Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail programs. We’ve got one program for adults and another for kids ages 6-12. Next month, subscribers will be receiving letters from J. Estanislao Lopez and Bushra Rehman, and Laura Rueckert and Shawn M. Peters, respectively.
Laura Rueckert is a card-carrying bookworm who manages projects by day. At night, fueled by European chocolate, she transforms into a writer of young adult science fiction and fantasy novels. Laura grew up in Michigan, USA, but a whirlwind romance after college brought her to Europe. Today, she lives in Germany with her husband, two kids, and one fluffy dog. A Dragonbird in the Fern is her first novel.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader?
Laura Rueckert: I was the type of kid who never went anywhere without a book. My mom told me as a toddler, I used to carry around a Mother Goose book at all times. Some books I remember enjoying are From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, A Wrinkle in Time, the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden mysteries, and The Dragonriders of Pern books. I always loved adventures and fantastic worlds and still do today.
Rumpus: How did you fall in love with writing?
Rueckert: Before I ever wrote stories on paper, I was a writer in my head. If I missed the end of a movie (this was before streaming!), I imagined the ending myself. If I disliked something in a book or TV show, I re-wrote it in my head. On long, boring car rides, I made up fantastic stories about aliens or dragons or long-lost treasure. Eventually I began writing them down, and I started to love putting words together to instill emotions and to provide escape.
Rumpus: What’s your best advice for creative kids?
Rueckert: Here are my three tips:
- First: Surround yourself with what you love as much and as often as you can. If you like books, read a lot. If you like art, look at it whenever you can. If you love music, take every chance to listen to it.
- Second: Practice! Write, draw, paint, sing—do whatever it is you love—whenever you can.
- And third: Someday, when you’re ready, seek out feedback on your art. You don’t have to change your work based on every piece of advice, but look for trends in people’s opinions. What also helps is to gently critique others–you learn so much about your own work by figuring out what does and doesn’t work in art from other people.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with your readers?
Rueckert: My book A Dragonbird In The Fern is a YA fantasy/murder mystery starring a dyslexic princess. I feel especially close to the main character, Jiara, because she immigrates to another country and learns another language, like I did. I hope readers are swept away to another world with my book–we all desperately need a little escape! Beyond that, Jiara has undiagnosed dyslexia, and she’s heard comments that made her doubt herself her whole life, even from her otherwise loving family. Whatever the reason, I think most of us know what it’s like to struggle with self-confidence, so I’d like readers to embrace the message that they are capable of more than they think.
Bushra Rehman’s collection of stories, Corona, a dark comedy about being Muslim American was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of its favorite books about NYC and her book of poems, Marianna’s Beauty Salon was described by Joseph O. Legaspi as a “love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home—and surviving.” She coedited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, which was chosen as one of Ms. Magazine’s “100 Best Non-fiction Books of All Time.” Her newest novel, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, centers on friendship and queer desire among young Pakistani-American women.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Bushra Rehman: I’ll always remember the experience of reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Yes, I know how old school it is, but for me the fierce love Betty Smith showed for her family and her father, her knowing of what it was like to be from a community that was hated and looked down on… misunderstood in this country, that is the fierce love I feel for my Muslim father and community. Although our lives were almost a century apart, I could relate deeply to her experiences of being a child in an immigrant neighborhood in the boroughs.
Along my reading path, there were books that continued to change the course of my life: Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn; Suheir Hammad’s Born Palestinian, Born Black; Ishle Yi Park’s The Temperature of This Water; Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina; and Julia Alvarez’s Yo!; Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia; Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Leaving Yuba City; and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. These are just some of the books that helped me realize it was only a life of words and activism that was going to work for me.
Recently, I’ve been diving deep into the work of Kamilah Aisha Moon, a dear friend who passed away last year. The poems in She Has a Name and Starshine & Clay are master lessons in love and writing: how to construct, a phrase, a line, a world of a family and community. I’ve also been loving How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. There are stories in this collection that touch on pandemic grief in a way that resonated like nothing else I’ve read. The characters are numb from loss and yet, as humans do, they continue to go through the motions of living and loving, surviving.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Rehman: At the age of ten I stapled together some loose leaf, made my first diary and began writing. At the time I poured all my hidden thoughts into my diaries and poems. There were so many feelings I couldn’t express out loud. Then when I was twelve, my family was moving so much, I didn’t go to school for a year. My diary became a form of survival. I kept my brain occupied by writing poetry and articles about my daily life.
For decades my writing was just for me. Then in the nineties, I discovered communities of queer South Asian artists and activists, radical BIPOC writers. I started performing poetry at fundraisers and discovered there was an audience for my work about Bollywood divas and plastic-covered sofas, for my work about being a queer Pakistani girl from Queens. This is when I realized being a writer could be a lifestyle rather than my secret passion.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Rehman: Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is about female friendship and queer desire in a Muslim community. The main character Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia’s heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close-knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing miniskirts, and cutting school to explore the city. When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens. At Stuyvesant, Razia meets Angela and is attracted to her in a way that blossoms into a new understanding. Punctuated by both joy and loss, full of ’80s music and beloved novels, Roses in the Mouth of a Lion is a coming-of-age story of a Muslim girl struggling to reconcile her heritage and faith with her desires.
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a book for anyone who has ever had to leave the world they grew up in to be who they needed to be. It’s a book for anyone who has felt different or struggled with hetero normative, gender-limiting expectations. It’s a book for those who remember what it was like to be queer and not have the words to express it, those who still struggle to reconcile their religious faith with their personal beliefs. It’s a book for anyone who wants to feel the pure sensory experience of living in an immigrant neighborhood in Queens in the 80s.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Rehman: Without a doubt, it’s Ocean Vuong’s ‘The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation.” It’s a piece I return to over and over, when I’m grieving, thinking of how to write about grief, or teaching how to write about grief. It’s gorgeous.
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