Choreographing Memories: Kathryn Abdul-Baki on Writing Memoir

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Writes4Women podcast, Kathryn Abdul-Baki shares her journey of weaving memories into memoir, discussing how her multicultural upbringing between the American and Arab worlds and her love for dance have influenced her writing. She opens up about the challenges and emotional processes involved in recounting personal and family stories, highlighting the therapeutic aspect of memoir writing. Kathryn also touches on the rich cultural exchanges that shaped her life, advocating for understanding and harmony across diverse backgrounds, all while drawing connections between her past experiences and her present passion for dance and writing.

YOUTUBE EPISODE SUMMARY (with timestamps)

(0:00:00) - Celebrating Women's Voices With Catherine Abdul-Baki

(0:07:07) - Journey to Becoming a Writer

(0:20:45) - Expat Life in Middle East

(0:34:02) - Love of Dance and Music Inherited

(0:39:46) - Unexpected Journey

Episode notes

Kathryn video1521378653

[00:00:00] Kathryn: I have quite a few sharp memories, but then also my mother was an avid letter writer and two or three times a week she would write these long, lengthy letters to my grandmother, her mom. Back to the US and some of them would be published in the local Nashville papers so what I couldn't remember quite vividly, I was able to draw on from her notes, her letters that my grandmother preserved and I, got ahold of.

[00:00:27] Pamela: Welcome to Writes4Women, a podcast all about celebrating women's voices and supporting women writers. I'm Pamela Cook, women's fiction, author, writing teacher, mentor, and podcaster.

[00:00:44] Pamela: Before beginning today's chat, I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Dal people, the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is being recorded, along with the traditional owners of the land throughout Australia

[00:00:57] Pamela: and a quick reminder that there could be strong language and adult concepts discussed in this podcast. So please be aware of this if you have children around. Let's relax on the convo couch and chat to this week's guest.

[00:01:10] Pamela: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Writes4Women. It is Tuesday. March five as I'm recording this. And I have a fabulous interview for you today. Coming up with

[00:01:22] Pamela: Kathryn Abdul-Baki about her memoir dancing into the light. It was an absolute joy to read this fantastic memoir and to speak to Kathryn a few weeks ago. And there is so much in here about the memoir writing process, as well as a really beautiful story about her experience of growing up between two cultures. Her mother was an American and her father was Arab. And when Kathryn was four, they moved over to. The middle east and a lot of her childhood memories come from that part of the world. And it's a lovely story about her. Experience of dance and how that came out of her childhood and then she weaves this beautiful thread of dancing throughout this memoir

[00:02:03] Pamela: thank you to everybody who has been listening to and supporting the podcast, pet some great feedback on this year's episodes, huge. Shout out to Annie Bucknell, who is my virtual assistant is doing a fantastic job on the social. So thank you so much, any and an absolute thank you to all the Patrion supporters. If you'd like to support the podcast for the cost of a cup of coffee per month or less. You can do that by going to rights for women.com and having a look on the Patrion page, and it will take you to the right links there.

[00:02:33] Pamela: But thank you so much to all those people who are doing that already. And thank you to everybody who is writing reviews and telling us how much you enjoy the episodes. And of course that just pushes the podcast up higher in the rankings, just as a book on Amazon.

[00:02:48] Pamela: It goes up higher with more reviews. So thank you for those people who are doing that. And please think about that. If you do enjoy an episode, popping a review up on to wherever it is, you listen, whatever platform. This week I have in personal writing news just very quickly, I've finished the edits on out of the ashes.

[00:03:05] Pamela: So that has now gone off to my publisher at Belinda. To be narrated and it will be available from may one, I believe, or sometime in may. And I'm very soon starting. The writing of the third installment of that black one lake Sirius, which will be out later in the year, hopefully on audio. One thing that I always have trouble with. And it doesn't matter how many times I tell myself I'm not going to have trouble with it.

[00:03:32] Pamela: Is the timeline. I did try and keep track of that using the plotter app PLO, double T R, and that went some way towards helping. But I've got to Friday afternoon, I'd finished the edit and realized that. Yeah, there could be a little bit of a trouble with the timelines. I just had a brainwave and this is probably a brainwave that other people have had before me.

[00:03:53] Pamela: But hopefully it might be a tip that helps some people out there manage timelines at the editing and revision stage. When you really want to double check something. I knew that I had written throughout the manuscript in various places often at the beginning of a chapter, or maybe not maybe elsewhere. It had been six weeks since the fires or three weeks since she came back or whatever it was.

[00:04:14] Pamela: So I thought I will do a search, a word search on the word weeks. And I have to say that was absolutely a godsend for me. It allowed me to find all the spots in the manuscript words, referred to a certain number of weeks. And it did bring up or did show me and highlight a little bit of a glitch that I had.

[00:04:35] Pamela: I was able to find that and then to tweak that and then to fix it. A little bit of a tip there never, ever underestimate the S find slash search function. If you're looking for a particular phrase or you want to know a particular thing that a character said at a certain time, Time, if you can think of a word or phrase that may have been used at that point. Type it into the search. Bar at the top, if you're in word. Scrivener also has a similar function.

[00:05:01] Pamela: I was in word by this stage because it was the final copy. But yeah, found that to be a real boon and helped me enormously. So hopefully that is a little tip that might help some people out there.

[00:05:12] Pamela: Let me tell you a little bit about today's guest Kathryn Abdul Bucky. She was born in Washington, DC to a Palestinian father and an American mother, and grew up in Iran, Kuwait, Beirut, and Jerusalem, where she attended Arabic, British and American schools. She. Attended the American university of Beirut in Lebanon for two years and earned a BA in journalism from George Washington university and has an ma in creative writing from George Mason university in Virginia. Katherine worked as a journalist and a features writer for an English weekly newspaper in Bahrain. Lorraine before devoting her time to writing fiction. Her published works include a collection of short stories. For novels.

[00:05:53] Pamela: And her memoir dancing into the light. She won the Mary Roberts Rinehart award for short fiction and her novel sense of Zelensky was a finalist for the Ariadne prize. Her books are taught at universities in multicultural literature and Arab studies departments. And she's a frequent lecturer at universities and schools on these subjects. Kathryn loves to dance and teachers and performs Argentine tango in the Washington DC area. As I said, this was a fantastic chat with Kathryn. I really enjoyed meeting her on the podcast and I loved reading her memoir. . Sit back, grab a cuppa, pop on your walking shoes, whatever it is that you do while you listen to rights for women and enjoy this chat with Kathryn.

[00:06:36] Pamela: So Kathryn Abdul-Baki, welcome to the Writes4Women Convo Couch.

[00:06:41] Kathryn: Thank you. My pleasure to be here.

[00:06:44] Pamela: It's really lovely to have you and you are coming to us all the way from, is it Washington, DC

[00:06:50] Kathryn: Yes. Virginia. Outside of Washington.

[00:06:53] Pamela: Fantastic. And that rang a bell with me of course, because having read your memoir, I know that's where I. The story starts with your parents, but we're gonna get into that in a little while. Before we do get into talking about dancing into the Light, could you tell us about your path to publication, Kathryn, because you have written quite a few books yourself, you've been writing for a long time, and I'd love to know when did you first know that you wanted to write, and how did that lead you on your journey to becoming a writer?

[00:07:23] Kathryn: Thank you. I always knew I wanted to write from the age of 12 on, my father gently suggested one day when I asked him what I should be when I grow up. He said, be a writer. My mother had been a writer. So for somehow that for some reason that stuck in my head and I just, I. Tended to like the arts and the humanities, so that I picked that up and went to journalism school.

[00:07:49] Kathryn: And then later on I, after practicing journalism for a while, I got my master's in creative writing and that's when I started to write fiction mainly. So I've made I've written a collection of short stories called Fields of Fig and Olive, and then I've written four novels. Mostly set in the Middle East, mostly with Arab characters.

[00:08:11] Kathryn: But the previous last novel was with American characters who travel all over the world, including the Middle East. And this is my first ever memoir. So it's my sixth book, but my very first non-fiction effort.

[00:08:26] Pamela: Yeah, I'm interested to talk to you about that and the timing of the memoir and where it, it's come in your journey of being a writer.

[00:08:34] Pamela: And obviously, you've drawn a lot in your writing on your own experiences in growing up in the Middle East and being a child of an American mother and and a Middle Eastern father. And of course that's what the memoir is all about. It's about growing up between two cultures and I also found that it was very much about coming to grips with and exploring grief, which is something that I really wanna talk to you about too.

[00:08:59] Pamela: But having, written for a very long time, written fiction, delved into your own experiences, but I guess, but in a fictional form what was it that brought you to the point where you thought, I really wanna write a memoir, I wanna write about my own life?

[00:09:18] Kathryn: I came to that very late, when I first published my, my first book of short stories I had a lot of early memories in those stories little stories of people vignettes.

[00:09:30] Kathryn: I. I was asked on one or two radio shows when I was on, why don't you write a memoir? Why did you choose to write fiction? Because they're so memoir and back then, this was over 30 years ago, I thought memoirs were written by, elderly people who had seen it all and wanted to encompass their whole lifetime.

[00:09:50] Kathryn: I felt I was way too young to write a memoir. But memoir has changed, as and now you can simply write a memoir of one year of your life or six months of your life or so I suddenly wanted to write a memoir of my current life, which includes dancing I, I teach dancing and how I combine that with writing.

[00:10:12] Kathryn: The more I went back to the origins of the dance world in my life and where I first started dancing, it took me back to my early years and in Tehran and dancing with my parents. And as I've flitted back and forth, present life, dancer, writer, past life, it got a little confusing and. A couple of my early readers said, why don't you just try writing it linearly, just, go straight from the beginning.

[00:10:42] Kathryn: So I ended up doing that, which I think made it for more of a story. And as you probably know, that juxtaposed here and there little bits about my current dance life, but mostly mo, mostly it is a story of my life growing up in the Middle East and, tended to be much more than just about dancing.

[00:11:05] Pamela: Yeah, very much and I really wanna talk about that dancing thread with you later. Oh. So it's interesting that is that was the kind of impetus for the story in a way, because the book does start and end with dance. But I wanna get onto that later. I don't wanna spoil too much of the story for listeners, but.

[00:11:21] Pamela: It does start with the meeting of your parents. First of all, I'd love for you to tell us about how your parents first met. I just found the whole story of your parents' relationship and everything just so fascinating. So I'd love for you to, just to give us that little bit of a snippet of story and also maybe too, once you did land on the fact that you were going to write, a kind of more linear story, about your growing up.

[00:11:45] Pamela: What was it that made you decide on that point as the beginning of the story in a way?

[00:11:52] Kathryn: I always envisioned that opening, which is a dance scene that takes place in a nightclub. And why it was that I was drawn to certain kinds of men who danced a certain way. And so I create that scene as an prologue.

[00:12:06] Kathryn: And that was always in, in the book for some reason. And then from there, I, why was that? I attracted to that kind of dancing and all of that took me way back to the very beginning, and I then focused on how my parents met. What it was about my father that drew my mother what it was about him that drew him to dance.

[00:12:29] Kathryn: And then from there I just went chapter by chapter through my life trying to pick out the parts that really affected me over the course of my my life, my growing up. Because it does stop at a certain point. Childhood, but later childhood. So that's

[00:12:47] Pamela: an interesting kind of.

[00:12:48] Pamela: I guess process of memoir writing too, isn't it? Because you could draw on so much, it's like your whole life, like you say. But obviously you decided to have those parameters of you started with the background, of when your parents met, and then we go into, your arrival in Tehran as a 4-year-old and then you're growing up in that part of the world.

[00:13:09] Pamela: How did you decide. What those boundaries were as you, did you work that out as you were writing? Or when you started out, was it like, okay, I am gonna start here and I'm gonna end there? 'cause that's just that part of the story I want to tell.

[00:13:23] Kathryn: What was helpful was having this theme of dancing.

[00:13:26] Kathryn: I will say that was very helpful. You can pick anything you want, in addition to just the sequence of events that always grounded me, brought me back to what it was I was trying to say. So when I start with the dancing, then how my parents met and I tried to infuse that with a little bit of dancing.

[00:13:45] Kathryn: Then. How when we went to Tehran, that carried over in the dancing there. Then when we moved to Kuwait, that carried on in the dancing there. How after the traumas that happened in my young life, the the dancing pulled me up, how that carried over the dancing. Also, when I visit my Arab family in Jerusalem, my Palestinian family, and how dancing was such a big part of their life as well as the expat.

[00:14:13] Kathryn: Community in which I lived in Kuwait, and so the dancing really helped me pick and choose what I wanted to put in. Of course, there were other things as well, but that really grounded me kept bringing me back to the major theme and what I was trying to say about music and dancing and how that affected me and lifted me up from the experiences I had as a young

[00:14:38] Pamela: child.

[00:14:38] Pamela: Yeah. Yeah. And of course your parents met in Washington. Yes, that's right, isn't it? Which is near not that far from where you're speaking to us now. Tell us a little story about how your parents met and your mother's kind of, role in really encouraging the relationship.

[00:14:58] Kathryn: My father was very he finished his undergrad and was working on his master's and had moved to Washington, DC where he had one or two jobs at the time.

[00:15:07] Kathryn: But one of the jobs was moonlighting at night not moonlighting, but it was a job of, as a cashier in the Middle Eastern Deli. And my mother had dropped out for a year from a prestigious school in the Midwest, Northwestern, and decided she was going to go to Washington and take a break and see what the real life was like before going back to school.

[00:15:30] Kathryn: And in those days, people smoked. And so she walked in with a roommate of hers, a girlfriend, into the deli where my dad was working. And she was always very very outgoing and very much wanting to see the bigger world than the one she had come from in, which was outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

[00:15:50] Kathryn: And the moment she saw my dad at the time, she just thought this is something I'm looking for, anyway, he was young and handsome and she could tell from an exotic place, so she pushed a little bit here and there and encouraged him to go out and with her and my father being very proper, coming from a Palestinian Muslim family from Jerusalem, the Holy City everything is done in certain ways.

[00:16:16] Kathryn: He enjoyed being encouraged and. They essentially eloped at one point because she felt that her family was not going to sanction their wedding. So they eloped and then they told her parents that it was a feta accompli and everyone had to accept it. But yeah. But yeah, I loved that.

[00:16:35] Pamela: And it sounded like, obviously there would've been, a bit of shock horror at the beginning. Yeah. But it sounded like both sides of the family really. It didn't take them that long to embrace the, their in-laws, their son-in-Law and their daughter-in-Law.

[00:16:50] Kathryn: Once they met everybody, once my American grandparents met my father and saw that he was really a very honorable kind of person. And once my grandfather got over the fact that his son was not going to marry a young Arab woman married a foreign woman, which is every parent's. Nightmare when they send their children far, yeah. But once he, once everybody settled down they really had a very nice gathering. Everyone appreciated everybody else's culture and religion that's, everyone

[00:17:20] Pamela: got along something that really struck me actually as I was reading the book, Kathryn was the kind of level of acceptance and embracing of.

[00:17:30] Pamela: The other culture, particularly for your mother when she went to live in, what would've been such a different, and, quite shocking at times, culture. Yes, of course having an expat community would help with that, but she really embraced, didn't she? The cultures that, that she went into.

[00:17:46] Kathryn: She was just in heaven because she always wanted to explore and get out. She had this big wanderlust in her. And she loved being in Tehran. Of course, in those days it was during the Shah and the Iranians with whom they mixed were very worldly and sophisticated and their lifestyle. There was, one of an expat lifestyles.

[00:18:06] Kathryn: Well catered to. And then when they moved to Kuwait, or when she met my father's family, my father's family they were very worldly also from Jerusalem. They'd been ex exposed to centuries. I not those people, but say decades of, yeah. International travelers and so they were not like they were not very, they were not close-minded at all.

[00:18:29] Kathryn: So once they settled into the fact that this marriage was indeed. Happening and it was a good thing. Everyone accepted her and she knew how to just go into a culture, accept it. She never in those days it was a lot less say rigid than what it is today. Interestingly enough, 50, 60 years ago, it was people were much more open and.

[00:18:54] Kathryn: It was during a very peaceful time, let's say in general. So she had a wonderful time living there and never, in fact never wanted to come back and not, she loved the United States and she loved to come back and visit. But in terms of living, she really loved the warmth and the culture of living

[00:19:14] Pamela: overseas.

[00:19:15] Pamela: Yeah. Now that definitely comes through in the storytelling. And you of course were four. When you, your family moved to Tehran, how vivid are your memories of that time? Because I imagine there must have been some gaps in your memories

[00:19:29] Pamela: how did you go in terms of writing about that younger period of your life, in those early years of living, living over there?

[00:19:38] Kathryn: Actually, I have such vivid memories. I was an only child, so that's one. One thing. There were, I didn't have any distractions around me. Yeah. A lot of people had asked me, how do are your memories so sharp?

[00:19:49] Kathryn: I have quite a few sharp memories, but then also my mother was an avid letter writer and two or three times a week she would write these long, lengthy letters to my grandmother, her mom. Back to the US and some of them would be published in the local Nashville papers because people were interested in fantastic.

[00:20:08] Kathryn: And what was going on overseas. So what I couldn't remember quite vividly, I was able to draw on from her notes, her letters that my grandmother preserved and I, got ahold of. So but in general the memories that I relate are generally my memories. I was there for two years, from four to six.

[00:20:30] Kathryn: Yeah. So some of them are hazier than others, but yeah, I was able to fill in the gaps with those letters.

[00:20:36] Pamela: , so fantastic that your grandmother kept those letters too. Like it's such a Oh yes. Valuable family history, isn't it?

[00:20:43] Kathryn: It is. It really is. Yeah.

[00:20:44] Pamela: Yeah. And then from Tehran, you moved to Kuwait.

[00:20:48] Kathryn: Is that right? We did, yeah. Yeah. We moved to Kuwait where my dad then went to work for an oil company and in Kuwait at that time, I'm talking 1958. It was literally where we were outside of town, about an hour out of the city. It was simply a desert with a jetty, a pier and an oil refinery and houses for expats who were mainly British or American.

[00:21:17] Kathryn: I think we had one Australian family as well. But so it was really a very different, now that was extremely different from being in Cosmopolitan, Iran, a Teran at the time. So this was something totally different. But we were right on the beach on this. So that was a lovely diversion we had.

[00:21:37] Pamela: Yeah, it sounded amazing.

[00:21:38] Pamela: I love the little bit where you're flying in with your father and he says, oh, there, I've got your sandbox. And of course the sandbox was the desert.

[00:21:47] Kathryn: Too much, too big of a sandbox. I can still feel the disappointment. Looking hard to find this little tiny sandbox and finding then it was the whole desert.

[00:21:57] Kathryn: Yeah. I still feel that pain.

[00:22:01] Pamela: And I have to say, Kathryn as a horse lover, I live on a property with horses and I ride Oh. So I really enjoyed your your father. I'll let you tell the story of your your father's original connection to horses, and then how he then got back into that when after you moved.

[00:22:17] Kathryn: That's wonderful that you enjoy horses. He used to, in the US at one point he went to the University of in New Mexico and he worked to pay his tuition. He worked on a ranch and so he learned he might have learned, known how to ride a little bit, but he learned how to ride well there, working with horses and being a cow hand, a cowboy, essentially.

[00:22:40] Kathryn: So when he went, oh, in Tehran, they also belonged to something called the officers Club, which was for American families of military people. And he, although wasn't with the military, but they being expats, they were, they joined that and they had a weekly ride where a lot of people would just dawn their, riding gear and go out over the beautiful Iranian countryside and ride.

[00:23:07] Kathryn: So he did that once a week and then when they went to Kuwait, he and our next door neighbor, who was from Texas obviously decided that the two of them were gonna find horses and each of them was gonna buy a horse. And they had some bed winds coming up from further in the desert who, horse breeders.

[00:23:25] Kathryn: And they brought them two, two horses and my father took it up again. So that was a big part because the desert was totally flat in Kuwait. It was that kind of desert, totally flat. And we had the beach so there was plenty of room just to ride. And and there was very little other than that, to really I.

[00:23:44] Kathryn: Entertain adults. Really? You eventually, people built a kind of little sandy golf course, but other than the golf and the beach and the horses, yeah. That was really what expats

[00:23:55] Pamela: did. Yeah. So did you continue riding as you grew older? Did you ride in your adult

[00:24:00] Kathryn: life? I didn't ride in my adult life because I think as I mentioned the book, I had a pretty severe fall when I was nine.

[00:24:09] Kathryn: I continue to ride after that. Later on as an adult, I I gave that up.

[00:24:15] Pamela: Yeah. It's amazing how fear kicks in as an adult that you seem to be able to get over when you're younger. But yeah, as an adult it's not so easy.

[00:24:23] Kathryn: Also in Kuwait that, the terrain was soft, right?

[00:24:26] Kathryn: So we were riding on the beach and riding on the sand, and so it was very different when I moved to other places where, you know Yeah, true. It was a little bit,

[00:24:34] Pamela: yeah. Beautiful memories though, isn't it like to be able to have.

[00:24:38] Kathryn: Oh, I love horses. And my, one of my daughters rode for many years. Okay. So I was able to vicariously continue it through her.

[00:24:45] Kathryn: Yeah. Your

[00:24:46] Pamela: father would've loved that too. Yes, he did. We did talk initially a little bit about the memories and your vivid memories and being an only child. And then I guess being in such a.

[00:24:56] Pamela: Exotic place and somewhere so different, where you'd come from would've really cemented some of those memories in. But as you are writing a memoir like this, how did you go about when there were gaps, you like, you had your mother's letters, you had your own memories and no doubt, family stories that you could draw on.

[00:25:13] Pamela: How do you, as a memoirist approach that difficulty of, oh, I really wanna write about this, but my memory is a little bit fuzzy. Did you have that experience at all?

[00:25:23] Kathryn: I did several times. And what you do there, at least what I, what worked for me because I try not to make up too much, 'cause I do want it to still be a memoir and be based on fact and truth. Just for my own satisfaction. Obviously readers wouldn't know the difference, but for me, I would make up little bits of dialogue. Like I, I wouldn't have known what my, the dialogue between my parents were in a certain certain situation, but I could see and hear the voices and hear the various words and know their various interactions so I could make up little snippets of dialogue that would have been probably pretty close to.

[00:26:02] Kathryn: I hope the conversation that took place or, there were little bits like that I had to, but most of it I recall obviously not the exact dialogue, but the gist of the conversations that I had. For example, with my relatives in Jerusalem with my relatives in Hawaii. Tho those are more clearly in my head, but what I couldn't really remember, I think you can have a license to make up as long as it's not too farfetched and really going to change if you wanna stay true to the Yeah.

[00:26:38] Kathryn: To the memories. And I really didn't wanna make up too much.

[00:26:41] Pamela: Wonder. So you're really drawing on some of those fiction techniques, aren't you? In, you're bringing the dialogue in. Were there other kind of aspects of fiction writing that you feel that you brought into the writing of the memoir?

[00:26:52] Kathryn: I. Well, the dialogue was very important. You are absolutely right because in the beginning when I first wrote it down, I didn't have hardly any, as, not nearly as much dialogue. So that when I went back on rewrite, after rewrite, I just, I decided this could be dialogue because it would make it come to life more.

[00:27:11] Kathryn: So that's when I had to make up things, but I didn't, create this, whatever scenes the scenes were, as I remembered it, I just filled in the dialogue. It's really important, I think, also to, to set an active scene. So action, something that's happening so that it's not just description, because I tend to do a lot of description and I enjoy doing that.

[00:27:32] Kathryn: And I, I to look around and take things in and then. Write about them, but I realized you really have to show some action so that the reader can actually experience it with you. So that's when I created dialogue and active just active motion. So that people could identify more.

[00:27:51] Kathryn: I think that was a big part that I hadn't realized when I started how much dialogue I was going to have to insert

[00:27:58] Pamela: there. Yeah. Yeah. And of course you bring in some, and as you say you do have some description, but it's not overloaded with description and the description that you have is beautiful in that it's very sensory and it really sets the scene, which I think is so important, particularly when you're talking about places that you know a lot of your readers wouldn't be familiar with.

[00:28:18] Kathryn: Yeah. You have to, I think, you have to create the scene because, it's like watching a film you, and if it's an exotic place, you wanna see all of that stuff. But that's the part that comes easy to me, that wasn't the difficult part was really getting in the dialogue and writing in the action.

[00:28:35] Kathryn: More action that came more difficult. But once I got into it and I decided to put that in with the help of a couple of course recommendations of editors and things then I began to see the value of that, having the description, but also the action and the dialogue.

[00:28:51] Pamela: Yeah. No, you do a beautiful job of it.

[00:28:53] Pamela: Thank you. Your mother sounded like such a strong, adventurous woman. And as you described her, she wanted to explore the world. She wanted the biggest stage, if you like, than, and than where she grew up. And both before and after her death, you were surrounded also by very strong women. And I think, apart from your mother, the women who you met and grew up with, in Tehran and Kuwait and in your time in the Middle East, we have this kind of misconception in a way, don't we, about gender roles, I think in the West that the gender roles that do exist in Middle Eastern countries. Can you talk a little bit about that and your experience of that and how Women definitely do, have strong roles in those societies.

[00:29:37] Kathryn: I was very fortunate that I had some excellent role models both in I had a housekeeper, lady who became almost a mother figure once my mom died, and she was from, she was a village woman from the Mount of Olives. But although she was, confined by her role almost as a woman, but still she really ran the whole house and had, her own opinions.

[00:29:58] Kathryn: Told me stories of village life and things that I that were for an illiterate woman, she was an amazingly strong person. And so she was a big influence. My aunts, my. Father's sisters also each ran their own households and they took extremely good care of me when I'd go to visit them over the summer.

[00:30:20] Kathryn: And one aunt in particular came and lived with us for a while after my mom had passed away, and they ran also the house. Not only the house, just our lives. I couldn't, I can't imagine. Having carried on without the kind of love and support that I found from my Arab the caretaker and as well as the relatives I had, whether they were my dad's cousins or my uncle's wives, or my aunts, his sisters.

[00:30:50] Kathryn: There was a lot of support, although I was dreadfully lost the loss was, unfathomable of losing my mother. And before that, my young brother it was, they saved me really, they brought me the support and the love I. I needed. But yes, Arab women are very strong. I, they, their roles may be more around the home and the family because people tend to have larger families in the homes.

[00:31:15] Kathryn: And, but of course that's changing now. Women are all working and going out like they do anywhere else. But even when I was growing up, the women were very influential in. No one told them what to do. They did as much as they could, depending family to family, right? Yeah. Like everywhere, but yeah, they're very strong. And I would say mostly it was the love and support I got that got me through my two or three years of real grief over my mom, and the interesting thing was they never, they always took my mother as a Western woman who did her own thing, no one ever tried to make her do or be anything.

[00:31:53] Kathryn: She wasn't. They all respected that, Jean was like that because that's where she comes from. Yeah. And my mother always respected them, but she could see there were strong women, but she never tried to. Influence them or make them into what they weren't or, it was a total acceptance, I think, of each other of their different entities and yet how they all interacted.

[00:32:18] Kathryn: Really, it seems like I'm painting a super rosy picture, but I think my mother wasn't, wasn't very religious, although her, she came from a very religious area in the United States. She wasn't she wasn't really dogmatically into anything much, was able to accept many things and my family coming from Jerusalem, exposed to, Islam, Judaism, Christianity for so long, they were able to accept her.

[00:32:44] Pamela: Yeah. Really fascinating. I don't wanna give away too much of the story, but you've mentioned the passing of your mother when you were young and prior to that, your brother. And of course, I think for me in the reading of it that kind of really informs a lot of the story.

[00:32:59] Pamela: You wrote this obviously a long time after the, those passings. And as someone who lost a parent when I was young, my father died when I was three. And even though I have no memory of him, I do know that grief that you grow up with, in your family is very informative and definitely has an impact on you and your kind of formation, of who you are as a person.

[00:33:22] Pamela: Yes. Did you find that writing about those experiences such a long time after, that was still, there, was still processing going on for you in terms of that grief that you experienced when

[00:33:34] Kathryn: you were younger? That's a really nice question. Even though it was so long after I, whenever I'd come to the part in the story of my mother's passing, I would have to leave the work and get up and just go do something else for a few hours or maybe a whole day, and then I'd come back to it and.

[00:33:55] Kathryn: So that was, a way of processing, even though I'd, I thought I had processed it years, yeah. Before when I came to actually write it and recreate that scene of her passing in the hospital and how it affected me. Then. It was very painful, I would guess for about. 12 or 13 rewrites.

[00:34:15] Kathryn: Wow. And then after a while it becomes almost like someone else's story. Yeah. And you can get a distance, but initially it was extremely painful. I'd come there and I'd just stop. I wouldn't cry or anything. I just, I would feel paralyzed.

[00:34:30] Pamela: Yeah. And was that, it would've been after your father's death that you were writing that too, I imagine.

[00:34:35] Pamela: I

[00:34:35] Kathryn: started it before he died actually. Okay. I what I started it before he died, but I hadn't gone but a third of the way through, or even less than that. Something I really regretted later because all the questions I had that were, I would've loved to pick up the phone and call him and ask him, but I realized he was not there anymore and he was the holder of the family history in many ways.

[00:35:00] Kathryn: But probably after he passed, I felt a little more freedom to write it. I may have felt always conscious of what he was gonna think about this, and maybe he was not gonna the way I wrote about this or that, the fact that he had passed. When I really got into the writing, it was just during Covid actually.

[00:35:19] Kathryn: I think that freed me somewhat not to write things he wouldn't have been happy about, but just freed me to tell the story my way and not really in the back of my mind wondering how he was going, because nobody but me really at that point cared about the story. He was gone and he was the only one who really had lived through those years with me.

[00:35:39] Pamela: Yeah. True. But I guess you would've been, grieving his death too as you were writing. Yeah. And then reliving the death of your mother. So it's just would've been, very powerful for you, I imagine doing that writing. Really interesting. Yep. So I just wanted to go back, I guess full circle to the dance aspect and the music aspect.

[00:36:00] Pamela: What was it about the music and the dance for you that came from your childhood that then I guess, carried on through the rest of your life and became such a strong and powerful theme in the story itself? Because it really bookends the memoir. You start and end with the dance in a way, and.

[00:36:21] Pamela: It weaves its way through the story. Where did that love of dance and music come from?

[00:36:28] Kathryn: My dad strangely enough, he came from Jerusalem where obviously the music he heard was Arabic music. But when he came to college here on a whim, he took a few ballroom dance lessons.

[00:36:40] Kathryn: I. And it was during the fifties or no the late forties actually fif early fifties and late forties. And the Latin dancing was a big craze here. Everyone was doing, the Caribbean dancing, the Mambo, the Cuban stuff. It was all. It was that, that time. And so both my parents got into that.

[00:36:59] Kathryn: And of course he was, I think he was probably the better dancer in a sense, 'cause he'd been at that training. But that continued with him. So when I remember as a 4-year-old, 5-year-old. Just being a little girl. And he was playing this music all the time and it was all mostly Latin music by various artists.

[00:37:19] Kathryn: But his favorite was Harry Belafonte, who was a Jamaican singer and did a lot of course, that's not Latin per se, but it's Caribbean and that was his favorite, his favorite music. And so he would, on weekends he would put that on and they would have company and people would dance and I would dance with them, as a little girl.

[00:37:39] Kathryn: And that continued, after Tehran, after Kuwait, that just continued. And as an adult, I, when raising children and writing books, I just had no time to think of anything else. So I didn't really I took the odd dance class here and there just for my own. Enrichment, but I really hadn't gotten back into dance in any significant way.

[00:38:03] Kathryn: And I decided at some point, I've gotta get away from the computer and the way the writing, I was just too confining. I need to get out and do something different. And I started to take a few dance classes here and there. It all came flooding back and it came flooding back. This was the music I loved.

[00:38:22] Kathryn: The Latin, the Chacha, the Roomba, the samba the Calypso of Harry Belafonte. And I just was hooked and that sort of. Opened my life to a whole new, not only a whole new activity, which was dancing now because I started to take ballroom classes and go out social dancing. But it also opened me to a whole new milieu of people because there were all kinds of international people, not only Latinos, but Russians and Eastern Europeans and everybody who was into dance.

[00:38:55] Kathryn: And so I met people. I never would've crossed paths with. My other fields, my writing or meeting the parents of my children's friends, or, yeah, this was a whole new mil of people. So that really broadened my horizons even more,

[00:39:10] It's such a great creative release too, isn't it?

[00:39:13] Pamela: And creative. Experience. Oh, it is. Yeah. So

[00:39:16] Kathryn: it really is and fun because, you can't go on the dance floor and not be laughing Yeah. Or en or enjoying yourself, so that, I think it's a great stress buster. Yeah.

[00:39:28] Pamela: Kathryn you finished the memoir to some extent. I won't go into the epilogue 'cause that's for readers to find out, but you do finish the main part of the memoir when you're still, in the Middle East.

[00:39:38] Pamela: Still at school. I'm curious, how was it that you ended up back in the states?

[00:39:45] Kathryn: Interesting. I had never planned on coming back to the States. But when I got married very young at 19, my husband and I were in college and the American University of Beirut, and he was a few, is a few years older than I am.

[00:39:58] Kathryn: So he had graduated and was coming to the US to continue to do his master's and I was halfway through my undergraduate. Degree and I decided, again, it was basically my idea that it would be a good idea if we got married and we came together. So initially we came just for two years, ostensibly, to finish our studies and go back to Beirut.

[00:40:22] Kathryn: We were living in Lebanon. And it was a lovely place to live. Our families were there. Yeah. But a few years after we came and we finished our degrees the Civil War started there in the early seventies. And so our parents said, stay a couple more years in the United States and let's see what's going to happen with the situation here.

[00:40:43] Kathryn: And of course it is. The Lebanese Civil War dragged on for 15 more years. So by that time my parents and his parents left Lebanon, went to Jordan was no longer safe or tenable to, it was untenable to stay in Beirut. And so we ended up just staying here after year in the United States.

[00:41:03] Kathryn: Then our, we had our children and then they got in schools, and then it just happened. We never had envisioned that we would come back and live in the United States. Just wasn't part of our plan. Yeah. But life takes you.

[00:41:19] Pamela: Yeah. Yeah. Did your father stay over there?

[00:41:24] Kathryn: He and my stepmom, because he remarried, they stayed in Beirut, they went back to Beirut a few years when the situation calmed down, but then it got really bad.

[00:41:34] Kathryn: So then they came to the United States and they settled near us, near Washington. So then we were all here as a family, my parents and my nuclear family. We all ended up back in Washington, which we never, any of us expected. Yeah. A mess.

[00:41:51] Pamela: Full circle.

[00:41:52] Pamela: Any plans to write more memoir?

[00:41:56] Kathryn: I am writing the next phase. This one will be more like little essays, but they, rather than a linear thing, they will be just different parts of more my adult life. So I do talk about, how it was when I did go to boarding school somewhat and then how I lived as an adult.

[00:42:13] Kathryn: We went back and lived in the Middle East overseas with my husband's job and various things, but it'll be more of a series of essays on different. When I say essays, I mean creative nonfiction. Yeah. So I have already, I'm about, I don't know, a fifth of the way through.

[00:42:30] Pamela: Great. I look forward to that

[00:42:33] Kathryn: and thank you so much.

[00:42:34] Pamela: Something I also wanted to ask you, as somebody who spent a lot of, all your formative years, in that part of the world, I imagine that it would've given you quite a strong understanding.

[00:42:44] Pamela: In some ways of the conflict particularly, obviously it's escalated again now. Yes, it's a very bad time. Yeah. And that, you do mention that through the, throughout the memoir that the background there. Do you think growing up in that part of the world has given you an understanding of both sides of the

[00:43:01] Kathryn: issue?

[00:43:03] Kathryn: Most definitely. Also because my father's Arab as well and he's Palestinian. So of course all that history was, I was aware of it. Yeah. It wasn't, my father's family, per se, was not all that political or, in any way, but things happening all around you. And of course, because I spoke Arabic, my mother insisted when I was young that I learned Arabic and she put me in this little village girls school.

[00:43:29] Kathryn: So I learned it quite quickly. I think when you also learn a language well, and you are immersed in that culture. You pick it up, you pick up the identity of that culture, right? It's not just, you see it from the outside, you really become part of it. And I feel, always not torn, not, no, I'm always very more sympathetic with the Middle Eastern side because that's where the problems are, right?

[00:43:54] Kathryn: We don't have all that many problems in the United States, but I'm very sympathetic to the plight of people who anywhere who you know are in need or. In unfortunate situations like what's happening in Gaza now and this Yeah. It's just very sad. Very hard. Really?

[00:44:11] Pamela: Yeah. Very hard. Yeah, it is. And such long historical roots, isn't

[00:44:15] Kathryn: it?

[00:44:15] Kathryn: Yes. Situation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kathryn, it's been

[00:44:19] Pamela: so lovely chatting to you, and I have to say, I, it was such a beautiful memoir to read and I highly recommend it to all the listeners out there, particularly anybody who is interested in writing memoir, because I think it's, a lot of the listeners of the podcast are writers, and I think you do such a beautiful job of turning that, those life experiences into a really lovely story.

[00:44:40] Pamela: It reads just so beautifully.

[00:44:43] Kathryn: I could just add one thing Yes, please. For people, for writers not to be so intimidated about writing a memoir, because there it seems to have a big landscape, but if you pick a theme like I was suggesting I did with the dance and just narrow it down I would encourage almost anyone to write a memoir because it's looking back, it's so fulfilling to see that you've.

[00:45:07] Kathryn: You've enabled other people to see a life as it was lived then, so it don't be intimidated. You can find a way of telling your story. It may not be the way I chose, but it will be your way.

[00:45:20] Pamela: Yeah. I think that's great advice and. I've written little bits and pieces of fragment sort of stories I guess, of my life and poet poems in particular, I guess about Oh, beautiful.

[00:45:30] Pamela: Different things in my life. But I have to say reading, dancing Into the Light really did make me think about , writing some nonfiction actually. So thank you for that. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.

[00:45:42] Kathryn: Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, I read a lot of Australian things too, so I love. I can identify with a lot of that because we lived in the desert too.

[00:45:51] Kathryn: There's some stories about the living in the desert and the hardships and all that, and I can relate to that a lot.

[00:45:56] Pamela: For sure. Kathryn, this a question I always like to end with, and this is interesting in terms of someone who's written a lot of fiction and now working on some nonfiction and having written the memoir.

[00:46:06] Pamela: The question that I like to ask at the end is, what do you think is at the heart of

[00:46:10] Kathryn: your writing? Oh my goodness. The heart of my writing, I think is just trying to express what's inside of us. That we're all basically human beings. We all can communicate, we all can. Solve our conflicts. We all can learn to appreciate each other.

[00:46:30] Kathryn: I think in most of my writing now when I you ask that question, it's always a two cultures coming together, and how they overcome their differences and learn to coexist and thrive. And I think that's something the world needs more of. And whether you write about a I've written about a marriage where, two people are of the same culture, but they're radically different in how they find a way of resolving that.

[00:46:54] Kathryn: Or if there are two cultures differing lovers from different cultures and how they resolve that and. I just think that at the heart of my writing is trying everybody to get along and to realize the richness of life is in our variety and our differences. Once we learn how to we cherish those and thrive, yeah.

[00:47:16] Pamela: Yeah, I love that and I can definitely see that in Dancing Into the Light. Congratulations on the memoir. And where can listeners anybody that's interested in reading dancing into the Light or your fiction, whereabouts can they find those books?

[00:47:31] Kathryn: Oh, they're all on Amazon and Barnes and noble.com if you have that.

[00:47:35] Kathryn: Or you can order them from any bookstore really. But if people find Amazon some people like to order from Amazon, some people don't but that's one place. You can just Google my name and they'll all come up my, all my books.

[00:47:48] Pamela: Fantastic. And I'll put your website in the show notes too so people can look you up there. And are you on social media as well, Catherine, if people wanna follow

[00:47:56] Kathryn: you? Yes. It's Kathryn Abdul-Baki. I'm on social media. I'm on Facebook mainly, and Instagram. Yep.

[00:48:04] Pamela: Great. I'll put that in the show notes as well.

[00:48:06] Pamela: Thank you so much for this chat. It's been absolutely lovely and really enjoyed the book, as I said, and I look forward to reading some of your fiction and your essays when they come out.

[00:48:17] Kathryn: Thank you. This has been a real extraordinary privilege. Thank you so much.