Naeem Murr on Finding Inspiration in a Chevy Impala

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Naeem Murr about his new novel, Every Exit Brings You Home.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Because you say you don’t start the book with any firm ideas. What did you start with? Do you start with an image, an urgency, a vision of a character?

Naeem Murr: Well, what happened with this – and this has happened to me with two of my previous books – you know writing is a very mysterious process to me, and, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time treading water, producing pages. I’m somebody who just sort of works obsessively, which I don’t think is a good thing. I think it’s important to work, but not to think that work is going to save your life, you know, it’s not going to save your life. I So, you know, with those three books, I had been working on other things. So for me, with this book, I had been working on a long, long novel, a huge family saga based upon my Palestinian family. And I had been working on that for over 10 years, you know, and it was really sort of crushing me. It required enormous amounts of research. So, I felt this enormous pressure with that, because it was family and because, you know, it required so much understanding and knowledge. And I just needed to take a break from that book. And I decided I was going to write some short stories. So, I took a walk in my neighborhood. And, you know, as I was returning home, I live in a in a big condominium building, I saw just outside my condominium building an old Chevy Impala attached to a U-Haul trailer. And in the front of the Chevy Impala were a sort of middle-aged couple, and they were leaning against one another, and they seemed sort of bereft. And they seemed incredibly connected and incredibly disconnected from one another at the same time, and there was a baby in the backseat. There was something just incredibly evocative about this image. I couldn’t tell if they had just arrived or about to leave, and later it made me think of a contemporary incarnation of Adam and Eve, you know, that the moment after the fall here they were right in life and in all the difficulty of life. And it gave me an idea to write a short story about a man from Gaza. I had been thinking about Gaza because there had been another flare up of conflict some evictions in East Jerusalem at that time. And so, I thought about a man from Gaza and a single mother moving into his building, and that’s all I knew. I thought, Oh, well, that’s going to be the story. It’s going to be about home. And that the final image would be that image of the two of them in that car with the U-Haul trailer attached to it. And then as I began to write it, Jack, who I thought was single, turned out to be married. I knew nothing about him, and he just sort of cohered for me. You know, for me the character has to come alive. The character has to help me tell the story and he was very quickly just facing me across the page.

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Naeem Murr, a dual US and UK citizen, is the author of four novels: The Boy, a New York Times Notable Book; The Genius of the Sea; and The Perfect Man, which was awarded The Commonwealth Writersʼ Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His new novel is Every Exit Brings You Home. He is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Among his awards are a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.