Shabnam Piryaei is an award-winning poet, playwright, media artist, and filmmaker. In addition to authoring the books all children. (Diode Editions, 2024), Nothing is Wasted (The Operating System, 2017), Forward (Museum Books, 2014) and Ode to Fragile (Plain View Press, 2010), her films have screened at film festivals, art galleries, and public installations around the world. She’s been awarded the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Award, Poets & Writers Amy Award, the Transport of the Aim Poetry Prize, the Brain Mill Press Editors’ Choice, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance Grant, a Puffin Foundation grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her play “A Time to Speak” was staged at the MAD Theatre Festival in the United Kingdom. She is currently directing a documentary film entitled No Separate Survival about asylum seekers across the U.S.-Mexico border. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and teaches in the department of Broadcast & Electronic Communication Arts at San Francisco State University. She is the founder and curator of the online art and interview journal MUSEUM. Her art has been exhibited at the Unlike Art Gallery, Elysium Art Gallery, New Gallery London, Youyou Gallery, Jotta, Galleria Perelà, Kala Art Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Bahar Mirhosseni is a writer, teacher, and a criminal defense/human rights lawyer. She is a former public defender and the Director of Legal Advocacy at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. She also co-teaches the Pretrial Justice Clinic at UCLA School of Law. She has collaborated with a range of human rights organizations including the Georgia Capital Defender Office, the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, and Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. She has worked extensively with lawyers in the MENA region on access to justice, human rights, and high quality public defense. She has been awarded a Women Authoring Change Fellowship from Hedgebrook Writing Residency. She is a Contributing Editor at Kweli Journal.
Bahar Mirhosseni: Your new collection of poetry, all children. is pure art. It feels uncompromising. What inspired this book?
Shabnam Piryaei: Thank you so much for seeing it. With this book I was trying to dissolve the compartments I made in myself, and to come forward with my whole self. I’m deeply in touch with the child version of me–I love cartoons and I can be incredibly silly. And I get along really, really well with young kids. They are so wise and free, often even in the midst of trauma. Honestly, now, I’m much more free and child-like than when I was as a kid. When I was a child, I absorbed the energy and feelings of the adults around me, I worried about people’s safety–including my own. I cried often about injustice in the world, the ways that people are broken by other people. I tried to be obedient and was praised for being mature and following instructions well. It led to me inhibiting myself a lot.
So through this book, I’m also giving the child in me a place to play and be free and creative. I’m honoring her as much as I’m honoring the child in every reader. My connection to kids, while joyful and anchored in play, also means that I feel overwhelmingly their suffering. So in part, this is an ode to all kids, everywhere, across time. It's a way to hold them. Throughout my art making career I’ve written through heavy, stories that I feel called to chronicle and share. The older I get, the more I bring light into the dark. Sometimes it means infusing my own light, sometimes it means noticing and pointing to the light that’s already there, the luminous quality of everything. The idea of weaving this book into a children’s magazine felt like weaving light into its very infrastructure.
BM: We were hanging at a park in the East Bay a while back, talking, in part, about the art of playful dressing. Would you define this as yet another form of play?
SP: Yes. I’m actively calling in, and surrendering to, the energy of joy and play. This includes how I adorn my body. I’ve come to realize that my light is always incredibly bright. I don’t need to try to turn it on, I don’t need to build it up or activate it. What happens is that often, I dim it for other people. If I just trust them, and myself, if I permit myself to stop obscuring my own light, I can let that light call people into their own highest selves.
BM: Aracelis Girmay said, “For me all children. is a book of spirits, a mystic’s gorgeous trace, an experimental children’s magazine for adults.” How did you imagine this work of art?
SP: I’ve been writing this book since I was a child. One of my first poems was rhyming poems about potatoes getting married and I would draw the potatoes holding hands beside the handwritten poem. Or, similar to some of the once upon a time stories in this book, I used to tape record myself reading fairy tales to an imaginary audience of children. And then I’d listen back to those cassette tapes alone in my room.
BM: Would you say that something shared by your books Ode to Fragile and all children. is a mixing of worlds, geographically, temporally, and otherwise?
SP: The way that immigrants often hold different parts of themselves, it’s not just code switching, it’s something else, it’s trying to preserve the wholeness of each part. Growing up in a house where my family was like ‘you’re Iranian, not American,’ there was a lot of compartmentalizing. Part of it was what they taught me, and part of it was what I experienced. So much of Iranian culture, and reverence, and love is a mutual, reciprocal act and when it’s done in isolation, it doesn’t work. You kind of get exploited. So I had to learn how to preserve and love my Iranian self even when it wasn’t understood or it was read as weakness.
I think one overlap with my first book and fourth book is that I gave myself permission to mix different elements and genres. In Ode to Fragile it was poetry with plays, and even then the plays were often micro plays, or abstract scenes. And with all children. there are games, and drawings, and things specifically from my own childhood in the 80s and 90s mixed with things from the COVID quarantine period, and there are ghosts from the Iran-Iraq war and talking animals, all in the same world.
BM: As I think about the title of your new collection, all children, I wonder if there were specific groups of children you had in mind.
SP: I truly mean all children, as in, every human. I know that the child version of every person is fully alive and always existing. Every aspect of ourselves is alive across time. And so at any moment, you can access any version of yourself–past, present, future, like opening a book to a particular page. So on one hand I’m speaking of all people who are currently child-aged, and I’m speaking directly to the child in every adult reader, because I know they can hear me, I can speak through the child to the adult. At the same time, I’m drawing attention to narratives that are overlooked, treated as statistics, hidden. Children who suffer domestic abuse at home, children traumatized by war, poverty, empire, racism.
BM: Can you talk a bit more about playfulness?
SP: My guides are calling me to play. My son is a daily reminder of the power of playfulness and joy as an act of creation, bliss, prayer. And I am really trying to integrate play in everything that I do–in my art, the way I dress, the shows I watch, the way I approach learning and fighting in jiu jitsu, the way I dance, the way I teach.
BM: Your book has its own unique structure that is very clear, with specific patterns. What inspired the structure of the book?
SP: When I was 12 years old, my father and I published a bilingual kids magazine called All Children Magazine. I would translate stories from Farsi to English, or conduct interviews of local artists, or draw pictures. It was just the two of us making it together. I also really loved Highlights Magazine. I was an only child until I was almost 13. All my cousins and aunts and uncles were living in Iran. And I never had friends over or went to anyone’s house. In many ways, I was deeply lonely at home, or operating in spaces where there were only adults around me. So outside of school, the only child-like experiences I was having were watching cartoons or reading. And Highlights Magazine was an integral part of the joy of my childhood.
When I started making all children. I ordered a bunch of Highlights Magazines from the 90’s off of ebay, the same issues that I’d read as a child. And I read them and studied them and played with them while writing and crafting the book.
And there are lots of other inspirations. Shel Silverstein (I’ve based one of my poems off of one of his poems), The Simpsons, Calvin & Hobbes, Sesame Street, Agnes Varda, Evie from the show Out of this World, Garfield, The Far Side, Steven Universe, the Dog Man book series, the Hilo book series.
BM: In From the Editor, you have a line: “We never leave.” I found it intriguing. Could you please elaborate?
SP: Time is not linear. I’m gesturing, lovingly, to the expansive, beautiful divinity of life, the ways that we stay for and with each other. That our physical bodies are only an aspect of ourselves. It’s also a gesture to the fact that everything is connected. So when I heal myself, this heals all versions of me across space and time. It heals my ancestors and my descendents. And all of this, this deep, intricate interrelatedness is a gift and a responsibility.
BM: Can you speak about the dissolved compartments of Shabnam and the deliberate choices you made, like incorporating the animal world?
SP: A few years ago I wrote The Adult Alphabet Book, an MS Paint-drawn book that puts animals in silly situations while teaching the ABCs. I think it was maybe one of the first times I really made something just because it was hilarious and fun for me. Pure play. When I was making all children., I felt like I could give these animals a whole additional, deeper life. So I extracted some of the illustrations from The Adult Alphabet Book and offered them in this new context as Which caption fits best?
BM: What surprised you most about the process of creating all children.?
SP: This was the first time I shared my manuscript with other writers as I was writing it. I had never done that before. I didn’t study creative writing in an institution and so every other book I’d written had been produced from start to finish in isolation. I don’t know that this was a surprise, but it was a newness, a community element in the making of it that felt really rewarding. I got a lot of amazing guidance to help me align the books with my original intentions.
And I’m lucky it got published by Diode Editions. They really honored the book as it is.
BM: Who do you write for?
SP: For you. For everyone.
BM: In Nextdoor, one of your poems from all children, you juxtapose the natural world with police violence. The poem opens with the line: "a young man desperately buries himself under damp leaves while helicopters hunt him." Powerful! How did you find your way to this poem?
SP: Even in the worst circumstances, nature always offers pure love and nourishment. In the most devastating situation,the earth loves us. My process of writing poetry for so much of my life had involved eeking out poems in a hole of sorrow and darkness over a very long period of time.
With nextdoor, I was on the actual Nextdoor app and there was really a person who was desperately fleeing the police at night and all these app users were mocking the way he was hiding, and all of it felt like overwhelming violence. The violence of the police hunt, of the economic and social system we are all a part of, the violence of the app users toward this young stranger, which is a violence toward themselves, toward their own spirits. I wanted to offer him something beautiful. My real offering was the desire for this young man to be protected and loved in that moment. In other words, this was one of the few poems that came out flowing, all at once, so it was this desire that allowed nature to come through with its own love, to hold him in this way. I served as the vessel.
BM: Can you talk a bit about your specific relationship with the natural world?
SP: I was always afraid of nature. Maybe not always. I don’t remember yet who I was or what I loved or feared in my first two years of life when I was in Iran. But in the U.S., I didn’t grow up camping or being around nature. Later, I discovered that the things I was fearing in nature were all the elements of myself that I was not ready to face.
I often feel a tension between myself as an individual and myself as part of the sacred family of life. In other words, I see the light in everyone. I always have. But also, there is this other part of me that is protective of those I love, and even those I don’t know, who are being harmed. And I feel deeply social injustice from state violence and oppressive economic, legal and political systems. And that pulls me into my individual self. Into my angry self, my frustrated self who’s unwilling to give passes to people who continue hurting others, harming them, violating them, traumatizing them. I feel this tension between being an individual in the world, wanting to protect the people, and practicing the knowledge that everyone is divine. So nature helps me feel how everything is deeply connected forever across space and time.
And nature is not just soft and pretty.
I stayed in Big Sur for the first time maybe 10 years ago. There was no internet, no phones. It was the most inundated I’ve ever been in raw nature. And there was so much power and beauty and hunger and survival. An intense, luminous interconnectedness between the trees, frogs, mountain lions, ghosts, hawks, stars. Seeing this intricate, moving, divine way that light and dark operate in nature inspired me to integrate all aspects of myself more.
BM: Thank you for making time for this interview.
SP: My pleasure.
