the point in finishing this if nothing comes next?

I ended up going home for two weeks to San Diego and I was so worked up about it. My mom said, “You’re going to go back to writing. Just stop for a second.” I needed those breaks even if they weren’t huge, even if it was just two weeks. Most of the time, you can’t force your way through a problem. You have to make space for something to come in and solve it. There are things that feel like working, but are not writing. Watching movies or reading books, that’s all work. That’s all putting new data in my mind so I can filter it through and maybe craft one sentence because I watched twenty movies.

Was the plan to be a writer or die trying, or did you have a backup career in mind?

No backup plan. So help me God, I was going to be a writer. That’s how I felt in the book selling process. There’s so much agonizing waiting. It’s so hard to write something good. I did not have a backup plan when we were on submission, and it was not looking like sunshine and rainbows. I was very scared and I thought, “Oh my god, I have to get a job in tech and turn my life around.” but very graciously my agent was really patient with me. My parents told me, “You’re so close. You can’t give up at the finish line.” There are like six finish lines when you write a book, but this was one of them. I revised the whole draft and we resubmitted, and then I got a deal. So there was no backup plan, but there were freakouts along the way. Plenty.

How did you know what you needed to rework?

There was some feedback I got that I thought was valid, but I didn’t think it was worth rewriting the whole piece without a deal in place. But when nobody else made an offer, I felt that I had nothing to lose and that I might as well take the notes and keep working on it.

After the deal, I had to take a whole bunch of other notes and had to rewrite it all over again. That’s something you don’t know until you go through it. Don’t get too attached because everything could go.

What’s your writing routine like?

I like to write in the mornings. My dream is to wake up and have a beautiful morning and coffee and journal, then go to write at a coffee shop. At a cafe I could write for two or three hours and then go to the gym. Anything can happen after that.

Luckily, I do work events and the schedule is amazing. I work in the evenings, so I do get the mornings to myself and try to exercise and write every morning. It doesn’t always happen but it is my ideal routine.

What kind of writer do you want to be known as?

My favorite response I’m getting from the book is when people say that they felt moved by it. I place a high value on emotionality. If I don’t feel something when I’m reading — the book can be beautifully written, have the most amazing plot, the most incredible characters — but if I didn’t feel anything, if I didn’t feel scared, if I didn’t feel sad, if I didn’t fall in love, then it doesn’t make the top 10 for me.

What were your comp titles for “Good News”?

“Writers and Lovers” by Lily King, “Either/Or” by Elif Batuman, “The Rachel Incident” by Caroline O’Donoghue. Then the show “Ramy,” about an Egyptian-American family in New Jersey. It’s very funny. I think that if you liked watching “Ramy,” you might like reading this book.

How are you feeling now that you’re so close to the book’s publication date?

I honestly feel so excited and happy. I’m sure many more emotions are going to come. I’m sure I’m going to go crazy at some point. I think, and only writers can really understand this, it’s so hard to get to this point. I’m just so relieved to be here. When I moved to New York 10 years ago, this is what I wanted to do and I finally get to do it.

How has Istanbul inspired you as a storyteller?

The biggest inspiration has been the cultural aspect. I had a very American upbringing and grew up in San Diego, but I did not feel like I had American parents and I did not feel like my brother and I were typical Americans. That wasn’t an alienating or bad thing. I feel very connected to a certain sensibility that is very Turkish. Hospitable, generous, affectionate, loving, and verbose.

Istanbul and Turkey in general is a place that really has a high value on art. I started learning Turkish during the pandemic. Something that I thought was really beautiful was in the construction of the language — that the reasoning behind certain things was to make it sound more beautiful. Like when you’re connecting suffixes and you put a “y” to soften the sounds. Beauty has such a stronghold in Turkey. The architecture is beautiful and people put a lot of effort into what they wear and how they look. Those things really came through the maternal line of valuing beauty in all things.

What advice do you have for aspiring novelists?

Connect to the work itself and protect the space around it before you let other people in. I had this very protected bubble around what I was working on. I could build that strength, so when I did show my work to other people, I wasn’t so vulnerable to their comments. Try to stay connected to what you’re working on and trust that you are the best conduit and that you know what’s best. You are the source.

Nazlı Koca is the author of The Applicant (Grove, 2023), winner of the 2024 Colorado Book Award for Best Novel. Her poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction appear in ZYZZYVA, Narrative, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver. After living in Istanbul, Berlin, and the US, Nazlı is now traveling the world. We spoke over Zoom while she was in Hoi An, Vietnam.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 🇹🇷 Türkçe için tıklayın

What’s something that has been eye-opening for you during your travels?

When I first went to Buenos Aires from the US, when I met other writers and introduced my work to them, I often talked about it in the framework of publications and professional accomplishments. Whereas the writers I met there seemed more interested in living the life of a writer.

Do you write letters to your friends all the time? Do you do readings even if it means reading the same poem every day? Do you go to readings and do you have 10 notebooks at your desk at any given time and you’re always jotting down ideas? It’s important to keep this love of literature by separating it a little from the publishing side.

When you were younger, did you dream of being a writer, and did you think it was possible for you?

I definitely thought it was possible for me, and my family also supported me. I didn’t doubt that I could be a writer until I was in college. I remember feeling discouraged by other people because I think they held themselves and others to the standards they learned from the media or their families. They had different ideas of what type of person could be a writer.

I liked writing because I liked reading. My mother would often read Turkish feminists or international literature that instilled ideas in her — and therefore, in me — of equality and peace. I wanted to live in a world where those ideas could flourish and exist, because in my daily life this wasn’t necessarily the case. You’re living in a reality where you have to always be careful of what you say in public. You have to act a certain way around men to be safe, and a lot of the city is not for you. But in literature there was this vast space that welcomed me and I was looking forward to joining their ranks and finally writing a book.

Would you say your graduate studies in creative writing were critical in your growth and career as a writer?

Definitely, and not just because of the program itself. It’s about making a choice, a crazy choice, to study writing for two years. Especially in my case to move to South Bend, Indiana from Berlin. You’re taking this huge risk which might lead you to being broke and broken for years. I felt really lonely and depressed at times, but the program gave me a lot to do with my time. I was reading two novels plus sometimes hundreds of pages of articles every week. I never thought I could do something like that when I lived in cities like Istanbul and Berlin, where my social life was my priority. Then my life totally flipped. As a writer, you need that switch when you’re working on any project, especially a long-term project.

In your novel, I loved how you used non-English words without explaining or translating them. Was that an intuitive choice for you? How would you say it shapes the reading experience?

It was an intuitive choice and it felt right from the beginning. I hope it translates to a reading experience similar to my experience as an immigrant. When we’re traveling or living in foreign countries we don’t understand at least some of what we hear. But still we go on. For example, I don’t always ask what a word means when someone’s talking to me unless it’s necessary. I try to guess from the context or I’m at peace with not understanding unless I really have to. I can walk down the street and be totally comfortable not knowing exactly what that street sign says. I wanted people to have that kind of experience that they also felt welcome even though they couldn’t understand certain words immediately.

But most importantly, I wanted any immigrant or minority who’s ever been told they shouldn’t speak their own language in public because it makes people uncomfortable to feel at home in Leyla’s natural slips into her mother tongue.

In your acknowledgements, you say that this book was originally a poem. What’s your relationship to poetry?

The letter in the beginning of the novel is a prose poem inspired by Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant,” but it wasn’t prose in the beginning. You could say that the story that follows is a fictional embodiment of that poem.

My relationship with poetry is always changing. Sometime during my PhD I stopped calling myself a poet and haven’t written any poems since. I was worried that my brain was poisoned by all the elitist ideas I was exposed to, but I think it’s been long enough that I can return.

I do miss how poetry made me feel. In my 20s I was a poet. In my early 30s I forgot that I was a poet and now I’m remembering again that I was a poet, like in a dream.

How has Istanbul inspired you as a storyteller?

Istanbul inspired me in many different ways over the years. I left it at first at 24, shortly after the Gezi Park protests. At that time Istanbul had inspired me to tell stories no matter what, wherever you can, however you can. I had a lot to get out of my system.

If I had not lived in Istanbul and just went to Berlin from any other place, it wouldn’t have been the same. What happened during Gezi – a year after my college graduation, at the precipice of adulthood — and experiencing the shocks and difficulties that unfolded afterwards completely changed me in a way that I couldn’t even imagine.

Istanbul made me feel that I had to lean toward it and I had to actually write. I had this desperation to reframe my life and my country based on what just happened. The more I wrote about it, the more I thought about it, the better the answers got and my options became clearer to me. And here I am.

Ten years later, I was able to develop a new relationship with Istanbul. It wasn’t stories about the past anymore. I felt weakened by the city in my 20s, but in my 30s something changed and I feel stronger after this renewed connection. My friends who stayed in Istanbul really inspire me. They are reinventing themselves and taking risks, finding ways to do what they want even though everything seems to be stacked against them. In this way Istanbul now inspires me to write from a point of strength rather than a need for escape.

You once told me that women writers are asked more than men if their work is autofiction or inspired from their life. Can you talk more about that?

One reason seems to be this entitlement that people feel to question women’s lives. Think of your stories that you’ve heard from family, friends, books, movies, the news. Society feels much more comfortable scrutinizing women. It’s a constant. Whereas men are not to be questioned.

When men write a book it doesn’t matter if it happened to them or if it happened to anybody else or if they just made it up. The man wrote it, so it’s his story. Elif Batuman and Rachel Aviv had a great conversation about how the virtue assigned to writing about people different from oneself served men throughout history. They were able to tell themselves, “this woman is never going to tell her story so I should tell her story and I’m a novelist and I can tell this story the best way.” Nobody questioned the ethics of that, but somehow questioning the value of a woman writing a story inspired by her own life is still fair game. This question or comment about a woman’s work often comes with an implication that what they wrote was good, but not quite a real novel.

Every writer is inspired by their own life. But I don’t owe an explanation of how much of it is from my life, how much of it is imagined. I don’t love the term autofiction because it was coined and defined by a French man in the 70s specifically as “fiction, made up of events and facts that are strictly real.” Today it often feels like when people call your work autofiction, they take it as 100% or 90% real. I find it a little silly that anyone can assume this for any novel they encounter and can label it with a single word that seems to have lost its oxymoronic charge in mainstream criticism. We see the problem in movies, books, non-fiction, or criticism that we’ve been exposed to over the years. They all have these ideas of why a woman is acting the way she is. We often internalize it, like “typical daddy issues,” and repeat that as a joke. What’s happening with this autofiction question posed on us disproportionately more than men, whether or not we describe our work as such, is just another version of the same mentality. They are so confident that they can understand us, see through us, that they know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Do whatever it takes and learn how to be okay with feeling lonely. There are certain things about your life that you force yourself to do because of your fear of being alone. Being a writer is your chance to let go of those things.

Don’t believe in the idea that you have to be a part of a certain clique, you have to hang out in certain bars, coffee shops with your laptop or notebook. Spend the majority of your efforts on the actual act of writing. Don’t feel like you are less of a writer because you don’t do the things that the people around you who call themselves writers do. Everybody’s different. Appreciate your loneliness.

But don’t be scared to care about the world. You might meet writers or read articles that say writing and politics are two different things. If you don’t feel this way, don’t force yourself to separate politics from your writing. If you feel like you have to force yourself to separate those two when you want to write a story, then don’t. Just put down the world on paper the way you see it, the way you experience it.

Ayten Tartıcı is a Turkish writer based in NYC. I first met her one humid summer in DC many years ago, when we were both college students interning at the capital. It wasn’t long before we began exchanging our poems with each other, and neither of us have stopped writing (or sharing for feedback) since. Ayten studied literature at Harvard (BA) and Yale (PhD), and her literary criticism, poetry, and translations have been published far and wide. These days she’s focusing more deeply on her fiction, and has been working on her creative projects as a 2025-2026 Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction, and was a 2025-2026 Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House. Her first published short story will be out in May.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 🇹🇷 Türkçe için tıklayın

You’re involved in so many forms of storytelling: photography, poetry, translation, short stories and essays. Which form of storytelling were you drawn to first?

I started writing poems in Turkish when I was around six years old. It was something uncontrollable. I would come home from school and try to finish my homework as quickly as possible so I could write. I quickly filled up notebook after notebook.

Did you share your poems with anyone?

For a long time, I kept my poems secret, but my friends and family knew that I was writing. During middle school and high school, I started sharing them. Like Emily Dickinson, I thought of poems as gifts, and I might offer them to a friend or to a love interest. They went from being something hidden to something that was exchanged and shared, to then something hidden again when I started college. As time went by, the nature of the poems kept changing.

Do certain forms of writing feel more playful to you, while others come with additional pressure?

I don’t feel any pressure when I’m writing fiction. It’s the same with literary criticism. Of course, with criticism, you are usually working under a deadline. You can’t edit endlessly. I’m forced to get it out the door. In that sense, there is some kind of pressure, but I’m able to lose myself in the process to such a degree that pleasure overpowers any sense of dread.

Poetry is where I might feel under the gun. Poetry is compression. As an art form, it is supposed to be tight. Despite that economy of language, Eliot once said of Dante’s Inferno, “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” You can experience it before you wrap your head around it.

Do you remember your first published piece?

It was a calligram in English that was published in my high school literary journal. I was really into visual poetry at the time and very much under the influence of the French symbolists.

Do you remember the moment when you decided to commit yourself to a life of writing and literature? Or perhaps it was more of a slow migration?

At the end of high school, I realized that I wanted to become a writer, but I wasn’t sure yet how to make it work and what that life would look like. For a long time, I juggled a lot of things that took me away from my writing. I’ve always been a writer and a reader, but if you’re asking about total surrender, that only came in 2023.

That was the first time I had the courage to call myself a writer. I’m very hard on myself and I thought it was preposterous to call myself one because of the respect I felt for so many other intellectuals, novelists, and thinkers.

You’re currently at your first creative writing retreat at the James Merrill House. How has it been for you?

The first week, I felt like a fish out of water. I’m a homebody. I was in a new environment and it took me a while to get used to it. I sensed history all around me. Here I am, staying in the house of this poet that I really admire. I’m surrounded by his books, personal effects, and the relics of his life. The James Merrill House Foundation, the larger community in Stonington as well as the fellows have done a remarkable job preserving this space as a living, breathing sanctuary for writers. I was tip-toeing around the house at first, like I was on pins and needles. I also felt the presence of former fellows and the work they had produced in that space. In my time here, I started a small, experimental project. Beyond that, I spend my time reading Merrill and the work of former fellows, such as Henri Cole and ‘Pemi Aguda.

I’m also walking distance from the water, and because I grew up by the sea, it’s soothing. I am grateful to be here. The retreat became a way for me to meet new ideas on the page. And I met some incredible poets and made new friends in the community. I know I am a part of something that is greater than me.

How does the fact that you’re a literary critic play a role when you sit down to write creatively?

Critics who have tried to become creative writers have often failed miserably. Perhaps it’s a cautionary tale.

How would you say they’ve failed?

I recently had difficulty reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, which she published in her early sixties and that difficulty wasn’t necessarily due to a lack of plot. Susan Sontag also wrote novels, but she is considered a brilliant essayist. We don’t necessarily think of her as a great novelist.

Why do you think that happens?

In Hardwick’s case, the reason might be that she came to fiction relatively late in life. By then, she was already established as a literary critic. I wonder whether that creates a certain pressure. Once you’re established in one genre, does moving into another feel like a risk? It’s a question I’m interested in, more broadly. In our generation, we see a great deal of crisscrossing between genres. Writers who we’ve long thought of as poets have published novels. We’ve grown accustomed to this fluidity. I think these lines have always been porous and they are meant to be crossed.

Does teaching literature nourish you as a writer?

I try to instill in my students the perspective that I am also looking to learn from them. And it’s true. Recently, one of them made a colored pencil drawing of Sappho’s Fragment 31. It’s a nude, showing a woman’s back. The lower half of her body is shaped like a candle; yet, it’s not the top of the candle that’s melting, but rather the bottom. When I first saw her drawing, I had to stop what I was doing that day. Sappho’s conception of eros as an inverted candle that’s melting from the bottom? Once I read her artist’s statement that it was a visual commentary on how desire can be a slow burn that is both conscious and unconscious, it changed my perspective about a poet that I’ve been teaching and reading for a long time.

What’s your writing process like?

I get completely absorbed in what I’m writing. Until my project is done, it’s what I live and breathe. Everything else in my life gets put on hold. I once forgot to pick up my daughter from daycare because I was fussing over a sentence and I am committed to never letting that happen again. Objectively, I spend too much time reading and researching.

For literary criticism, once I feel like I have a good grasp of my subject, I will then begin writing. Usually the writing itself takes less time. A piece has never taken me more than a week, but it’s the process leading up to it, the voluntary solitude I enter into, the amount of reading I undertake that prepares me for that moment of writing. It is about feeling authoritative. I do enjoy the editing process and entering into a dialogue with my editors, which feels like a reward.

These days, fiction happens on a daily basis. It’s an entirely different, cumulative approach. I try to write daily even if it’s just ten words. I do believe in the religion of showing up every day.

Do you set goals or deadlines, or is daily practice the only goal?

Over time, daily practice has become more important to me than deadlines.

Do you have a sense of the type of writer that you want to be known as?

I don’t think I want to be known for anything. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the reader. They will make of the work what they will.

Do you see any themes emerge in my writing?

I’d say precision in language. You have a very strong respect for what you’re writing about. There’s a strong sense of, I’m writing about this because I deeply respect and honor what it’s about.

I see what you’re asking. I want my work to feel effortless. Whether that’s literary criticism, fiction, or poetry and no matter how much blood, sweat and tears have gone into it. I want the work to hide its labor. I want it to be seen as a moment’s thought, even if that wasn’t necessarily the case. I think that yearning comes from the urge that you identified correctly with me — not just respect for what I do, but also a love of precision. I want my writing to be crystalline, but I also want it to feel effortless.

What’s the greatest compliment you’ve received about your writing?

A few people in the past have memorized my writing and recited it back to me. One time it was a sentence from a review. One time it was a line from a poem. Another time it was a sentence from a short story. To me that’s the highest form of compliment, to occupy space in someone else’s mind and memory.

You grew up mostly in southern Turkey then moved to Istanbul for middle school. Did you move to Istanbul with your family?

I moved with my family but it was made very clear to me that they had moved because of me. We were initially going to move to Ankara where my dad was working at the time. But then, after I scored well on the national exam, my teachers urged my parents to find a way to make it work and instead send me to a school in Istanbul that they thought was a better fit for me. Literally hours before the deadline, my dad rushed to a government office and changed my school choices. Then the whole family ended up relocating to Istanbul, which was difficult for us the first couple of years. That put an extreme amount of pressure on me to perform well in school.

How has Istanbul inspired you as a storyteller?

I have a very complicated relationship with Istanbul. I usually visit with friends who are foreigners, and I’m able to experience it from their perspective. Each visit I get to see the city through different eyes.

Istanbul changes very rapidly and that change is something a lot of writers have written about. Those changes are very much in your face. There’s always a new building, new shops, a new highway. The city changes its face often, but time can slow down in other parts of the country. As an immigrant living in New York, being in Istanbul is a harsh reminder of the physical and emotional distance I have to Turkey, and I don’t like that. I’m sometimes entirely happy skipping Istanbul on my trips and flying to my hometown in southern Turkey where my family now lives.

The changes I encounter in my hometown are significant as well, but they’re subtle: a plant my mother has received or a set of new coffee cups. These tiny but not necessarily less important domestic changes tell you you haven’t been there for a while. But I find that kind of change easier to deal with than buildings that I’ve never seen. Of course this was before the earthquake.

I’m not saying I’m against change. It’s just that it takes a while to process. And sometimes if you’re visiting for a short time, it can be difficult to grapple with how you’re an immigrant in another country, and process your new position vis-à-vis your home country. It doesn’t mean I don’t find Istanbul inspiring. It’s just that I don’t think I’ve made peace with it yet.

Did you ever consider a different career path?

In high school, I briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a geneticist. I was very interested in these firebugs called Pyrrhocoris Apterus, which you can find under linden trees. They were everywhere on our school’s campus and I thought I could study the pattern variations on their wings. I kept them in glass jars in my bedroom until one day, my concerned father sat me down and asked, “Do you really want to spend the rest of your life looking through a lens?” While I never became a geneticist, I don’t think he realizes I’ve done exactly that.

Amy Omar is a Turkish-American writer, director, and producer. Though she’s spent the last year living in Rome, Amy’s now back in New York, the city where we first met and I was lucky enough to be shown her favorite writing spot — an absolutely perfect, cozy, and surprisingly uncrowded location which I’ve decided not to disclose in order to maintain its perfection 😊 (hint: it’s near her old NYU stomping grounds).

Amy’s films explore narratives around Middle Eastern/Muslim characters and themes of cultural isolation, superstition, religion, and feminism. She wrote and directed her first short film, “Breaking Fast with a Coca Cola,” which premiered at SXSW in 2023, and has since directed various international short films, including “The Napkin Collectors” (2026), “Ayşegül on Tuesdays” (Clermont-Ferrand 2025) and “Gedu’s Gift” (part of Ramadan America, SXSW 2024). Her first feature film, “Bee,” is set to shoot in Istanbul later this year. I am in awe of Amy’s dedication to living an international life and the way it shines through in her storytelling.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 🇹🇷 Türkçe için tıklayın

When did you know that you wanted to work in film?

Before I moved to New York for college at NYU, I had always loved old Hollywood films, but I was definitely more in the literary world. I was reading all the time, I wrote a lot of prose and poetry in high school. Then I started going to art house cinemas, and that was really exciting to me.

When I studied abroad in Paris I took a bunch of screenwriting and film studies courses. At that time I was like, “Oh, I love film and I want to do something in it.” I didn’t know what that could mean — it could be a thousand different things.

I started off as an entertainment lawyer, which gave me access to that world. When I started working in the indie film world, it became pretty clear that I wanted to be on the creative side. And even when I decided that I wanted to be on the creative side, that could mean a lot of things, too.

It was really during COVID when we were all trapped at home, every day I would sit and write, and really unlock childhood memories, family history. I started writing screenplays. Then, when I got the grant to make my first short film, “Breaking Fast with a Coca Cola,” — I had no intention to even direct, I never thought I wanted to be a director — but after I made that film, it was like, “I love this more than anything I’ve ever done.” I’ve been building my film-making repertoire over the past 3-4 years. Every time I do it, I love it more and more. There’s nothing that has felt more right for me.

Growing up, what possibilities did you think were available to you in terms of a career in the arts?

I always loved literature, reading, and writing. I remember thinking, I love these things, but these are hobbies. This is not going to be a career. It’s not going to be a life. I really believed that when I was a young person. The reason why I studied political science was because I thought I was going to be a diplomat. I wanted to go into foreign service because I wanted to live a certain international life. It never occurred to me that I could do that in a creative sense.

But as I continued living in New York, going to these cultural institutions, seeing more films and living in Paris, it became all-consuming. It kind of got out of control in the sense that I loved it so much. I had many years of internal chaos. I love this thing so much — how do I make this into something that’s a job? For a while it was being an entertainment lawyer.

So it was that feeling you followed rather than a logical analysis of “now that I’ve checked off everything, I can do what I want”?

No, it wasn’t logical at all. It was this instinctual feeling where I’ve never felt this way before and I will do everything in my power to keep it.

Think about it. A majority of people go through their lives and they’re not excited by anything. They go through the motions of life and most people never find what they want to do. I always found myself so lucky that I found something that I was so excited by, that gave me so much life, that really gave me — it sounds dramatic but — a will to keep going on.

I will make sacrifices, I will trim finances. I’ve been freelance for the past two years. It’s not easy. There are a lot of things that I used to do in my full-time job life that I don’t do anymore. I don’t buy a lot of stuff. I live a more minimal life, but it doesn’t bother me because I’m fed by my art. For me, that’s the most rewarding thing.

Earlier, you mentioned friends who are struggling after studying the arts and taking a creative path right after graduating. What do you think that doing something else offered you?

It gave me ease, peace of mind. Being a lawyer and having had this corporate life before I came into film has given me a very different perspective on my film-making career. That’s why I can continue to be driven and positive. I’m not jaded at all. It’s very difficult, there’s a lot of rejection. A lot of times it’s very lonely. I have teams, but before I’m in production, I’m on my own. You’re filled with massive amounts of self-doubt all the time, but I’ve tasted what the alternative is.

The alternative wasn’t bad at all. I did enjoy what I was doing, but because I saw that, it really gave me the confidence to be able to go into this other life. I could always go back to it if I need to — and I won’t. I will do everything in my power to not go back to it. But once I did that, it showed me that this is not what I want to do.

If the opposite would have happened, I could have ended up like some of my peers. It’s very hard. You get really jaded. You graduate college at 21, you’re bartending and you’re working at coffee shops and you’re doing all these things that are very exhausting and time-consuming. You’re never making ends meet, and you’re actually not working on your art at all.

How is working on your feature film “Bee” different from working on your shorts?

Screenwriter Melis Aker and I met when I made “Ayşegül on Tuesdays,” where I was a writer-director and she was my actress. After that project was done, she shared the feature film “Bee” with me. She asked if I’d be interested in directing. I really, really loved the script.

It’s a very different process because I didn’t write this script. It’s gone through many different drafts and when you’re working as a director with a writer your role is very different in the sense where your job is twofold. It’s to build out the visual language. It’s to have your directorial approach, your vision. How am I going to take what’s on the page and put it on the screen and how is that going to do the story justice but how is it my personal vision as well versus another director’s vision?

The other aspect is, how are we going to produce this? When you’re just a writer, you’re often thinking only about what’s on the page. As a writer-director, I’ve experienced seeing a script I’ve written make it through the production process or the post-process and have thought, what I wrote was really expensive, why did I write it this way? Now I know how to make things a little more “producible.” Now, when I write things I think about the edit. How will this work on screen? Is this dialogue forced? Do the actors feel like it’s natural? How is this marrying with the visual language? That’s been a big change.

What would you say makes an Amy Omar film?

I’m really only interested in female perspectives. I don’t really care about the men. If I have any male characters, they’re secondary characters. I’m not really interested in the male gaze. Right now I want to explore what it means to be a woman in different periods of our lives. There’s a lot of world and emotional building and sensory experiences in my films. I’m very interested in taking interior emotions and putting that on the screen not through dialogue. I’m more interested in visual storytelling and how you can build an emotional heartbeat in a film without really saying much.

Has anything you’ve written or produced or worked on in any way answered a question that you had about yourself?

So many! “Ayşegül on Tuesdays,” a little bit. It’s about me but it’s also about my mother. A lot of my work has been exploring this idea of being a two-culture person, where I have this American identity growing up in America but I also have this Turkish identity, too, so what does that mean?

I was always embarrassed to be American, but there is an aspect of growing up in America that I see in my work. That’s actually my perspective. It’s actually wrong and misleading to say that I’m a Turkish filmmaker because I’m not. I didn’t grow up in Turkey. I was exposed to a lot of things in the country, but my view of the world and film-making and my work is always going to be that of a Turkish-American. I’ve learned to be okay leaning into that because those are the aspects that made me, me, and gave me the vision that I have. I guess I’ve learned self-acceptance.

How has Istanbul inspired you as a storyteller?

Through very textured memories. When I started writing scripts it started off just writing down memories of going to Istanbul, going to Bodrum. As a child I would go to Istanbul every summer. It’s mostly sensory memories, I think that’s how a lot of childhood memories are defined, by sensory experiences. Smells of my grandmother’s apartment, of her staircase, of her balcony. There are so many memories I can point to that are not really experiences but are based on objects. That’s why food is so important in my work. I think about the watermelon jam that she used to make or this cake shop next to her apartment where we celebrated my birthday together a few summers ago. I would always be in Istanbul for my birthday. Most years I would be there and we would go to this cake shop and they would make these beautiful cakes with fruit in them. Or going on the ferry, or when I was around twelve and I really wanted to drink Turkish tea and Turkish coffee and my mother wouldn’t let me. It’s very sensory. As I started becoming more of an adult, I thought a lot about the geography of the city. It’s a place that has so much feeling for me. I go there and I feel and see so much beauty. It’s truly breathtaking.

Everything in Istanbul is so visually striking and there are endless things that I want to make there and I feel endlessly nourished by the visuals, but I always leave this place asking, how am I not not seeing more? How is it still so hidden to the world?

What’s it been like being in Rome for the year?

Rome is so quiet. I’m in this big city, but I feel like I’m in a rustic village. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt I’m living in a place where time doesn’t exist. I never really know what time it is. In New York I always felt like I never had time to do anything. But here I wake up and every day feels like a dream in the sense where it’s a little disorienting, but in a good way. I don’t feel rushed.

Most mornings are very leisurely. I read, I write, I do all my creative stuff in the morning. Then I go on a lot of these aimless walks. Time is the big theme. I don’t feel constricted by time.

I spent a lot of time traveling around Italy, particularly the south. There are these emotional nostalgic Mediterranean triggers and I’ve started to remember things about going to Turkey as a child that I had forgotten about. That dry Mediterranean smell, the vegetation, the figs, the produce, the beans. The beans in Italy are the same as the beans in Turkey, you know, the fava beans. I never ate fava beans back in America. It’s been very fruitful creatively as I’m writing about experiences in Turkey being in Rome.

What advice would you give to someone who’s in college and hoping to make a career in film?

Just go out and make something. A lot of people make the mistake of wanting to do something perfect. They wait and wait for that person to come along to make their big feature. It’s more important to keep making things because every time you make something you practice, you learn about your visual language and all those little things build up to the big thing.

The first thing that I ever wrote was a TV pilot when I was studying for the bar exam. I was working on it for a few years and then I had this moment where I’m like, I’m never going to be able to make this TV pilot. No one is just going to come along and pay for me to make this expensive TV pilot.

Write a script that’s maybe five pages. Go out there and shoot it. If you have friends who have a camera, shoot it with the camera. If you want to shoot on your iPhone, shoot on your iPhone. The most important thing is to build the body of work.

How did you learn the craft of screenwriting?

It was when I worked at FilmNation, this indie film production company in New York and LA. Every Friday they give out scripts to everyone in the company. You read one or two scripts over the weekend and you write up a blurb about it. On Monday, as a company, you talk about them which — for me, as someone who worked there in a legal role — was so exciting. I was learning how scripts are written, how to write dialogue, how to make scripts fast and punchy, but also I would be in the room with the creative execs and hear how they talked about scripts. What they liked and didn’t like. This flows really nicely, or this feels inauthentic.

I didn’t know anything about scriptwriting beforehand. When I wrote “Breaking Fast with a Coca Cola” and even after I got the film grant, I didn’t even have film software. I didn’t even know how to format a script at the time. I was doing it on Microsoft Word in weird font. And so that’s some of the feedback that I got from people. They were like, “Oh, this is not really formatted well.” That was a funny little thing that I had to learn, which didn’t affect the story materially.

But that didn’t stop you.

No, no. Not at all.

London-based playwright, screenwriter, actor (though she might disagree), and musician Melis Aker recently finished drafting a novel for her PhD thesis, and is making her directorial debut with “MILK TEETH,” a short film currently fundraising for pre-production. It’s safe to say that Melis has a few stories she’d like to tell.

Melis has had plays commissioned and developed across the US and the UK, with a play produced Off-Broadway in New York and at The Old Vic in London. It was an absolute treat to speak with Melis about tattoo-worthy writing advice, how each form of storytelling offers something different, and what it was like to grow up with Istanbul as her nemesis.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 🇹🇷 Türkçe için tıklayın

How would you describe your career?

I’ve been saying I’m a writer and hoping that people don’t ask for details. I’m a playwright and screenwriter primarily, just by virtue of the thing that I’ve done the most or have had the experience doing the most. My roots come from theater. I was an actor for a bit. Some say I still am. I’m not. The only reason they say that is sometimes I do projects with friends. I don’t try to go out into the world as an actor.

But yes, I do come from a stage and screen foundation. And parts of my training supplement that. I studied English literature and specialized in dramatic literature. It sort of forms the foundations of me as a writer. Now trying to get into the prose fiction world has felt more or less natural, but a big learning curve, also.

Pursuing a career in the arts is not for the faint of heart. When you were growing up, what career possibilities did you think were available to you?

My family has always said — and I hate this term, but here we go — “you’re a citizen of the world.” That’s how they manicured my existence. With that came the assumption that, Wow, we can go into the world and do anything! Which is incorrect. But I’m obviously grateful to them for giving me that risk-taking ability.

I did think that the arts were possible. Of course, I had family members saying to always have the option of keeping it as a hobby, maybe look at something else to supplement, which actually is not a bad thing to say, to be honest. If I had a kid, I would say to them, “If you want to be realistic, having a different interest will only supplement your breadth as an artist.” So I think that it’s not a bad thing ultimately, if you want to be an artist, to do something else as well.

I went to Tufts for my undergraduate because I thought I’d go into international relations. Very quickly I realized that is not something I want to do. I had a great-uncle in diplomacy. So there were certain expectations built, culturally, like, you could always just do something else! I was stubborn. In the end, here we are.

There’s this idea that you must be exceptional to be able to do that as an artist, or that only a select few get to do it. No one knows the portion of people who are working artists but are not celebrities or big, big names that everybody hangs on their wall as posters. There’s a disparity of the knowledge and the specificity of what this career even entails.

You did your MFA in playwriting and screenwriting at Columbia, and you’re about to complete your PhD in creative writing. What are your general thoughts on these academic institutions and how they help support creativity or teach writing?

I have a family that, bless them, they mean well, but they will ask what the ranking of a school is before asking why I’m going to that school. It’s not just them, this is a cultural thing. Like, Ooh, Columbia? Suddenly, the Columbia t-shirt means more than anything else I’m doing. Like, I’m trying to finish a draft. That’s success!

I always wrote and I knew I had an affinity for it. I studied literature at the IB program at my high school. But because I went into the world as an actor, things were more active as an actor and that’s how I identified myself. It took me getting into this MFA program to be able to give myself that kind of confidence to even call myself a writer. Now, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, like whether you need an institution to say that or not, I don’t know. The reason I wanted to get into Columbia was actually for the teachers David Henry Hwang and Lynn Nottage. They were incredible, incredible mentors. So it was worthwhile for me because it helped me build my sense of self as a writer and also those relationships. I had a great cohort as well.

It does build that practice of writing every week and understanding of structure, because without that it feels very hard to understand what your piece is for, what it’s trying to do. That being said, can you not take those and try to build them outside of an institution? I think certainly, you can. I guess it is an access thing. You can’t quite reach those people who teach those classes, the mentors themselves. I don’t know how else I could have been in the same room with them, really. If I were to trace a lot of the things in my own career as a playwright and a screenwriter, it does go back to Columbia. Even the way I got my agent is because I assisted playwright Ayad Akhtar, who had come for a class session. Then I got to be his personal assistant for two years. So if I map it all out, it did matter for me.

Anything that you learned about writing either at Columbia or in your PhD program that you hold near and dear to your heart?

There’s one that to this day that if I had to get a tattoo, maybe I’d get that. Anne Bogart, who’s a lovely director, was part of the Columbia faculty and has a lovely line which applies to everything, not just writing. Hold on tightly, let it go lightly. It’s wonderful in the context of the preciousness, the connection you have to that story. To be able to hold onto it for dear life, to really turn it inside out, and then to just let it go because maybe it doesn’t serve the story anymore. It’s relevant for relationships. It’s relevant for everything. That’s one thing that’ll be forever with me.

The stories and plays of yours that I’ve read all have a connection to Turkey. Is this something you feel particularly driven to explore, or is it just the water you swim in?

The simple answer is yes. Sometimes I hate it and sometimes I love it. Sometimes I just don’t want to write about this, I just don’t want Turkey in the aperture. The reason is — I’ve been calling it cultural dysmorphia — the feeling of being an outsider wherever you go. Turkey is my familiar water and I’m using Turkey as a way to understand being an outsider. I’m probably scratching this to get to the root of why. The answer seems to lie probably in Turkishness or being Turkish in some way.

I’m hopeful. I want to believe that none of us are necessarily limited by that. I go to Turkey and I don’t feel Turkish. And then I come here and I feel Turkish. I don’t know what that is, but it’s there. It’s the elephant in the room. It’s a ghost, haunting me.

Has anything you’ve written ever answered any sort of question for you?

This novel is so much more investigative and has scope. It’s helping me get to the root a little better without getting distracted by a third element, like how something should get staged or filmed. It’s leaving me alone with the questions a bit more and I have gotten a little closer to the idea of being an outsider and realizing my positioning. Fiction can provide that strange murky point of reference.

Your character dialogues are extraordinary. Is dialogue something that you had a talent for, or would you say you really worked at it?

I’m sure I worked on it over years, just trying to listen and listen better. Being an actor definitely helped with the listening purely because you’re training the way you want to be in a scene and listening to another actor. I also played music at a young age and that helps, it tunes your ear a little bit, to pay attention to little disharmonies. They say playwriting is a bit like scoring, like scoring dialogue and scoring people.

How do you know if a story idea is meant for the screen or for the stage?

Oh, that’s hard. Plays are essentially short films or short stories, the constraints of time and space being what they are. But I do think successful plays are contained in either an emotion, a place, or have one very fixed variable. Liminal spaces, also. These tend to be well-suited for what a play can do. It’s like a ping-pong match in a fixed environment.

If there’s a place that you’re in and you look at how beautiful it is, film helps to recreate it. I find that novels can be anything. They are all epics. It feels like having access to interiority, to then going into an outside space, meeting other people, the bias of getting information through whatever perspective…all of those things you can’t really get, you can imply, maybe, in film. But it’s hard.

Let’s talk about your journey into novel writing a bit. How did you expect it to be?How’s it going?

When you’re in that flow, it’s beautiful. It’s wonderful because you can live there. It’s almost more three-dimensional than, ironically, theater or film. It feels like there’s so much you have to contain every beat of the way that it takes such a long time. That pace is something any screenwriter or playwright can also benefit from because we’re used to deliver deliver deliver, and I tried to do that with the novel and it failed miserably.

I got burnt out. I got burnt out from being burnt out. Like, it was not possible. Complete the novel, complete the draft, then I’ll go back and revise! But no, no, I couldn’t even complete the draft because the more I went, the more I’m like, wait, I lost track. It’s such a big document. I’ve lost track of what I’ve done on page five. I’m on page 120. I don’t know what’s happening.

There’s just too much, as we say, dramaturgy, to even get a draft out. That was a learning curve. And removing that pressure from myself to be like, Okay, this is going to take as long as it does. Honestly, when I got to the end of the first draft, I was like, I’m never doing this again. This is crazy. People write five novels. How do they do that?

If you hadn’t left Turkey, what do you think you would have written about?

I’d have more insight and an in into local life. By that I mean smaller textures. How do taxi drivers talk in a more specific way? Can I write a series on just taxi drivers? Zooming in. You look at different things that you care about like the municipality, the upkeep of the ferries. You look at things more, rather than feelings.

I’d probably want to pick a very niche location and explore that in more detail. I would look at pavyon kültür in Ankara or meyhane. Where the meyhane came from, and what that meant for people across generations, or where a street name came from.

Because my audience is different, I have to constantly split the difference. What is relevant, what has to be explained, all of those things. Whereas if you were in Turkey, you wouldn’t do that. They just know, you know, taksi durağı. They know what a bakkal is.

What is your relationship to Istanbul and how has it inspired you as a storyteller?

Istanbul used to be my sworn enemy. Because I was raised in Ankara, I’m like, Man Istanbul’s that popular kid. Everyone’s writing about Istanbul. Everybody knows Istanbul. Like, yes, I get it. It’s beautiful. You build that little resentment of like, I get it, it’s everywhere. Also, all my family’s from Istanbul. To me it’s a strange homecoming to deal with what Istanbul meant to my family. My mom lives there now. I’ve been forming a different relationship with the city, trying to be a peer with my mom and trying to see the city through a different set of eyes, more like a local. The more I try to avoid it the more it comes back. And the textures of Turkey, or the things that I like about Turkey, even the things that I like about Ankara, are from Istanbul.

Istanbul has a way of combining those textures. It’s just unlike anything else really, any other place. It’s a treasure. It finds its way in.

Do you feel a responsibility to portray it authentically or in a certain way?

Yeah. I have to compare it with the novel, talking about Ankara for the first time, which not a lot of people would know about or would want to go to. I can take more creative liberties with Ankara because it’s not been written about as much. If I try to go to Istanbul, like with “ARI” (currently in development) I was trying to be very specific about the neighborhood. If it’s not going to be Beyoğlu it should be Kadıköy, if it’s going to be Kadıköy, you know my great-grandmother’s side was from Erenköy so I spent some time trying to really look at the architecture of streets. So yes, I feel the pressure to represent it accurately, but I also think it’s like an absurd city of contradictions. So that being said, I think it also gives way for magical realism.

As you think about your career, what kind of writer do you want to be known as?

It’s so hard to understand the pattern, but a colleague and an artistic director told me recently that I write the experience of being both an outsider and an insider well. I don’t know what that means, but I do think that it lends itself to formally slightly heightened work. So it’s not going to be necessarily realism. There’s going to be something absurd, whether that’s through humor or whether that’s stylistically, through magical realism that jars the situation.

Mina Seçkin is a Brooklyn-based novelist and the author of “The Four Humors,” a story about a young Turkish-American woman spending a summer at her grandmother’s side in Istanbul, where she avoids studying for the MCAT and delves into ancient medicine to get to the bottom of her constant headaches. The novel explores the interwoven intricacies of both family and national history, and holds an extra-special place in my heart: It was the first novel I read that truly encapsulated my experience of visiting family as a Turkish-American in Turkey, a time that was transformative for my own identity. Mina is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University and at work on her second novel.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 🇹🇷 Türkçe için tıklayın

What is your relationship to writing? Besides novels and short stories, do you have other types of writing that you explore, or have explored in the past?

I first came to writing poetry and in a lot of ways, I feel as if it’s still the muscle that keeps me moving. When I’m writing something for the first time, it comes out in poetry first and then I have to translate it. I’ve also written speeches and content for nonprofits, which is such a strange opposite spectrum. What I haven’t done as much, what I have been terrified of constantly, are essays. Especially personal essays.

Have you received pressure from your publisher or agent to market your book by publishing personal essays?

A little, yeah. That was the first time I felt like I should write a personal essay. You feel — not pressure, exactly — but start to think about the form when friends might also be considering that kind of essay. I either have a block with it that I have to explore or I just have to accept that that’s not what I’m doing right now.

I feel very similarly to you. I love writing personal essays, but it’s just not something that I’m ready to put out in the world yet because the more honest it is, the better it is. And I don’t want to be that honest with everyone right now.

It’s funny, there’s an audience aspect to it that I feel less comfortable with than in fiction, when you acknowledge that the character is not necessarily you. Whereas in non-fiction it’s so much more about yourself and the actual relationship you might have with the public, which I feel weird about.

When you were growing up, did being a novelist seem like a realistic career option for you?

It did not seem possible at all. I don’t think anyone in my extended family is an artist. They all work in business, or are engineers, doctors. There’s a great-great-grandpa who’s known for wanting to have been an actor, and everyone passes his photo around being like, “Look at how handsome he was.” My parents didn’t, and they still don’t really, understand how an artist might be able to navigate and make money in this world and have a stable career. I understand their fear because art and art-making is definitely not stable. Not nearly as stable as the professions they’re used to, which is knowing a trade and having a certificate that says you do that trade and it being translatable.

I always think that the more a diaspora grows and the more generations go through a diaspora, the more financial security your generation might have as Turkish-Americans. Which I think is why we are actually seeing a lot more Turkish-American writers and artists now.

When did it start to become a realistic career path for you?

It was right after I graduated college. I was working at Literary Hub right when they had just launched. So much of my job was copy editing and also looking through publishers’ catalogs and finding the new books that are coming out and picking excerpts. It made me want to write my own novel so badly, just right away.

How did you develop the belief and confidence that you could write a novel?

I always think that all novelists and writers of books — especially novelists, though — have to be delusional. You have to have a delusional belief in yourself. But the very practical answer also must be true: if other people can do it, why can’t you? If you have all the tools in front of you, if you’re reading as much as possible, if you’re showing up, if you’re open to that self-criticism to what makes the narrative the way you want it to be. I think anyone can do anything with the tools.

At the same time, showing up every day is not to be taken for granted. It’s not easy. So much of that showing up every day is hours and hours of being like, Why am I doing this? This is so hard. I don’t want to do this. This is nonsense. This puzzle is not solving itself in the narrative. What is the meaning of it at all? That daily perseverance is where our delusion comes from. And maybe the delusion is faith. You need to believe that you can do it and that it’s going to happen if you keep going through the hurdles.

What kind of writer do you think you would have been, if at all different, if you didn’t have the MFA?

It’s interesting because when my book came out, I became more aware of something that the MFA doesn’t teach as much, which is publishing, what the market looks like, what is selling, what doesn’t sell. If I hadn’t done the MFA, I would have continued to write poetry. But I was always aware that that wasn’t going to be very sellable.

And that’s important to you?

It is ultimately, yeah. I want to one day be not working other jobs and have my primary form of income being writing, but that is so rare and hard.

But others have done it!

Others have done it, yeah. Maybe we need our delusional faith right now.

When you were in the MFA, were there any “writing rules” you learned that were helpful, and maybe others that made you think, “This insults my soul. This will have no place in my career as a novelist”?

It’s so funny that you say that. I’m teaching now in undergrad and in the MFA. In general, I hate rules. I hate authority. I think the best way to teach writing is to expose people to as much reading and powerful writing as possible. And also to help students see what their sentences are making a stranger see in their head. We’re just summoning an image and a feeling and trying to see that from the outside.

I’m really conscious of not giving too many rules, and I don’t remember the hard and fast rules I learned, maybe because I rejected them. I do remember a few that I don’t know if I believe in, and they’re little ones. They’re just on the sentence level. I remember a teacher really harped on never using the verb declension ing. So, instead of saying “running,” just use “run.” These rules always reveal what this author’s particular style and taste is, right? This other professor hated the first person and thought that the first person was inherently self-interested and selfish. And he constantly taught us to bury the “I,” and if you’re in the first person, to try to not use “I” as much as possible.

Another teacher once said that to show a character smoking a cigarette is lazy and easy characterization. Never do that, I’m bored of that. Which is funny because today, fewer people smoke.

Your main character smokes a lot.

Yeah, she’s a smoker. Those are smaller rules that I do remember, but maybe because they feel absurd to me as rules, right? They’re interesting suggestions. I think the MFA and teaching writing in general, you can only teach it so much. It’s a craft that you hone and hone. The more perspective you get on it, whether that’s through reading books or sharing your writing with others and having honest feedback, the better. What the MFA gave me the most was a community of fellow writers and friends who are, truly, my best friends and first readers. I think that’s the most important thing.

The network.

Yeah, the network. I feel like artists are afraid of that word. They want to not admit that they seek that, but it’s very important.

“The Four Humors” is such a rich novel, with family dynamics, women caring for each other, cultural identity, medicine and healing, immigration, nationalism. I read somewhere that it started out as a short story in your MFA. Was there one theme or element that you just needed to get out for your first novel, maybe something that was in the short story?

I’ve never thought about it in this way before. I definitely think the thing that was completely eating away at me for all of my teenage years and those years of my 20s writing the book was the understanding of my two cultures and two identities. The split identity and being a stranger in Turkey and yet feeling so intimate with it and connected to it by blood and culture. It’s really interesting because they say writers write the same thing over and over again, right? That they go back to the same topics over and over again. And I know I do. I think I will and I don’t think in any way, not in any way at all, that this novel answered anything for me. There’s no answer to what all that means.

But the exploration of it did exorcise the pain of this question for me in a really beautiful way. I remember when I was writing this book and before I was writing this book, every time I went to Turkey I would feel this pressure to capture that exact feeling. I would always feel the pressure to write down that one thing that really encapsulates this exact thing that I’m trying to capture. I would feel overwhelmed, but excited by it. It was the challenge. It was the very question I was turning over.

Once the book came out, I remember I felt this amazing feeling. I went to Turkey and I felt no need to write anything down. I could just be there and not be notetaking anymore. And that’s not to say I’m done with any of it and the questions of it, especially Turkey or Turkishness. But it’s nice to be able to go there and not feel that pressure to get it right.

My writing lately is almost the American side of me at this juncture in life and politics, where I wonder sometimes if overemphasizing my own identity is not actually othering me more. Which I didn’t used to believe a while ago, but I might believe now. In my work, I’m always trying to see how you can make your character who is not the dominant race and ethnicity of this country not othered or marginalized just by being the main character and normalizing them. It’ll be interesting to see what that looks like or how it changes in my writing.

I love the way you talk about bodies. I know there are some doctors in your family and I was wondering if the way you write about bodies comes naturally to you and it’s going to be something we see your work moving forward, or if you wanted a particular emphasis on that for this book because it is so much about the body and healing.

I definitely feel like it’s both nature and nurture in this way. In “The Four Humors” it definitely took on a science and medical angle. I’ve been thinking about it lately because definitely at the time I was so obsessed with the medical and the anatomical because I was afraid of it. I never wanted to follow that line of doctor work because I was afraid of the body and gore and blood. I do think I’m always going to write about it, but not necessarily in that medical way.

You know how there are people who eat just for nutrition and sustenance and people who eat for pleasure? I have always been an eater for pleasure. I don’t have any idea when I’m hungry or not. As a result, I have a very addictive sensory personality. That’s why I was addicted to smoking for so long. I have a raging sweet tooth right now — and sugar addiction, and sparkling water addiction. It’s almost like my primary way of being in my body right now is eating and consumption. But it does change. I think every person is in their body in a different way and expresses it in different ways. Right now mine is eating, exercising, and being active. But it has manifested in so many different ways for me.

The body is our essential conduit to being alive and processing this world. I feel like my writing will always be addressing that in some way because writing is always translating your sensory and emotional experience out to the world. If it’s not bodily, it doesn’t make as much sense to me. But it’s true. There are so many writers who are so heady and there’s no body to it at all. Or anything sensory. I don’t think I’ll ever be writing that way just because I don’t experience the world that way.

Your main character sees bodies in everything, comparing peach pits to skulls, for example. How do you know so much about bodies? Did you do research, or is it information you grew up with?

I definitely did research, but also my older sister is a doctor and she has the most encyclopedic mind I know. That mind has been in action ever since I was little. She was obsessed with books that had every single type of bird in it, every single type of dog in it, every single type of medical fact in it. And those books were in front of me a lot, too.

What is your relationship to Turkish literature?

I go through phases of really being submerged in Turkish literature. Being a Turkish-American person is coming of age a million times again and again because there’s so much that your parents may have taught you — and then you get older and you get to experience primary documents for yourself. And literature for me is the most primary document of all. To be able to make your own decisions and understandings about life in Turkey through literature is so amazing.

I first really dove into it when I started translating “Tuhaf Bir Kadın” by Leyla Erbil for a class and I was obsessed with it. It was so good. I felt like the young woman narrator was very much someone I recognized or someone who could walk right off the page. And then I went into a big, big deep-dive of women in that period, like Sevgi Soysal I also fell in love with. More and more work is being translated which is great because I’m a very slow reader in Turkish. Very slow. I have to actually read instead of, say, in English I read a page so quickly it’s almost like I absorb a paragraph right away. In Turkish, I have to actually sit down and read each sentence, and that’s hard. But when I do do it, it makes me appreciate the sentence, and it makes me feel more intimately connected to the book.

What type of writer do you want to be known as?

The thing I want to remain true to is a commitment to language that is always surprising and new.

How has Istanbul inspired you as a storyteller?

For me it was always a very primary source of emotion, loss, love, and longing. It is both historical and constantly changing and becoming new. It is such a quintessential experience for me to land in Turkey and get picked up by my uncle or cousin. And as we’re driving from the airport to my grandmother’s house, my uncle is pointing out all the new buildings. And I love the Turkish verb for it, dikmek. How that verb is used for buildings, always. Such an organic word for such an inorganic thing. To see that change every year. To experience a city in a way where you don’t see it for a whole year, then you see it one year later and you see the things that have changed and the things that are always the same and never going to change. A very interesting internal clock to have in you.

The first time I saw “You All & I Alone” was at an outdoor short film screening at Kadıköy’s Gazhane Museum. I was deeply impressed by how the film (in just 14 minutes!) managed to convey so many of the complex emotions I’d been experiencing lately about life in Istanbul.

Born and raised in Istanbul, screenwriter and director Nükhet Taneri took home the prize for “Best Short Film” at Antalya’s 2022 Golden Orange Film Festival. She shared the award with her partner in both life and cinema, director and screenwriter Barış Kefeli. Together, the two of them had adapted Hakan Bıçakcı’s short story “Darkness” into the short film, “You All & I Alone.” The film reached viewers at international film festivals and on the streaming platform MUBI. Nükhet and Barış are now working on their first feature-length film, an adaptation of Hakan Bıçakcı’s novel “Displaced.” When she’s not working on her own films, Nükhet works as an assistant director on commercial shoots.

A note on translation: Though the mentioned works of Hakan Bıçakcı are not currently published in English, Nükhet and Barış have translated their film titles for international audiences. The original names of the films and texts are “Ben Tek Siz Hepiniz” (“You All & I Alone”), and “Uyku Sersemi” (“Displaced”). “Darkness” is my own translation for “Karanlık.” I will be using these translations to refer to both Bıçakcı’s texts as well as the films.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 🇹🇷 Türkçe için tıklayın

When did you realize you were interested in film?

My high school, Üsküdar Amerikan, was a huge influence. I’d go to film festivals, and my friends and several of the younger teachers also loved film. Together with our teachers, we formed a Film Club. I also took classes in film, including a screenwriting class which was immensely helpful. My classmates and I made a couple short films together. They’re only like a minute and a half, two minutes long, but it was enough for me to know that this was something I could enjoy doing, and that maybe this was a direction I wanted to head in.

While in high school, at first I thought I wanted the careers of the characters on the shows I watched. When I watched Ally McBeal, I wanted to be a lawyer. When I watched Nip/Tuck, I wanted to be a surgeon. It took my mom asking me one day, “Are those the careers you want, or do you want to be the person who films these shows, who writes these stories?” for me to think “Oh, the latter!” That’s when things clicked.

Now, of course, I know that I’d have been unhappy as a lawyer. Because being a lawyer means being a part of one world, and one world only. I knew in high school that I loved cinema, but I studied the sciences instead and then in college I majored in engineering. Then I went down all these ridiculous paths because I couldn’t decide on just one thing, and being a part of only one world seemed difficult, depressing, and uninspiring. This was exactly it, I think: to be a part of every story, or to be the person directing, creating that story. That’s what opens up all these other worlds for you. And then you no longer have to choose.

Did a career filmmaking seem realistic to you?

I was always of the idea that nothing serious would ever come of it. While I was in elementary school, I was also enrolled at a conservatory for classical piano. Like many kids born in the 80’s and 90’s, I was what you might call a “project child.” She should learn ballet! Join the swim team! Play piano! Be valedictorian! Learn four foreign languages! Etc. I played piano for two hours a day, but also had to keep my grades up.

I was a talented kid, and put a ton of effort into piano with a deep sense of professionalism and discipline. No summer vacations, no winter holidays for me…but I didn’t even really like piano. To be honest, my love for film and storytelling actually came about during that piano-playing period of my life. Trapped for four hours, just me and the piano, I would disassociate. I’m 12, 13 years old, and I want to go outside and enjoy myself, but I have to practice. As I practiced piano, I would mentally disappear from where I was and start to daydream. That’s how I first became a storyteller.

Stories became my escape from that heavy, unpleasant burden of playing piano. Sometimes I’d make up love stories, sometimes flashy, glamorous stories, dances, all sorts of things. I could keep myself thoroughly entertained with these worlds I dreamed up. The thing was, even though my piano studies were so intense, my parents always reminded me that this was never going to be my actual career. I never asked, “Well if I’m not going to make a career out of it, why am I working so hard?” At that age, I couldn’t really question it. That’s probably why I kept rejecting film and cinema until I graduated college, because of this belief that these types of things, no matter how much effort you put into them, will never be your career — just a hobby you’re force to participate in at best. Everyone has to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. This belief had been ingrained in me without my knowledge.

But wasn’t your dad an actor and singer?

Yes, but when I was born he’d already left that career behind and was working in textiles. My dad’s career also impacted our family perspective on these things, I think. He was a singer back when he was younger, actually he’d even gotten a little bit famous. But eventually he wanted a steady paycheck and a more comfortable life, so he stopped. There were also some contractual reasons that had made it difficult to continue.

My dad always told me that I should have a real career. Because his career had given him a slap in the face. He wasn’t able to carry on, though if you ask me, if he had fought just a little harder, been a little more patient…because he was so unhappy later, in corporate life. But it’s very hard for the person actually living it to see what’s happening. If you ask him, the life of an artist had betrayed him. He wanted to get married, make a home, have a kid, and these things all required a “real” career. Personally, I think if my dad grit his teeth a bit longer, found a way to get around certain legalities that restricted him, and continued to make music, he would have been much happier.

Did you write the screenplays for“You All & I Alone” and “Displaced” together with Barış Kefeli?

We did. For “Displaced,” Hakan Bıçakcı is involved as well, though he didn’t want to be a part of the writing team for “You All & I Alone.” While working on the short film, even though he wasn’t involved in the actual script, he gave us some great suggestions. He never once freaked out about the possibility of us changing or ruining his story. He told us to go ahead and do whatever we liked. Since we got along so well last time — he’s incredibly motivating, and has so many ideas — we asked him if he wanted to write the feature-length film with us, and he is.

How do you decide which novels or stories you want to adapt into film? Are there certain qualities you’re looking for in the writing?

Barış and I never set out to adapt anything. Actually, we worked separately as directors and had no intention of working together. We both happened to be going through a dry spell where neither of us could write anything at all, and we were also working jobs. The whole reason I work as an assistant director is so that I can also make my own films. But once you’re working a job, you lose that enthusiasm. I suddenly realized that I’m spending all my time as an assistant director on commercials and TV shows. It didn’t make any sense, and it got to a point where I thought, if I’m working this hard I might as well have just continued on as an industrial engineer. It was a really draining, unproductive period.

A friend of ours recommended that we look into adaptation. It’s good to start out with adaptations because there’s already a complete story to work with. You can either stay true to the story, or, as you gain experience and confidence, start to transform it. We liked this idea. After that we started to filter everything we read through a cinematic lens. Both Barış and I were already fans of Hakan Bıçakcı’s short stories and novels. I’d read every story in his collection, “You All & I Alone,” but I’d never read them with the intention of adapting them for film. Barış had the idea to adapt the story titled “Darkness.” I re-read “Darkness” and realized that it’s absolutely written for the screen.

When we moved into feature films, we wanted to tell our own stories. Barış had a script he’d written, and I had a script I’d started. We put a lot of effort into both, but they didn’t work out. We sank into another depressive, unproductive period until we said, “Enough! Let’s open up Hakan’s books.” At this point, we know him well and he’s a cinematic writer. At first we wanted to adapt another one of his novels. The three of us worked together on it, but that was a more experimental and surreal story. It was really out there, and we didn’t know how to tie it all together and bring it to the screen. Finally, we decided on adapting his novel “Displaced.”

When you say you put a lot of effort into both but they didn’t work out, do you mean that you couldn’t finish those screenplays, or did you come up against obstacles such as budget, location, casting?

In my own script, I wrote out a few scenes and ideas I wanted to express, but a film has a rhythm, a certain dynamic to it, and the ending needs to make sense. Sometimes, you just can’t tie it all together. No matter how hard you try, you can’t get to that ending the film needs. You have your plot, but in the film there needs to be an aspect that emphasizes the point you’re trying to make. Sometimes, it doesn’t work and you have to start over from the beginning. Usually it’s because there’s something missing in the beginning that prevents you from tying it all together at the end. This process can be a big struggle. You can get lost in the film, because there are going to be things that you’re not going to want to get rid of. Characters, dialogues. You can get so attached to these things that it’s tough to say, “let me get rid of this and see how it works without it.”

We had a scene like that in “You All & I Alone.” It worked great in the script. We shot the film, made our rough edits, but something’s off. We changed it around, yet something’s still not working. We don’t want to admit that the problem is that one scene. We had a couple people watch the film and both of them told us to get rid of that scene. Finally, we deleted it and changed the whole structure, from beginning to end. The film’s beginning was now the end, the end the middle, and the middle, the beginning. We took the film, turned it upside down, abandoned our entire storyline and script, and that’s how that film got done. That scene was really great, it was one of our best scenes. It was the only scene an actor friend of ours had starred in. He had gotten up at three in the morning to film that scene, and we had gone ahead and cut it. Really, such an amazing scene, but it had to go.

This type of thing gets harder when you’re working on adapting a novel or short story, because you’re not the only one who gets attached. The person who actually wrote that story is also attached. And if they wrote it, and if we loved it so much when we read it, there’s a reason for it. But not everything that works on the page translates to the screen.

Do you ever think about who your target audience is?

Never. We had to think about it for the first time ever while working on the feature, because you have to define your target audience when you’re filling out applications. If you ask me, those types of things are kind of nonsense. If I wanted to think about target audiences, I’d shoot more commercials. All the stories I want to tell are about me in some way. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. What would someone think watching this? Who is my target audience? Who’s this for, what’s it for…it’s for me, all right? For me.

What was the biggest risk you’ve taken in your filmmaking career?

Getting “You All & I Alone” into production took many years, with the pandemic in the middle. For four years we had an actor for our main character we were very attached to. I mean, we wrote and sent him the first draft of the script in 2018, and he agreed to work with us. He’s a good actor, and yet I didn’t ever feel that he was quite right for our character. But when such an amazing actor loves your film, you don’t want to go back to the drawing board. You think, even if he’s not a great fit, he’ll make up for it with his acting. But it still didn’t sit well with me.

We’re ready to shoot and this actor constantly has something else going on. We postponed for one month, two months, three months, four months. At the same time we’ve got another actor whose schedule is going to start filling up really soon. By the way, we have to change the crew each time because everyone always has other jobs going on. When you’re finally ready a month later and call everyone back, not everyone’s going to be available. Six days before our shoot we find out that our actor has another commitment. This time we said, “We’re going to shoot this film. We have no other choice.” But to find an actor in six days, to get to an agreement…for four years, we’ve been with this other actor. To us, he was inseparable from the film itself. Whether I liked it or not he was just as much a part of this film as we were. Deciding to part ways with him was the bravest decision we made.

That day, I was crying and Barış was in panic mode. We’re looking at all these actors, who can we bring on, who would be a good fit for this character. We’re looking at these actors and we see Okan Avcı, who’s playing a role that’s completely different from our character. And it’s not even a role where he looks like himself. He’s playing, like, a teacher in a village and we’re looking for a city type of guy. We tried to get in touch with Okan right away. Barış’s sister is an actress, and she was kind enough to connect us with him.

That day, Okan agreed to arrange a meeting and we immediately sent him the screenplay. We met the following day and realized that Okan was born for this role.

Do you have any topics and themes that, as a filmmaker, you find yourself returning to again and again?

I’m really interested in human-centered stories, human psychology, and the relationship between society and the individual. I keep saying, more than I wish I had studied cinema, I wish I had studied psychology. That would have made for a better transition into film.

What was the experience of writing your first script like?

I was a student in Los Angeles, writing a short film for class. I had a great teacher who loved my idea. He understood both where I wanted to take the film and the spirit of it, and his guidance helped me out a lot.

It’s easy for me to get bogged down writing long details and descriptions, and to lose myself in my thoughts. My screenplays are very tightly controlled. Like, I write where the actor should place his hand, because in my mind I’m seeing the scene come alive and I’m translating all of it to the page. The screenplay should give the director — I mean, the director was going to be me as well, but anyway — and the actors flexibility. The cinematographer, too. Of course, the film is the director’s vision, but that vision needs to be open to improvement. My teacher offered me a lot of guidance on that front. We always wrote our scripts together in class, and my classmates and I workshopped our scripts with each other. That was when I really learned how to write a screenplay. It was tough, I mean it took me 2-3 months to write a 12-13 page script, even though I was working on it constantly. Actually, it’s not really that long, it could take years, too. “You All & I Alone ” — which was of similar length — took us four years.

How do you stay motivated during the time it takes to make a film?

It’s a turbulent time for me. For short films, because there’s less money and fewer people involved, I see it more as something I’m doing for myself. It’s not like that for feature films. You’ve got a significant amount of money at stake, producers involved, a ton of applications. I find it really hard to stay motivated, but the silver lining is that the entire period of prep work is about financing. So if I’m being honest, the deadlines on those applications are the only motivating factor for me. I haven’t quite gotten a handle on managing my internal motivation, unfortunately.

What kind of screenwriter would you like to be known as?

Unique and idiosyncratic. Not someone that everyone understands and loves, but someone who really clicks with those who do get me. I want people to say, “Wow this is absurd, maybe Nükhet made it.” But when it comes to being remembered, I want them to say that working with me was a great experience, and that I was even-tempered and kind. I can always tell a story the way I want to tell it. After all, it is independent cinema. You can create great things by screaming on set and causing everyone distress, but for the films I make — even if they’re not that well known, even if they’re not that amazing — I want the people I worked with to say, “she was a really decent person.” That’s more important to me.

Both your films take place in Istanbul. How has Istanbul inspired you as a filmmaker?

Istanbul has a truly unbelievable texture to it. It’s different from anywhere else. I’m sure that everyone feels like the city they were born and raised in is extremely special but I think that Istanbul, objectively, is special. You’ve got everything in Istanbul. You’ve got the glittering, beautiful, elegant Bosphorus. At the same time, it can also be a filthy, rude, and tough city to be in. Some of its corners are like a heap of concrete, whereas others have stunning natural landscapes. You’ll see sunsets here that you can’t find anywhere else. That’s why, for a filmmaker, it’s an incredible city. It’s very fulfilling.

In those daydreams I mentioned, the little scenarios I thought up while playing piano as a kid, Istanbul was always in the background. The sounds, the smells — if only you could integrate smells into film – the textures. It’s a very dense city. Sometimes I walk its streets filled with hate, and sometimes full of love. I think that a city like this, one that can bring about such charged emotions, isn’t just enriching for film, but for any form of art.

Turkish-American novelist Leyla Brittan’s young adult debut, Ros Demir is Not the One follows a high schooler’s self-centered decisions in romance and friendship in an effort to win homecoming princess — all while battling insecurities about her Turkish-American identity. Reading it had me reminiscing about the books I read as an adolescent, and thinking about how I would have been thrilled to read about a main character (not to mention her love interest as well!) with my multicultural background. I’m so happy this book is filling a space that has stood empty for quite some time, and with a spunky female character to boot. I was lucky enough to meet Leyla in person during one of her Istanbul trips, and later sat down to interview her about her writing journey.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 🇹🇷 Türkçe için tıklayın

When you were young, did you know that you wanted a creative career, and did you see it as an actual possibility?

There’s a lot of creativity in my family, and a lot of interest in and respect for the arts. I saw those channels and participated in them very early. The art-making itself was something that I was engaged and interested in from a young age, but the idea of it as a career was definitely daunting. The world does reinforce that art-making as a career is very, very difficult. I knew that I wanted to be a storyteller — then I tried very hard not to be for a while.

In high school I was a writer and a performer, and that’s how I portrayed myself to colleges when I was applying. Then, in college, I heard so much about how difficult it is to actually make a career in the arts. So I tried really hard to distance myself from those things. I thought maybe I’d study computer science or statistics or, you know, something completely separate from English. My freshman year, over the course of the two semesters, I took nine classes in eight different subject areas because I wanted to figure out what it was that I wanted to study.

I did like computer science and coding, but English and writing were still my first love. I came back around to those when I actually had to declare my major. On the day that the school said, “You have to decide what your major is today or else you’re going to be in trouble,” I ran into the English department. I was like, “Is it too late? Will you take me?”

When you say the world reinforces that art-making as a career is very, very difficult, do you recognize the voice in your head that says that? Peers, family?

Both. I did hear it in the media. Then from my family as well. Friends’ voices, too, when I got to college. A lot of the people around me were very practical about what they were studying. I wished that I could be that way.

There was definitely a strong push toward other careers, especially from certain branches of my family and family friends. They would ask, What are you studying at Harvard? and I would say that I’m studying English, and their response would be, Oh, god. Then I would add, With a minor in computer science! and they’d be like, Okay, all right. She’s going to be fine.

How did you decide to pursue an MFA (Master of Fine Arts)?

Coming out of college, I wanted to work to see what I liked before I did any sort of grad school. I worked in outdoor sports journalism for a rock climbing magazine, which was amazing. I’m a rock climber and I loved that. Then I went to New York and worked in film and TV for about two years. I learned that I did love being in the film and TV space, but I was working on a bunch of films that weren’t really in my wheelhouse, a lot of sports documentaries. That whole time I had an itch to write my own stories. I wrote both my first book, which is not published, and Ros Demir is Not the One during that period of working. I had just finished drafting Ros and that was when I decided to go to an MFA program.

So you’d already drafted two novels. What did you think you needed an MFA for? Could you see what was missing?

I needed it for two main things. I knew I was capable of writing a book and that I loved that process, but I wanted the community that came from an MFA. I knew that having a community improved my craft because I had done a lot of workshops in high school and college, and I love the workshop format. I find it super inspiring to read other people’s work. That’s one of the biggest drivers for me, honestly — reading works-in-progress from other people and watching them revise. So I knew the workshop format was good for me and I felt like I had a lot of room to grow.

The other thing was time. Working in both journalism and film/TV, they’re both passion industries. Most of the people around me in those industries, that was the thing that they wanted to give their heart to. There was an expectation to throw all of your creative energy and your time into it. I was doing these jobs and enjoying them, but I also wanted to reserve some of my creative energy for my fiction writing and I was having trouble balancing those things. I figured that getting an MFA would give me time and space to just focus on writing, and it did. I went to the University of Wyoming, and I wrote two more books when I was there.

You’re so prolific!

It depends on the season. I didn’t write anything for a year and a half after graduating from my MFA program while I was trying to adapt back to also having a full-time job.

Let’s get into your book, Ros Demir is Not the One and the theme of identity. In an article about you in the Harvard Crimson, you mentioned you avoided writing about your identity. The word “avoided” is interesting because it means that there is this pull, or this whisper of you should be doing this. Why did you feel like you should be doing something, and, separately, why didn’t you want to?

My mom is from Istanbul and my dad grew up on a ranch in Montana. I grew up visiting both of those places quite often and as a result, felt very connected to both.

As a child, I was like, Yes, I’m a New Yorker, I live in Westchester. But these two other places are very, very much home to me as well and a part of my identity. That set me apart from the other students at my school. My mom was very involved with my school and educating people on Turkish culture. Every year she would come into my elementary school class, bring a little Turkish rug, and have us go on a magic carpet ride. She would sit my whole class down and pull up photos of Hagia Sophia and the Grand Bazaar and say, “Here are landmarks from my home city.” Then she would give everyone gofret [Turkish sweet wafers].

From a young age, I was acutely aware that my mom is from Turkey and she’s very proud of that, and that this is part of who I am. This is part of how my classmates perceive me, a thing that everyone knows about me. When I started writing more seriously in high school, and writing things that were drawn out of real-life emotions and experiences, it felt disingenuous to not mention that part of my identity. Even the act of naming your characters, right? If I’m like, “Oh, my protagonist is named Katie.” Well…my name is Leyla. It immediately feels like there is a breadth of experience that I’m not including in my work, even though I don’t write autobiography.

It meant a lot to me as a kid when I read books with characters whose families came from different cultures, or who were struggling with some aspect of their identity or heritage. There was part of me that thought, It’s my responsibility as well to write these stories. At the same time, it’s scary to do that for a lot of reasons.

One of them is that I was afraid that my work would be mistaken for autofiction. Then there’s the part of me that’s like, Who am I to speak for half-Turkish, half-American kids? I didn’t grow up in Istanbul, who am I to write about this landscape? When there aren’t that many people writing about this specific identity, it can feel daunting to think you’re speaking for this identity in some way. But that’s absolutely not true. Everyone’s human experience is entirely unique. How meaningful it is for me to write characters who reflect some aspect of my relationship with my heritage has far outweighed the fear of Am I enough to write this?

How did you get over that fear?

A lot of writing. Writing different characters and writing into those insecurities, into those questions of, How do I relate to my Turkish heritage? That’s something that comes up in Ros Demir is Not the One. Ros has a fraught and distanced relationship with her dad’s Turkish family. She’s like, “Yes, that’s part of my family, but I don’t identify as Turkish-American.” That’s in contrast to Aydın who’s like, “This is part of who I am and I think it’s great, I don’t understand why you’re so upset about it.” Writing not just characters who share different facets of my relationship with Turkey, but who also dig into those nervous, complicated facets. That helped a lot.

When you speak with readers in Turkey, how do they react to Ros’s insecurities around her own identity?

The audiences that I spoke to there were not that concerned with the insecurities about identity. They were more like, “It’s really cool to have Turkish-American representation and have this portrayal of a teenager who’s half-Turkish growing up in Connecticut.”

In the US though, I’ve had much more of a response to that aspect specifically. Especially from teenagers with mixed heritage or a mixed-race background; they’ve really resonated with the story. I’ve gotten a few letters from high school readers talking about how Ros’s struggles and insecurities about her identity made them feel very, very seen. That’s been beautiful for me to hear. I imagine how much this book would have meant to me and resonated with me when I was a kid.

One of the coolest things that happened to me is that at one of my tour stops I met a middle school-aged reader whose name was Leyla and one of her parents was from Turkey. She said that she had decided to come to the event because she saw a poster for it and she’d never seen an author with her name before. She also said that she had never seen a book with a half-Turkish character before. I was like, Oh my god, this is who I wrote this book for.

What is your writing process and how did you figure out what it was?

Broadly, I take a lot of notes and write down a lot of ideas [gestures to a series of notebooks on the bookshelf behind her]. And also in my iPhone Notes app, I have pages and pages. A lot of it is disconnected. A thought, a line that came to me. A scene or a place that I just visited that I want to describe because I want to base a setting on it later.

Sometimes I have these amorphous ideas for a book or a story. I currently have four different notes in my iPhone’s Notes app with placeholder titles — Such-and-such Book — and I don’t know what the plot for any of them is yet, but I kind of have an idea of what the book is about. I’m collecting and percolating pieces of them right now. Although four is definitely too many. I went through a period of not writing very much after my MFA because I was getting ready for Ros Demir is Not the One to come out, and debut year is just overwhelming. I had just moved to a new city and was working a new job. My writing comes in like floods like that, where it’s very difficult to write for a while and then suddenly it’s like, Oh no, I have too many ideas and I don’t know where to focus.

Then at some point I see the shape of the book and start writing. With every book, that’s been a really different process. The book that I’m revising right now was my MFA thesis. That one came to me in weird little bits and pieces and dreamy vignettes. It’s a non-chronological book, so it made sense that it was coming out that way. The book that I most recently was working on, I wrote the whole outline of before I started writing, which is something I’d never done before. Usually, I’m a pantser.

When you sit down for a writing session, do you set a timer, or maybe have a word count goal?

I’m a timer person, definitely. If I’m really busy, it’s 30 minutes a day, or it’s an hour, or it’s two hours if I have a lot of time. For me, having concentrated time works really well for drafting. I love first drafts, and find revising painful.

Do you see revision as tearing everything apart and starting over, or working on strengthening what you’ve already got?

I’ve been trying to be more the type of writer who’s able to tear things to pieces and completely redo, but my instinct tends to be that I like the shape of the story and it came out kind of the way that I wanted it the first time. That’s part of why I find it really difficult to do revisions. I’m precious about the first draft.

If you hadn’t done an MFA, what kind of writer do you think you would be? Would you have still been writing?

I would still be writing, especially given that I was already writing when I went in. I don’t think that I would necessarily be the writer that I am today, just in terms of being able to write a strong story. The MFA program helped me solidify what my process looks like, where I get my inspiration, and where my stories come from.

I really had to dig into those things in the MFA. When you’re writing on your own, you’re writing stories as they come to you. In the MFA, I had to interrogate: Why this story? Why is it that I’m drawn to writing about this? It was really helpful to me to figure out what I like to write about, the things I’m obsessing over, and I also improved my craft so much while I was there.

What kind of writer do you want to be known as?

I really want to write books that move people in surprising ways, that resonate very deeply with people, and that strike readers with the way they’re written. I love lyrically written books that use beautiful language to dig into subjects in a way that is difficult to explore with words. A friend recently told me that Mona Awad’s writing reminded them of my thesis novel and that was the biggest compliment I have ever gotten in my life. I think Mona Awad does such incredible things with language and atmosphere and surrealism. She thinks beyond the bounds of how we typically tell stories to really dig at some questions and themes that are difficult to verbalize.

What advice do you have for new writers?

You have to write the bad stuff for the good stuff to come out. The only way that I have gotten novels drafted is by being like, I was going to write for an hour, but my brain doesn’t feel like the words are coming in the way that I want them to, and still going and writing for that hour.

If every day that I woke up I thought, My brain is not at the top of its game writing its most perfect, beautiful chapters right now, I would never write. Ever. I think that happens to a lot of creative people. They have really great ideas but there is always this fear of I am not good enough yet or I’m not in the right headspace this week.

Writing requires a lot of faith and mental fortitude. It’s very hard to do if you don’t have something else in your life that’s already taught you those things. For me, that was going to the gym. The first time you go it’s impossible and you see zero improvement, but then you just keep showing up and keep the faith. Is there anything that happened in your life that helped you learn the mindset you needed to believe in yourself and finish a novel?

I love that question. I have two answers.

Growing up performing and acting shaped my resilience as an artist to some extent because you get used to not getting the parts you want. You get used to thinking, I can put my best out there and it might just not be what the director is looking for.

You also get used to seeing art as a collaboration. If you’re acting, it’s a collaboration between the playwright and you as the actor, the other actors, the director, and the audience. Writing books is also a collaboration. Obviously there’s your editor and your agent, but it’s very much a collaboration between the author and the reader. You get used to this idea that you have these ideas and these feelings that you want to put on the page, and everyone who reads it is going to get something slightly different out of it. That’s part of the beauty of it — that everyone’s going to find some different piece of meaning in your work.

In terms of the process, what you’re talking about, I had a very similar epiphany. I was working for the rock climbing magazine and getting back into lead climbing, which I had not done since I was 12. In lead climbing you have a harness and a rope, but as you climb up, you clip the rope into anchor points going up the wall. Which means that for a lot of the time you’re above your last anchor point, which is scary. I was climbing outdoors with my editors at this magazine and all these very cool, impressive pro climbers. I was also drafting my first book at the same time, the first book I wrote as an adult.

I remember being on the wall above one of those bolts and being absolutely terrified. I thought, I don’t think I’m strong enough to make it to the next one. I’m going to fall. My fingers hurt. My arms are shaking. I should just climb down to where it’s safe, below the last bolt.

Then I had this breakthrough. If I just push a little bit longer…yes, it’s terrifying right now, but if I push just a little bit longer and trust that I can do it, I’m going to make it to the next bolt and then I’m going to make it to the next bolt. And if I fall, it’s okay. I’ll climb back up. I remember at that moment thinking, Oh, this is the same thing as writing a book.

It is kind of terrifying and you’re going out on a limb all by yourself. Are your ideas going to hold together? Will the book mean anything to anyone? It’s that same thing of learning how to push through those fears and those voices saying, Don’t do it. Retreat. Go back to safety.

Lastly, how has Istanbul inspired you as a storyteller?

Ros Demir is Not the One is not set in Istanbul. I have other works that are partly or fully set there. But Istanbul finds its way in some form or another into most of my writing. Whether it’s a conversation that Ros and Aydın are having about the city — or, in other books, a place the characters actually are, a place they’re reminiscing about, or a place they’re imagining. It’s a very special, unique city with so much history and personality.

Something that I learned about myself in the MFA program when I was reflecting on who I am as a writer and how that is different from other writers is that a lot of my books do actually grow to some extent out of setting. A lot of people start with a plot point, or character, or a line of dialogue. For me, a lot of the time, it’s a place. I went to this place and it had this really strong atmosphere and that atmosphere had an emotional impact on me, or set me up in this emotional state to have this experience. In a lot of my writing I find myself starting with a place and thinking, How can I recreate those emotions and that emotional state under fictionalized circumstances?