Contemporary Authors

• Hijra: Poems Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 2016
• Salt Houses ( novel) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2017

Library of Congress Online Catalog 1.  Salt houses LCCN 2016046956 Type of material Book Personal name Alyan, Hala, 1986- author. Main title Salt houses / Hala Alyan. Published/Produced Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Description 312 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780544912588 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PS3601.L92 S25 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2.  Hijra : poems LCCN 2016007913 Type of material Book Personal name Alyan, Hala, 1986- author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Hijra : poems / by Hala Alyan. Published/Produced Carbondale : Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, [2016] Description 68 pages ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780809335404 (softcover : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS3601.L92 A6 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Reading Women - https://www.readingwomenpodcast.com/blog/2017/4/21/interview-with-hala-alyan

  Q&A with Hala Alyan
  May 5, 2017

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017
  This is your debut novel—congratulations! What has been your favorite part of having Salt Houses published?
  Thank you! My favorite thing so far has been seeing it in the hands of people I love—my husband, brother, friends—as they read it. It’s a wonderful feeling. And, of course, I feel very lucky to be getting to meet so many interesting booklovers! 
  Salt Houses encompasses several decades, generations, and countries. What inspired you to take on such an ambitious project for your first novel?
  I had to pretend it wasn’t a novel! I just thought of it as one big rug—the family—and then just followed the individual threads of each person’s story as far as it led me. Families have always intrigued me: the ways they fail and buoy and surprise us. I’ve always loved thinking about how we are broken and remade by family, as well as the concept of emotional inheritance, particularly in the context of immigration. So I think in a lot of ways this was the only book I could right at that particular moment in my life.
  Your characters live through many major historical events in the Middle East. What was your approach to your research as you wrote the novel?
  I used primary resources at first, meaning asking my father and other family members to recount their experiences during these different events. I also asked people to speak to any memories their grandparents might have relayed to them. Then I read as much as I could about the region during the 60s and 70s, while also making sure to consider what fashion, music and movies were popular in various cities during these years.
  How has being a poet influenced your approach to novel writing? Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process?
  I try to write thirty minutes a day, every day. That helps me keep myself as a writer attentive and curious, and keeps the process from chipping away at a novel from getting too intimidating, because I’m only responsible for that particular day. 
  Writing poetry has always felt particularly different than prose, but I definitely borrow from what I’ve learned as a poet. For instance, poetry engenders a certain attention to detail, an alertness to idiosyncrasies in the world around us. This helps when trying to authentically recapture dialogue or description in novels. I also find that thinking of a novel as nothing but a series of moments, sentences, thoughts (the way that a collection is just a series of poems) helps allow me keep the (at times) daunting process in perspective.
  What unique perspectives would you like to see Salt Houses add to the body of immigrant literature?
  I hope that it will grant people a glimpse into a Palestinian sociocultural narrative that is different than the hyperpoliticized images we tend to be bombarded with by the media. My wish was to tell a story that isn’t usually heard, particularly from a perspective that tends to be overlooked. 
  Here at Reading Women were all about female voices. Who are the women writers who have inspired you as both a writer and a reader?
  So many! Jhumpa Lahiri, Ada Limón, Jamaica Kincaid, Ani DiFranco, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Natalie Diaz, Ru Freeman, Amy Tan, Arundhati Roy Maxine Hong Kingston
  What have you been reading recently?
  I’ve been on a non-fiction kick, and recently finished Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and Bad Feminist. They inspired me so much I started trying to write essays—so far, nothing particularly impressive, but I’m hopeful!
  What are you working on next?
  I like to working on a couple of things at once, so I’m working on a new poetry manuscript and a new novel about a Lebanese family of expats that return to Beirut to sell their ancestral home. It’s tentatively titled The Arsonists' City.

  Photo Credit: Beowulf Shehan

  Bio
  HALA ALYAN was born in 1986. After living in various parts of the Middle East, she completed a doctorate in psychology and is now in practice at New York University. She has been published in Guernica and other literary journals, and is the award-winning author of three poetry collections. SALT HOUSES is her first novel. Alyan is also a seasoned performer, and her TEDx talk and appearances can be viewed at www.halaalyan.com. She lives in New York City.

• Brooklyn - http://www.bkmag.com/2017/05/04/hala-alyan-salt-houses-novel-immigration-therapy/

  “A Vulnerable Thing”: Talking with Hala Alyan about her Debut Novel, Immigration, and Therapy
  By Arianna Rebolini -
  May 4, 2017

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  Hala Alyan knows how to balance identities. The Brooklyn-based Palestinian-American spent her childhood moving between the United States and the Middle East; at thirty years old, she’s a licensed practicing psychologist, award-winning author of three poetry collections, and, now, a novelist. It makes sense, then, that Salt Houses, her stunning debut, offers such a piercing examination of displacement, identity, faith, and what one character refers to as a lifetime of “emotional code-switching.”

  The book begins in Jerusalem in 1963, with a mother reading her daughter’s future in the bottom of her coffee cup and hoping she’s seeing it wrong. From there, it follows the Yacoub family over four generations and across three continents, in a series of chapters that leapfrog years and read almost like discrete short stories. Through these snapshots, Alyan illustrates the heartache of war, the perseverance of family, and the sense of unsettledness that can permeate a life in exile. I got her on the phone to talk a bit more about these themes.
  You’ve published collections of poetry in the past—what’s it been like transitioning into prose?
  For whatever reason, it’s a lot easier for me to organize my thoughts around poetry collections, maybe because it’s a little bit more straightforward. I’m more of an instant gratification person; you work on a poem, and then you have a poem to show for it. Mostly up until I started working on Salt Houses, I’d done short stories and poetry collections. One of those short stories actually ended up being the second chapter of the novel.
  When I wrote it, I found myself really interested in this family, drawn into the character’s life but also wondering what was going to happen to his sister, what was going to happen to his mom, and so I started working backwards and forwards through time. I keep describing it as tricking myself, but I just sort of had to pretend it wasn’t a novel, like, I’m just working for 30 minutes every day, it’s not really a novel, it’s just a longer project. Then after a couple years, it was done. 
  It feels so relevant to the conversation right now regarding immigration and the refugee crisis, but it also illuminates how, for a large population, this has been relevant for a very long time.  Is displacement something you’ve always thought about, as a Palestinian-American?
  Yes. I remember, when I was a kid, the stories I wanted to read were Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club—I’ve always found myself really interested and drawn to immigrant stories. There’s a lot more media attention on those sort of narratives right now because they’re very pressing, and relevant to the political landscape of the moment. But I was born to immigrants, and we also moved around a lot. I was shuttled back and forth between the Middle East and the States. So I was constantly thinking about place and city and home and belonging and diaspora.
  And obviously there are hundreds of ways to tell an immigrant story, but it felt important for me to write this one using the multi-generational format, as a way to show how different things get inherited when we’re talking about diaspora and immigration across generations, and how things get lost. 
  These characters you’ve created often disagree about where to draw the line between preserving tradition and assimilating to the new culture, and there’s a lot of talk about what gets lost in that compromise. Can you tell me about what that means to you, that compromise between honoring tradition and adapting?
  I don’t know that there’s one straightforward way to do it. Something always gets lost in the process of immigration, of migration and translocation. What gets lost really depends on the family norms, family cultures, where you move, what the host country is like, and whether you have access to the home country or not. I’m really interested in diasporas and refugee movements where the home country is cut off, so it’s lost not just to the people who’ve immigrated, but also to the future generations, who then end up kind of developing a relationship with a place they may never have set foot in. That place then is really just a representation of what the parents or grandparents or great-grandparents have carried with them, and it ends up being about honoring an idea more than an actual place.
  And then you have the importance of stories, of carrying on those histories. Do you see writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, as an act of resistance or a form of activism in itself?
  Oh yeah. Absolutely. This is a time where—regardless of what people think of the historical moment that we’re all in—you’re going to see art flourish. You’re going to see some incredible literature, comedy, artwork, and music come out of it, because these are the sort of spaces where things like that become more urgent and more important. Stories that don’t fit within the mainstream narrative become that much more compelling, not just to the audience but also to the storyteller. It’s that much more urgent for them to tell it. I absolutely think of writing as an act of resistance. It’s an act of memory-making, it’s an act of memory preservation.
  How do you feel about the intersection of place and identity? So much of Salt Houses is about people who feel splintered, and about what migration does to your understanding of yourself.
  It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Because of the amount of moving I did throughout my life, especially up until my college years, I became a completely different person. In order to adapt, psychologically speaking, you look at your environment’s demands, and you look at the conditions that need to be met. It’s very much a survival tactic; it’s very much an act of self-preservation. You learn pretty quickly that there are certain things you need to understand in this new environment, or else you’re not going to survive it.
  Certain parts of the identity are necessarily forfeited, or they become very private—and that can involve dress, food, language, certain things that you might be able to do freely in the home country. We’re in a powerful, heartbreaking moment, because I think this is a time where people are like, “Don’t speak certain languages in airports.” Right? “Be careful with how you’re dressing on the subway.” You might still have certain beliefs and values, but those may necessarily be ushered into more of a private sphere.
  Which feels like it would be really taxing, to always have to police yourself, constantly being aware of your surroundings.
  Absolutely. But also there’s a privilege that comes with being of a later generation, because you might be able to put certain things on display. I can talk about certain things without fear because I have a passport, because I was born in this country. There’s a certain luxury there, that, in today’s climate, people who weren’t born in this country or who are here on a visa don’t have.
  You’re a practicing psychologist—how does that inform your writing?
  I feel like the two complement each other really well. Studying psychology, I had to learn about the psyche, human dynamics, and family structures, and in therapy, when I’m the clinician, I’m constantly thinking about intention and desire and motivation and what’s driving people to do certain things. That really helps in character development, when I’m thinking about fiction. My training helped me ask a lot of the right questions when I was trying to develop the characters and what would be likely to happen next within the family.
  On a simpler level, I’m just a curious person. I’ve always been a little snoop-y, so it’s not shocking that I’m a therapist and like to hear about people’s lives, and that I also like to write about people’s lives. That curiosity, which you learn how to hone in a more sublimated way as a therapist, ends up being helpful in writing, because you’re like, Okay, what am I looking for here? If I was this in person in 1970-whatever, in Kuwait, what would I be most curious about?
  Is it weird for you to think about your clients reading your work?
  That’s a big one. I’m really dealing with that now. More and more, I’ve had people find me through my work. If you read a poem of mine in a journal, at the very bottom is a bio that says, “is a practicing psychologist.” That self-disclosure is already made before the person even walks in the door. And I’ve been relatively forthright about it because, honestly, this is an age where anybody can Google anybody, and most people do. They should. If I was about to start working with a therapist, I’d probably Google that person and see what their deal was.
  I feel like when people bring it up, I try to make as much of a space and try to be as welcoming as possible and as willing as possible to have those conversations, because even if it’s at times uncomfortable for me, it’s important for the client to feel like they have a space where they can talk about what it means for them that their therapist wrote about this or that. For the most part, and I’m going to jinx myself now, I would say that it’s helped develop stronger therapeutic alliances. I’m doing a vulnerable thing in writing, they’re doing a vulnerable thing in coming in for therapy, and I feel like it sort of strengthens this idea that we’re all human here. We’re all doing the best we can.
  Has your family read the book?
  My father refuses to read it until it’s out properly. So does my mother. My brother has read it; my husband has read it. To be honest I was fiercely protective of it up until the advance copies came out, and then I gave it to a few family members. I was telling this to my brother the other day: Their feedback, that in itself, made everything worth it. Whatever happens next—and I do hope it resonates with people, that it’s a story people can see themselves in, or at least it’s a story that pushes people’s perspectives of immigrants and Palestinians—the feedback I’ve gotten from my family has been so lovely. I definitely borrowed from a lot of structural events with immigration that happened in my family, but not so much basing characters on them, because they would kill me. [Laughs.]
  Are those stories you already knew, or did you find yourself doing a lot of research while writing?
  I asked a lot of questions. My dad was super helpful in that process, and really willing to tell different stories, or ask my grandfather stories. It could be as basic as, “Did people drink in Kuwait in the eighties? And if they did, where did they drink?” Or asking my aunt, who was a bit of a wild card back then, “Where did you party?” A lot of it was gathering family stories, which was such a gratifying process in and of itself, and then culling it for details that I could use in the book.
  And what’s the story behind the title?
  It was actually titled something different at first, but when we finished all the edits and it was time to send it out, my agent was like, “You need to change the title. It’s not relevant.”

  So I was going over different notes, and thinking about the themes that were most salient in the book, which words were repeated. Obviously there were houses, homes. And I thought about this one scene, where one of the characters talks about remembering all of the different houses that he and his family have lived in over the decades, and thinking of them as structures made of salt that the tide can come and erase. Salt houses. That was it.

• As It Ought to Be - https://asitoughttobe.com/2016/10/02/hala-alyan-and-elizabeth-cantwell-a-conversation/

  Hala Alyan and Elizabeth Cantwell: A Conversation
  Posted on October 2, 2016 by aiotb

  Hala Alyan
  HA: Elizabeth, I have to start by saying how much I enjoyed this collection. I’m so curious about the process of writing it. Did you start off with a particular image that later shaped the collection? I ask because the repetition of dreamscapes was haunting and contributed to the book as a whole having an otherworldly quality.
  EC: Thanks so much, Hala! I’m glad you asked about this – you’re absolutely right that the repetition of the dream world came from a specific image/experience. When I was in elementary school, I began having a recurring dream – the one outlined in various iterations in the book – that really haunted me for a lot of reasons. In the dream, my little brother and I were outside, having a picnic, and he’d always ask me for something — another half a sandwich, some more lemonade, a napkin, something that got me to stand up and walk away from the picnic blanket. And I’d be walking away, getting him this thing he needed, and I’d turn back and see some sort of small animal crawling over to him through the grass. A kitten or a fawn or a puppy or a small chick. And he’d get this huge smile on his face — I think I started having this dream when I was about 10 years old, which would make him 6 or so. And I’d just know in that dream second that something was very wrong. This is also about the part in the dream where I’d become aware that I’d had this dream before and it was happening again. I’d start running back towards the picnic blanket, to tell him not to touch the animal, it was a trap, but it was always too late, and before I could get there the tiny cute thing would transform into a tiger, snatch him up in its jaws, and take him away. And I’d be running after them, that slow awful impossible run you do in dreams, and I’d know I couldn’t save him, and I’d wake up, out of breath, having failed yet again.

  Elizabeth Cantwell
  Later in life, when my brother began struggling with drugs, alcohol, and a series of stints in jail, the dream came back to me, and seemed somehow prophetic or real or upsetting on a new level, and I knew I had to write about it.
  Your book, too, has a lot of dreams in it — and I wonder, because I so clearly had a concrete dream I was playing with — are the dreams you talk about in your book real, or do you sometimes invent dreams for the sake of the device of having a dream? I’ve definitely done both, in the past — I’d love to hear more about where those dreams in Four Cities came from, or just what the device of the dream means to you.
  HA: Oh, wow. That is such a poignant and heartbreaking image to have had to return to nightly. Yes, there’s something prophetic about it, and also something tragic in how you were doomed to forget each time, doomed to have it happen all over again.
  I’m so fascinated with dreamwork, in life and in art, and I find that many of my poems actually begin with a certain image or symbol that first came to me in a dream. I’ve certainly played around with dreamscapes in writing, sometimes recreating them faithfully, sometimes inventing them entirely. In Four Cities, the dreams I allude to were real. I go through periods of my life, depending on what is happening in my waking world, where I will dream lucidly and, more importantly, remember my dreams very vividly. While writing FC, this was a period of time when I was dreaming very intensely, carrying those dreams around with me daily.
  With the collection I’m working on now, a very similar thing has been happening. For the past year, I’ve been remembering my dreams in very intense detail almost every night. And so snippets of them have reappeared in my recent poems, sometimes without me even realizing it’s happening. While it’s not the same dream in different iterations, as in your case, they are often the same themes and images: of drowning, of not saving the ones I love, of new cities that I have to explore on my own.
  Has the dream stopped or changed since you wrote the collection? And what was it like to write about something so distressing, so elusive?
  EC: Well, that specific recurring dream stopped in early middle school, so I haven’t had it since — if anything, I was surprised to find it bubble back up in my memory when I began to deal with my brother’s problems as an adult. As for what it’s like to write about something distressing and elusive — isn’t that what all writers do, all the time? We’re all obsessed with our own obsessions, writing to purge some elemental horror from our deepest selves that is, in the end, never completely rooted out. Even the poets whose work on the surface seems incredibly calm and self-assured and placid — I’m thinking of Merwin, maybe — once you dig in, it starts to become obvious that there are terrible repetitions and anxieties and dark rooms hovering underneath.
  You talked about lucid dreaming, and how that seems to be something important in your writing process sometimes. I definitely had the sense of the kind of surrealism that comes with the not-dream-not-awake state in a lot of your poems. But you ground that surreal dream state so clearly in place. In “After Thunderstorms in Oklahoma,” which I love, you have the reader set clearly in one place (Oklahoma), which then morphs into a memory from another place (Ramallah), which then becomes a surreal forest and the space of dreaming … How did you deal with the ways place can be both fluid and concrete in a collection of poems that so clearly relies on place for structure?
  HA: I love that description of the “dark rooms” that hover within. It’s so accurate. Yes, I think a lot of my work plays with that space between reality and surrealism, particularly because I’m so fascinated with how that space intersects with one’s sense of self. I think physical place (i.e. cities) play such a prominent role precisely because place, in my experience, is both fluid and concrete. In titling the collection Four Cities, I was aware that, in reality, I was actually encountering dozens and, of those dozens, each one was further quartered and slivered because I feel like I have many versions of every city I’ve loved within me: there’s the streets, the physical scents and sounds, but also the different selves I wanted to be (or discarded) in those cities, not to mention the ways I recreate those cities in memory and in dream. So I think that I dealt with that messy contradiction of fluidity versus concreteness by allowing it to exist, rather than trying to tidy it up.
  There are certain images that flitted throughout your collection: those of fire, creatures, water, doors. One of the things I enjoyed about the book was how you were able to return to the same elements without it ever feeling tired or repetitive. It was always with a renewed vigor, what felt like a fresh pair of eyes. Could you speak a little about that?
  EC: Oh man, the former selves. So many of them, strewn all over. That makes me think of your poem “Push,” which I read a couple different ways – both as a conversation between cities, and as a conversation between different versions of the self in those cities.
  And yes! Images. I’m so glad to hear they didn’t feel tired or repetitive. I do think that’s a very real danger of writing a book inspired by a recurring dream — by the end of the book there’s a risk that the readers are going to be like “Okay, seriously, we’re doing the tiger thing again?” I don’t know if I had a real strategy to keep things from feeling redundant other than trying to be true to the feeling of the recurring dream, of déjà vu — you know you’ve had this experience before, but because you know that, the whole thing feels weirder and more unsettling, not ho-hum.
  The thing I noticed almost right away in your collection, as far as images go, is that your poems are very busy. You’ve packed them full of objects, things, adjectives. They feel very dense that way. Image density is something that scares me sometimes, but you pull it off really well–how did you find yourself navigating that as you wrote?
  HA: What a perfect way to describe it: how the feeling of déjà vu only makes you more unsettled.
  I’m an adjective addict. I’m like a cook who oversalts every meal! When I gave my first proper piece of fiction to a writer friend of mine, she said, “Cut most of your adjectives and adverbs. Then cut some more.” In fiction, I think that sort of language can easily stifle the reader, but in poetry it feels more allowed somehow, more forgivable. It’s one of the things I love the most about poetry, how you can take a single tiny thing—a moment, an object, the arch of a lover’s eyebrow—and meditate on it.
  I think how I write is very much a reflection of how I think; my mind is always in a state of buzzing, trying to consider every possible angle and incarnation of a thing, always making room for more. My poetry ends up dripping with images. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I think in the past year or so, I’ve tried to see what kind of poetry I can produce with a more minimalist approach to language. It’s been quite a challenging, if at times rewarding, experiment.
  My favorite line in you book (my heart!) was: “I’m always opening the door to the same threat/over and over/and every time it looks like love.” It stunned me. So honest, so raw. It got me thinking about the different ways we love and lose, and of course about the way something that appears to be love in the recurring dream (deer, rabbit, etc) ends up being a threat (tiger). Can you speak a little bit more about this idea? Did you intend for it to have so many different meanings?
  EC: I feel like we should switch brains for a day in a sort of poetic Freaky Friday. I tend to be extremely wary of adjectives and I try to use only the most minimal and obvious and simple adjectives in my poems … But I really admire poets whose poetry encompasses a wider range of vocabulary and does so while sounding authentic. I would love to stay simple but also get better at describing images. It’s hard. I agree that the idea of meditating on a single moment is what’s alluring about poetry, but the closer I get to something the harder it is, for me, to accurately pin it down with words.
  Which maybe speaks to that line you’ve pulled—the more starkly face-to-face with something I am, the easier it is to fail to see it for what it is. As far as what I intended the line to mean—I actually remember writing that whole poem very quickly without thinking too hard about it, like walking really fast out into the ocean before your brain can tell your body it’s too cold and you have to stop. I try not to mean anything when I write. The poems I draft when I’m trying to mean something feel horrible and cliché and labored. But I can feel it—after the fact—when I’ve written something that’s managed to mean a lot of things successfully.
  Don’t you think, in addition to those ideas about loving and losing, or loving the wrong things, that love itself is a threat, even the truest love? There is absolutely nothing more terrifying than the vulnerability you have to take on in order to really love someone. Nothing.
  HA: Yes, yes, yes to poetic Freaky Friday! It’s interesting to me that what we’re essentially talking about is restraint: of self, of language, of self-censorship. I resonate with that idea of stepping into the ocean quickly before your mind can stop you. I feel like that’s what writing is for me in general, always trying to stay ahead of myself, or rather the smart-alecky part of myself that likes to clear her throat and say, “Well, actually, that’s a bit trite, isn’t it?”
  I completely agree and would add that the truest love is often the biggest threat. To love is to yourself in something else, even if it’s just the tiniest inch of yourself, and that’s always daunting. Writing about love—as authentic and pure as it might be—is equally scary, because you are simultaneously witnessing and making witness out of the world, putting that process on display. I think there’s something remarkably brave about it, particularly when we’re talking about loving the wrong things.
  My final question is about what comes next. What are you working on these days, what’s been effortless about it, what’s been particularly tricky?
  EC: That’s a great question! I’ve actually been working today on a document currently titled “new manuscript” so … I guess I’m working on a new manuscript? I’m not really sure what it is yet, but it’s something. I think it’s about halfway done. Maybe not quite.
  The things I’ve been writing in the past year or so haven’t been as united in theme as Nights I Let The Tiger Get You — I think that manuscript is really almost a story, and is certainly something you can read chronologically and get a cumulative understanding from. I’m doing more standalone poems right now, rather than working on a more project-oriented manuscript — you know, those manuscripts where it’s like “Every poem is title after a fast food meal!” or “It’s one poem for every day in 1943, but told through the eyes of a dying cow!” I kind of wish I were more project-oriented right now, because in a way that makes your task easier, but I just haven’t had the ability to make myself buy into a uniting theme yet. I bet if someone else were to read these poems, they would immediately identify a few obvious threads tying everything together, and probably I will eventually give all of them to someone I trust and make them tell me what I’ve actually written. But at the moment I’m just writing what I want to write.
  What’s been effortless about it? Um, nothing? DO YOU WRITE EFFORTLESSLY? Give me the secret!
  I am mostly joking … I guess I do, as I mentioned above, find it effortless to write a poem once I’m in the right headspace and can kind of just open myself up to whatever is going to happen on the page. But, mostly, this “book” (if I can even call it that yet) has felt a lot harder to work towards than Nights. Finding the time and space to get into the poetry mindset feels nearly impossible. I’m not in grad school anymore, I don’t have a stipend expressly for the purpose of writing poems, I have a full-time job that frequently requires night and weekend commitments, a 3-year-old who is currently crawling precariously on the couch behind my shoulders and shooting a Kylo Ren Hot Wheels car across the windowsill … My life is really full of a lot of wonderful beautiful things that have nothing to do with words. And that’s been the challenge and the inspiration for me lately—finding ways to shape this weird and boring and mundane and transcendent life into poetry even when everything about it resists poetry.
  What about you? What’s next on your plate?
  HA: Okay, I laughed aloud at It’s one poem for every day in 1943, but told through the eyes of a dying cow. Well, whatever form your New Manuscript winds up taking, I’m eager to read it. It sounds like these new poems are taking root in rich, evolving, honest soil, and that’s always a refreshing thing (as a reader; it’s hard as a writer, I know).
  I’m working on a collection very tentatively titled “The Twenty-Ninth Year,” which is about, well, my twenty-ninth year. I turned thirty in July, and the year leading up to it was such a strange and difficult and marvelous one. Of all I’ve written, these new poems are probably the most easily “traceable” to me, in that I basically turned myself into a subject of study, and am trying to do it as authentically and unflinchingly as possible. Sometimes, it’s nothing short of impossible. Sometimes, it’s healing and good and I feel cleaner after the poem. We’ll see what the manuscript as a whole looks like, once I start stitching it together. That’s usually my favorite part.
  This has been so wonderful, Elizabeth! I can’t wait for your new book. Thanks for letting me into your (lovely) mind.
  ***
  Elizabeth Cantwell a high school teacher and poet living in Claremont, California. Her first book of poems, Nights I Let the Tiger Get You (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), was a runner-up for the 2012 Hudson Prize; she is also the author of a chapbook, Premonitions (Grey Book Press, 2014). Her work has recently been published or is forthcoming in such journals as The Los Angeles Review, PANK, The Cincinnati Review, and Hobart.
  Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and Columbia Poetry Review. Her poetry collection Atrium (Three Rooms Press) was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry. Four Cities, her second collection, was recently released by Black Lawrence Press. Her latest collection, Hijra, was selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2016.

• Public Libraries Website - http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2017/05/hala-alyan-on-piecing-together-a-narrative-from-the-jigsaw-puzzle-pieces-of-life/

  Hala Alyan On Piecing Together A Narrative From The Jigsaw Puzzle Pieces Of Life
  by Brendan Dowling on May 3, 2017

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  Hala Alyan’s debut novel Salt Houses spans four generations in the life of a family on the West Bank, following their journey from the early 60s to the present day. Through all of the challenges the family endures—wars, invasions, love affairs, and displacement—they are held together by the luminous Alia. Equal parts headstrong and effervescent, Alia loves her family with a fierce compassion and remains bonded to them as various forces compel them to move to Kuwait, Beirut, Boston, and Paris. Alyan’s background as a clinical psychologist is evident throughout the novel, as characters big and small thrum with an emotional complexity that stays with the reader long after she’s finished the book. The Millions praised Salt Houses as a “heartbreaking and important story” while Bustle said that it “illuminates the heartache and permanent unsettledness experienced by refugees all over the world.” Alan spoke with Brendan Dowling via telephone on April 18th.
  The book follows a Palestinian family over four generations. What was it like to approach the same character at different points in his or her life?
  I actually had the most fun with that part of it. I think this is where the psychology training comes in, where it took a lot of imagination to delve into these people’s minds and ask myself, “What would a person who had been raised in Nablus miss ten years later when they’re in Kuwait? What sort of ways in which not having the community that they grew up around affect how they’re raising their children or how they feel connected to their children?” For lack of a better word, it required diving into the characters’ psyches and trying to imagine what it would be like to be these people.
  I also feel very lucky that I know a lot of people who lived in the West Bank during that time, who lived in Kuwait during the times that are outlined in the book, people who lived in Paris during those times. Once I got some of the environmental details fleshed out from people it was just a matter of trying to be as curious as possible.
  You touched on this a little bit in your previous answer, but how has your background as a clinical psychologist affected your writing?
   A lot of the skills that require you to be a good therapist and a good writer are similar. You have to be very curious in both fields, you have to be observant, and you have to pay a lot of attention. One of the things learning about psychopathology and family dynamics helped me with is character development of the narrative.
  More than anything else you’re trained to pay attention and to look for patterns. People will come in and give you jigsaw puzzle pieces of symptoms and it’s your job as the therapist to help the person build a coherent narrative around that. And fiction works very similarly. A lot of the times you’re working in the dark and aren’t sure what the characters are going to do or if any of this is going to turn into anything. It requires a certain amount of patience and a belief that the whole will eventually emerge if you remain faithful to the details.
  In terms of building a coherent narrative for your characters, did you have an idea about where certain characters were going to end up during your writing process?
  Nope! (laughs) I’ve learned a lot from this first book and I’m trying to learn from it for future things I write. I did not write chronologically. I would write whatever scene came to me at whatever random time and it was hell to stitch it together. In some ways it allowed me to remain really engaged and excited by the process. I felt like I was the vehicle through which these stories were being told and I was just as surprised when someone ran away with someone else or they decided to move to Paris.
  I wish I could say this was really thought out and I had a beautiful outline. I did not. (laughs) Everything had to be tightened up in the editing process for sure. The first draft in no way looks like what it ultimately ended up looking like because there were a lot of loose threads. Things had to be rearranged after the fact just for the plot to make more sense and the story to be tighter. But as I was writing it was more like, “What do I think this person would do next? What setting do I want to write about?”
  “Where do I want to see them in twenty years?”
  Exactly! It was a very whimsical process that worked really well for a debut but is not super sustainable for someone trying to be a writer in the long term. But it made it fun.
  In terms of writing from that sense of whimsy and following different members of the family, was it hard not to follow certain characters?
  You have to understand the book was probably five or six chapters longer. In the process of the editing, it was really like killing my darlings. In the end it was one hundred percent the right call because it made it all tighter and make a lot more sense.
  I had a lot more attention paid to the younger generation—shockingly, because I’m a narcissist. (laughs) I belong to the newer generation and felt like we need to know what they’re going through! (laughs) So I had a lot more stakes in them. It took several people being like, “Listen, we like these things. Turn them into short stories maybe, but when you zoom out, the heart of this story is Alia. The heart of this story is that marriage and everything else is a branch that comes out from it, so we just have to tighten it a little bit.”
  So I had a hard time not following the newer generation further, but at some point it was like, this book has to end eventually. I can’t just keep writing about this family forever! So that’s what ended up happening.
  How did you land on Alia as the character you wanted to follow?
  You know I didn’t, or I did unconsciously. In the process of having these interviews and answering these questions a lot of the times people point out patterns and things that existed that I wasn’t consciously even trying to create.  I don’t know that I ever sat down and thought, “Alia’s the beating heart of this book and I want to start with her.” I knew early on that I wanted her to have the last word and I wanted the book to end with her. But I don’t remember ever thinking, “I’m going to check in with her regularly and she’s always going to make an appearance.”
  But the more that I wrote and the more that I got to know this quirky scattered family, I realized the thing that holds them together and the continuous thread throughout is Alia. Even if it’s not in person during a chapter—even if it’s over the phone or someone randomly thinking of her when they’re trying on a garment—she really is part of the consciousness of this book.
  She’s a woman who was born in the late 40s or 50s, what kind of research did you do to flesh out the world that she would have grown up in?
  I based her in a lot of ways on my grandmother, in the ways that I wish my grandmother had been—a little feistier, a little more selfish, and a little more self-interested. I loved the idea of someone having those characteristics long before feminism came along and said you could have them.
  In terms of making it seem authentic, it was looking to how she lived her life and what were the things she seemed to miss the most about all the houses and cities and places she left behind. More practically, she couldn’t be a source of a lot of it because she had dementia. So while I was writing the book she had lost a lot of her memory. This book really felt like a race against the clock to recreate memory, even if it was fictionalized. I had to ask my father’s oldest brother who’s in his late sixties what was it like when they had to leave Gaza. There was a lot of just getting in touch with random family members—second aunts, third cousins, who I didn’t really know.
  I also tapped into the community I already have in New York. So asking people who had been in Nablus during the Six-Day War, what day would they realistically have been able to leave? What day would they know something was going wrong? A lot of it was trying to piece together teeny-tiny details from all these different narratives and ask myself how would it have fit into this particular person’s life to try to make her as authentic and fleshed out as possible.
  With that kind of primary research on family members, were there stories you had never heard before?
  Absolutely. My family isn’t quite as shut down around the topic of Palestine as the Yacoub family, where at some points it’s described as a wound. It wasn’t quite as much like that in my family, but certainly it was something that had to be asked about. The older the family members were the less likely they were to bring it up.  I discovered how much profound loss has been experienced in the last eight or nine decades, just how much loss has been experienced in a single lifetime by all of these people—from my immediate family to my grandparents to my uncles and my aunts.
  It had never really occurred to me the courage it takes to start over, because my perspective was as a child, which was hard in its own ways. You’re moving constantly, you’re in a new school—that’s hard. But it hadn’t really occurred to me how difficult it would be to open a bank account in a country where you didn’t speak the language, or go about getting social security numbers, or have to deal with people giving you nasty looks at the gas station where you work.
  It has made me more aware of my privilege as somebody who speaks English without an accent and looks relatively ethnically ambiguous if my hair is tied back. It gave me information and insight into my family, but it also gave me insight into how my siblings and I have had a vastly different experience than my cousins who never left Kuwait, or my cousins who went to Syria and only left a few years ago, or my cousins who went to Wichita and never left and are Kansas through and through.
  In your TedTalk you discussed the role that storytelling plays for members of displaced communities and the diaspora. Did you find that idea significant when writing this book?
  Absolutely. To be honest with you, I haven’t quite made sense of what this is going to mean for me yet. But I can say it was incredibly healing and cathartic to write this down. It felt like I was doing my tiny part in trying to keep these narratives alive. It was just a very small nod in the direction of my family and my legacy and the things I’ve inherited from the people who came before me.
  I come from a family where storytelling is very important. The vehicle of that storytelling is different depending on the member. For some people it’s writing, for some people it’s telling bedtime stories, for some people it’s journalism. The idea of reclaiming that voice and putting it towards writing as detailed a glimpse as I possibly could of several generations of a family where the most interesting thing about them wasn’t that they were Palestinian, but that they were people who were living their lives—it felt like an emotional exorcism of sorts. It felt very grounding and centering by the time it was done. It was very painful to write at times. I’m finding it painful to reread right now, but I’m just happy that it’s there and it’s done. I’m just very grateful that it’s there.
  And finally, what role has the public library played in your life?
  So when we first moved to Oklahoma I didn’t speak English-
  And how old were you?
  Well technically five. [Hussein] invaded when I was four, then we were in Syria for a little bit of time. We were in Oklahoma for a bit, Texas for a year, and then back to Oklahoma until I was in sixth grade. We didn’t have any money, we were on food stamps because my parents lost everything in the war, they were asylum seekers. So my parents would take me to the library because that was the only way we could afford books. It was partly how I learned how to read English.
  There’s something about wandering those aisles and being reminded that all of these people felt so compelled to put pen to paper and create something that was a testament to themselves is so gratifying and it reminds me of the best parts of myself. So the library is a very important archetype in my life.

• Morning Edition, NPR - http://www.npr.org/2017/05/04/526785965/i-belonged-nowhere-a-story-of-displacement-from-a-novelist-who-knows

  < 'I Belonged Nowhere': A Story Of Displacement, From A Novelist Who Knows May 4, 20175:05 AM ET Listen· 7:11 7:11 STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: At the very start of a novel by Hala Alyan, a woman does what seems like a very simple thing. She buys a coffee set - a dozen cups, a coffee pot, a tray. It's a simple thing that becomes painful because she is a Palestinian woman. She's part of a displaced family forced to move from one country to another. And the coffee set makes her cry out because the tray reminds her of one she's lost in her moves. Hala Alyan builds her story on little moments like that, moments in the lives of several generations of a family unwillingly on the move. HALA ALYAN: They're characters that are very lost in a lot of ways and are trying to look for home. I definitely think that there is an intergenerational trauma that went along with losing a homeland that you see trickle down through the different generations. INSKEEP: The novel is called "Salt Houses," and its author wrote it while working out her own family's story. Hala Alyan is Palestinian-American whose family has moved about since the founding of Israel and the wars that followed. That woman who lost the coffee tray, her story grows out of the writer's personal experience. ALYAN: I've always been really interested in the meaning we imbue with objects. I grew up kind of watching my mother's attachment to certain objects, my grandparent's attachment to certain objects, and a lot of the times, I mean, it becomes especially valuable because the place with which you attach it to is no longer - it doesn't exist anymore. INSKEEP: What was the story of your mother and your grandmother? ALYAN: Well, you know, one of the things that I'm (laughter) always thinking about is sort of how - when I wanted to get married, one of the things that I didn't really have the luxury of was wearing or asking my mother if I could wear her wedding dress or ask my grandmother if I could wear her wedding dress because my grandmother lost hers when she moved to Kuwait. My mother lost hers in Kuwait after the invasion. And so there is these milestones in our life that don't ultimately end up getting passed down because they're lost. They're lost in the rubble of time and movement and displacement. INSKEEP: Your family just doesn't have the heirlooms of another family. ALYAN: We don't have heirlooms, and it's very - you know, I mean, one of the things that my mother, I've noticed, is very kind of keen on and intent on is talking about sort of how she'll buy pieces of jewelry and talk about how, you know, this is - you'll give this to your children and then your children will give it - it's a little bit morbid, right? And it took me a while to sort of kind of put it together and be like, oh, I mean, it's - you're sort of putting together a fractured history. You're trying to start over again. INSKEEP: Where did you grow up? ALYAN: That's a loaded question (laughter) - all over. My parents met and married in Kuwait. And then, when my mother became pregnant with me, in the Middle East you get what your father has in terms of passport. My mother had a Lebanese passport. My father had Palestinian travel documents. And so she sort of in the stroke of foresight's ingenius, she went to, quote, unquote, "visit" her brother who lived in Carbondale, Ill. And she was this eight-month pregnant brown woman, and they let her in, no problem, no worries. INSKEEP: It was the '80s. ALYAN: It was the - it was a different time, right. And then she gave birth to me, and I was there for the first week or so of my life. We returned to Kuwait, and then after the invasion, we were in Syria for a little bit, and then they sought asylum in the states. So my passport, in a lot of ways, enabled us to then go to the states. INSKEEP: This was totally your mother saying this child I'm about to have is going to be a stateless person, in effect. ALYAN: Exactly. And in a really beautifully symbolic way kind of, you know, being like I want her to be anchored to something. And of course, she couldn't have known that in anchoring me she was going to anchor the entire family. INSKEEP: So is this drawn from your real life when you write in this novel of people not quite telling the family story to each other? They're half-revealed facts and images that they sort of have in their memory and sort of don't. Is that an experience you've had yourself? ALYAN: I have. I mean, I've sort of seen it - you know, in my family, it kind of depends on who you talk to. I definitely think it's a wound that never quite healed over. And so we sort of talk around it, right? We'll talk about, like, my father's restlessness and the fact that he likes to move every year or two. We'll talk about the fact that, you know, my mother really loves homes and loves to think about decorating homes and nesting and settling. And you see this in other traumatized populations, like Holocaust survivors. A lot of the times, it's something that's really not brought up, which then leaves it to the later generations to sort of re-imagine, re-conceptualize, kind of re-create what it was that was lost. INSKEEP: There's a lovely paragraph I'd like to ask you to read... ALYAN: Of course. INSKEEP: ...That gets at this sense of family memories that you don't quite have. The character's name is Riham. She's one of the younger characters. There's some discussion of a garden, and this reminds her of something. Could I get you to read that paragraph? ALYAN: Of course. (Reading) There was another garden, Riham has been told, though the details of it are hazy to her, almost fictional. All she knows is this garden was in Palestine, and it burned down. It is linked to the war she learned about in school and to her father being away a long time ago. The adults rarely speak of these things, giving vague responses to questions. It is clear they find this talk painful, and Riham isn't the type of girl to ask for more. INSKEEP: This has got to be a really common experience in this time when so many millions of people are displaced, people are refugees and many of them from war zones where the physical landscape that you note just literally isn't there anymore. It was destroyed. It was burned. The name has been changed. Different people are there. ALYAN: Absolutely. I mean, I think, and you add on to that, this other kind of complicating factor of having to defend one's existence or having to assure people that in seeking refuge in a different place, you know, you're doing that because you simply can't go back home again. INSKEEP: Years ago, I heard the story of a woman who made it all the way from war-torn Afghanistan to New York, I believe, and concluded after that experience that she belonged nowhere. She was not getting accustomed to the United States but after her experience could not imagine returning to Afghanistan. Do you feel like you belong anywhere? ALYAN: I would say for a very long time I felt like I belonged nowhere. The last couple of years I've sort of been re-conceptualizing it. Like, I could kind of belong everywhere. I belong wherever I am because I'm bringing with me whatever culture, whatever history, whatever love for food and music and memory and photographs that have been passed down to me. So I've gotten a little bit less attached to the idea of physical place needing to be big enough to hold me and hold my culture and hold everything that's important to me. INSKEEP: Are you bigger than any one place? Is that what you're saying? ALYAN: I think so. I think we all are. I mean - and I don't - you know, and I don't mean to undermine - like, I don't say that in the sense of Palestine isn't important to me anymore. Not - to the contrary. I think because Palestine is so important to me, I insist on bringing it everywhere I go. INSKEEP: The new novel by Hala Alyan is called "Salt Houses." (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HADI YA BAHAR") MANAL MOUSA: (Singing in foreign language).

• Psychology Today - https://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/name/Hala_Alyan_PsyD_New+York_New+York_282524

  Hala Alyan
  Psychologist, PsyD
  (646) 832-4491
  About Network
  Verified by Psychology Today
  I am a licensed clinical psychologist in New York City specializing in the assessment and treatment of trauma, substance abuse, anxiety, mood and relationship concerns, and cross-cultural issues. In my practice, I work with adults and adolescents who are coping with depression, anxiety, existential concerns, life transitions, and cross-cultural issues. My clinical training has included work in public schools, substance abuse centers, forensic settings, inpatient and outpatient hospital rotations, college counseling centers, and asylum seeking agencies. My training reflects my longstanding interest in working with underserved populations, including LGBTQ, immigrant, and marginalized individuals, and I provide psychotherapy in both English and Arabic.
  My approach emphasizes individuals' inner strength and resources, and involves reflection and exploration, enhancing coping strategies and incorporating my clients' interests, including art, music and writing, to help them develop a more authentic personal narrative. I believe therapy should be an illuminating, collaborative process, and love helping individuals unearth their innate dynamism and resiliency.
  In addition to private practice, I work as a part-time psychologist at New York University's Counseling and Wellness Services, and am an Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University, where I teach graduate-level courses on cross-cultural counseling and individual counseling practices.

• Poetry Foundation Website - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hala-alyan

  Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, she specialized in trauma and addiction work with various populations.
   
  Alyan's poetry collections include Atrium (2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry, Four Cities (2015), and Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. She is the author of the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). She has been awarded a Lannan Foundation fellowship and lives in Manhattan.

• Hala Alyan Website - https://www.halaalyan.com/

  Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review. She resides in Brookyln with her husband.

Alyan, Hala: SALT HOUSES

(Mar. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Alyan, Hala SALT HOUSES Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Fiction) $26.00 5, 2 ISBN: 978-0-544-91258-8
"Nostalgia is an affliction" a character states in Palestinian-American poet Alyan's impressive first novel, which tracks the dispersal of four generations of a Palestinian family.As matriarch Salma reads the future in a cup of coffee the night before her daughter Alia's wedding in 1963, the Yacoub family has already been uprooted for 15 years. In the decades to come the Yacoubs' distinctly personal experiences will mirror the experiences of immigrants and refugees around the world and the Palestinians' dislocation in particular. Salma feels lucky; unlike others moved into resettlement camps when Israelis forced them from Jaffa, her husband's wealth afforded them a house in Nablus. But transience has become the Yacoubs' way of life. Alia's older, more traditional sister, Widad, has already moved to Kuwait in an arranged marriage. When the Six-Day War breaks out in 1967, Alia happens to be visiting Widad in Kuwait City while her husband, Atef, and beloved brother, Mustafa, close friends and anti-occupation activists, remain trapped in Palestine. Only Atef makes it to Kuwait, with a secret guilt that will haunt him for years. Unlike her sister, the independent-minded Alia has married Atef, a professor, for love. Their difficult marriage becomes one of the novel's most compelling elements as the couple creates a life in Kuwait with their three children--Riham, Karam, and Souad--until the 1990 Iraq-Kuwait war forces them to flee to Amman. Karam is sent to college in Boston and becomes an assimilated American despite summers with his kids in an inherited apartment in Beirut. Artsy Souad also ends up in Boston but never feels at home in America. After a divorce, she moves to Beirut, where she re-creates herself. While more traditionally religious than her relatively cosmopolitan siblings, Riham is as disturbed as any Western reader when her adolescent stepson flirts with political extremism. In the next generation, Souad's daughter finds her own sense of displacement painful yet freeing. It's not always easy to follow Alyan's complex geographic and emotional mapping, but this journey is well worth taking.A deeply moving look inside the Palestinian diaspora.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Alyan, Hala: SALT HOUSES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911740&it=r&asid=46cff4d42be7fd9a1066334da8ea9ec9. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911740

Scattered to the wind

Lauren Bufferd
(May 2017): p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
SALT HOUSES
By Hala Alyan
HMH, $26, 320 pages
ISBN 9780544912588, eBook available
DEBUT FICTION

Salt Houses is a dazzling debut about four generations of the Yacoubs, a Palestinian family originally from Jaffa. Told from multiple points of view, the novel offers a unique perspective on Arab displacement, assimilation and the very notion of home. At the same time, it puts a human face on a conflict that many of us need to better understand.
The Yacoubs were relocated from Jaffa to Nablus before the novel even begins. The story opens in 1963, 15 years after this first relocation and just as Salma is reading the future in coffee grounds on her daughter Alia's wedding day. Though Salma tries to soften the message she detects, it soon becomes clear that the family will experience further displacements. After the Six-Day War (1967), they are forced to leave their home. Salma joins extended family in Jordan, and Alia and her husband, Atef, relocate to Kuwait where they raise a family. After Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the family scatters once again; this time the grown children of Alia and Atef, now with families of their own, disperse to Paris, Boston and Beirut.
Palestinian-American author Hala Alyan, who is also a practicing psychologist, balances the ordinary joys and burdens of family life with the deeper clashes of culture and homesickness that occur as the Yacoubs spread across the globe. Whether she is depicting the stormy marriage between Alia and Atef or their daughter Widad's concerns over her stepson's interest in the more extreme practitioners of Islam, Alyan serves her story well through precise, almost poetic language and empathy toward her characters.
Though the novel is not overtly political, both Alia and Atef are haunted by memories of Alia's brother, Mustafa, who died in an Israeli jail. But nostalgia is an indulgence they can ill afford. Transience is their way of life, and resilience is their legacy to their children. Salt Houses speaks to the specificity of the Palestinian diaspora, but it also mirrors the experiences of immigrants and exiles all over the world, making it very much a book for every reader.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Bufferd, Lauren. "Scattered to the wind." BookPage, May 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492735139&it=r&asid=05d66a7a81a97113d311b7cee7aea50e. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A492735139

Alyan, Hala. Salt Houses

Sally Bissell
142.3 (Feb. 15, 2017): p73.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Alyan, Hala. Salt Houses. Houghton Harcourt. May 2017.320p. ISBN 9780544912588. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780544912380. F
In what feels like a very personal debut novel, the award-winning poet Alyan, her lyrical skills on full display, traces four generations of the Yacoub family as they are forced into the ranks of the Palestinian diaspora. Constantly uprooted by war, Salma, Hussam, and their children Widad, Alia, and Mustafa make disparate decisions that have ramifications for their offspring over five decades. First fleeing Israeli tanks that bulldoze through their home in Jaffa, later settling in Nablus, only to be routed by the 1967 Six-Day War, Alia and her husband, Atef, relocate with her sister Widad to Kuwait. Salma, now a widow, joins the family in Amman, Jordan, while Mustafa, the rebellious brother who was the light around which his family circled, disappears. The Yacoubs are fortunate. Not relegated to refugee camps, they have the wherewithal to fashion new lives for themselves. Still, Alyan makes it abundantly clear how displaced persons, separated from their culture, their religion, and their homeland, are forever altered. VERDICT This timely historical does for the Palestinians what Khaled Hosseini did for the people of Afghanistan. By placing readers inside the hearts and minds of one Arab family scattered from Paris to Boston to Lebanon, she beautifully illustrates the resilience of the human spirit. [See Pre-pub Alert, 11/14/16.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Caption: A haunting look at today's China; another winner for Box; a quirky, touching, & addictive debut
Bissell, Sally
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Bissell, Sally. "Alyan, Hala. Salt Houses." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 73. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481649053&it=r&asid=15f59a83c29d529de8d134278a84103a. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A481649053

Salt Houses

264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Salt Houses
Hala Alyan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26
(320p) ISBN 978-0-544-91258-8

Alyan blends joy with pain, frustration with elation, longing with boredom in this beautiful debut novel filled with the panoply of life. The frontispiece tells the whole story in microcosm with a family tree of the Palestinian Yacoub family, who, for most of the book, no longer lives in Palestine. One brother, Mustafa, is lost in the Six-Day War and the sisters, Alia and Widad, relocate to Kuwait while their mother, Salma, moves to Jordan. Later generations end up in France, America, and Lebanon. Alia, the young bride in 1963 in the first pages, is the family matriarch with Alzheimer's as the book comes to a close. In 1977, her daughter, Souad, is a tantrum-throwing five-year-old in Kuwait City; by 1990, she is a student in Paris entering into an ill-considered marriage, then, 14 years later, a divorced mother of two, recently relocated from America to Beirut. Chapters focus on different family members as time and geography shift. These lives full of promise and loss will feel familiar to any reader; Alyan's excellent storytelling and deft handling of the complex relationships ensures that readers will not soon forget the Yacoub family. (May)
Caption: Hala Alyan's Salt Houses is a beautiful novel about generations of a Palestinian family (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Salt Houses." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 65. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928064&it=r&asid=ea9977e1b50104c61a72179d63faaa2b. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928064

Salt Houses

Bridget Thoreson
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Salt Houses.
By Hala Alyan.
May 2017.320p. HMH, $26 (9780544912588).
The war may have only lasted six days, but its impact echoes through generations of a Palestinian family in this ambitious debut novel. Alia, an eye-catching bride who struggles as a wife and mother and finally inhabits a fog of confusion as an old woman, is uncompromising in her longing for a home to replace the one she was forced to leave following the Six-Day War in 1967. The death of her brother, Mustafa, in the war haunts both her and her husband, who harbors his own aching desire for the past. Each chapter offers a crystalline glimpse into a different character's life, their stories jarringly redirected by the conflicts in the Middle East. Alyan uses deft storytelling to show that the way the characters' relatives see them does not always match the view from their own eyes. Each of those points of view offers insight into the clashes and misunderstandings that arise between the generations, aggravated by the tension between tradition and modernity. This is a moving story about a family's battle to salvage what remains when their home is taken away.--Bridget Thoreson
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "Salt Houses." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689487&it=r&asid=a7792a44c24af36634be9bd27bf169e6. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689487

Hala Alyan. Salt Houses

Issa J. Boullata
91.5 (September-October 2017): p77.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Hala Alyan. Salt Houses . Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 312 pages.
For a debut novel, Salt Houses is a sophisticated one with an interesting plot and well-developed characters. It deals with one of the worlds most complicated and continuing problems, namely, that of the Palestinians suffering from the loss of most of their country to Israel and attempting, as refugees, to reconstitute their lives elsewhere. It is written in a lyrical style by an award-winning author of three poetry collections, Hala Alyan, a teacher at New York University and a practicing clinical psychologist. Dr. Alyan is also an impressive performer with several talks and appearances to her credit.
Salt Houses tells the story of four generations of a Palestinian family, the Yacoubs, who originally lived in a villa in Jaffa on the Mediterranean seashore until the 1967 SixDay War forced them inland to Nablus as refugees. When in 1963 mother Salma reads the future in the dregs of her daughter, Alias, coffee cup on the eve of the latter's wedding, she sees her forthcoming uprooted life and her children's; she does not tell her of that, but it comes to pass in the 1967 war.
Alia and her husband, Atef, who moved to Kuwait and had three children, are uprooted in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invades. They lose their home--again-and scatter to Boston, Paris, and Beirut, where they and the grown-up married children start new lives in foreign cities, mostly apart from one another, with painful problems of assimilation, though with some occasions of better opportunity.

In this novel, Hala Alyan has effectively portrayed half a century of the Palestinian diaspora with much of its agony and human suffering that daily newspapers do not narrate when reporting on current events related to the Palestine-Israel conflict. Her novel should be read by all those who, with a sense of responsibility, need to know real peoples feelings and predicaments.
Issa J. Boullata
McGill University
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Boullata, Issa J. "Hala Alyan. Salt Houses." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 5, 2017, p. 77. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA502351939&it=r&asid=2cc5bfb61d2a332cd64927492b66e5d3. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A502351939

'Salt Houses' examines identity in diaspora

Denise Hassanzade Ajiri
(May 9, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Byline: Denise Hassanzade Ajiri
Identity in diaspora is something that always concerns the displaced, especially those who were reluctantly forced out of their homelands. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish put it eloquently in his poem about Palestinians refugees: "... We are what we produced in the land that was ours/ we are what's left of us in exile/ we are what's left of us in exile/ we are the plants of broken vase/ we are what we are, but who are we?"
Such is the concern of the Palestinian-American writer and poet Hala Alyan in her debut novel Salt Houses. The book is a chronology of a Palestinian family, the Yacoub family, and the wandering life imposed on them by the Six-Day War of 1967 and subsequently Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The story opens in 1963 in the West Bank city of Nablus and continues until 2014 as the family's lifves stretch through five host countries: Lebanon, France, Jordan, Kuwait, and the United States.
The characters of the book are from four generations: Salma, the mother of the family who earlier in 1948 fled the city of Jaffa with her husband due to Arab-Israeli conflict; her three children; her three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. The book showcases how different characters see the world, one through a daring eye and another conservatively. It paints how different generations react to change: As one reluctantly refuses to let go of the past, the other one is willing to embrace the change.
"Salt Houses" describes how distance deprives people from being part of their loved ones' life, including Riham, Salma's granddaughter: "All she knows of her siblings are her memories of them as children and then, abruptly, snapshots of adults whom she sees every couple of years."
The constant search for somewhere called home is something that rings throughout the whole book. Alia, who is forced out of Nablus in 1968, refuses to accept Kuwait as her new home and seeks refuge in the Jordanian capital of Amman whenever she gets a chance. Her daughter Souad is as disoriented. After living in Kuwait, Amman, Paris, and Boston, she eventually decides to reside in the Lebanese capital Beirut. And while to some home is "somewhere familiar, somewhere people look like us, talk like us," others even can't describe what home is anymore.
The whole idea of displacement even resonates in the difficulty that the displaced have in describing themselves. In Beirut, Souad goes back to being Palestinian as her accent exposes her, but in the United States she becomes "brown" and people are confused when she tries to explain that even though she lived in Kuwait, she wasn't a Kuwaiti and "no, she had never been to Palestine, but yes, she was Palestinian."
"Salt Houses" reminds us how children fall victim to war and conflict. It disturbs their lives as the 2006 Lebanon war disturbed Linah's as a schoolgirl. Linah, Salma's great-granddaughter who lives with her family in Boston, spends her every summer in Beirut. Prior to the war, which lasted for 34 days during the summer, summers were about swimming and playing. But this time it "is just heat and mosquitos and the bombings that sometimes make the windows shake. All the adults do is talk about evacuation and warships and explosions. They watch men yell on the television and shake their heads."
And that's not the end of it. War and conflict create divides not only among the adults, but also among the children. When Marie, a Lebanese girl, hears Linah talking about the war in Lebanon, she snaps back at her that she's not even Lebanese and reminds her of her accented Arabic. She adds, "You think your people deserve to be here? My mom told me all about them. Palestinians killed my uncle during the war.""
The story revolves around eight main characters and each chapter focuses on one of them. Alyan tries to develop each and every character as the story goes by, but her attempt is not successful. Characters seem unripe and even though they are involved in interesting actual events, it's difficult to feel connected to them as they remain fictional.
However, Alyan is a skilled storyteller which makes her debut a pleasant read. She is able to string along the reader through the book and keep the reader interested.
"Salt Houses" is a book on migration and the issues that the migrated struggle with through in their lives: how to integrate into the new society while staying connected to the old roots, how to keep the second generation rooted in their parents' culture and tradition without alienating them from the host country, and, with all these concerns, how to find a way to carry on with a "normal" life.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Ajiri, Denise Hassanzade. "'Salt Houses' examines identity in diaspora." Christian Science Monitor, 9 May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491355430&it=r&asid=3269e2ff3d5fbde824088d4d666ab702. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491355430

"Alyan, Hala: SALT HOUSES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA482911740&asid=46cff4d42be7fd9a1066334da8ea9ec9. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017. Bufferd, Lauren. "Scattered to the wind." BookPage, May 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA492735139&asid=05d66a7a81a97113d311b7cee7aea50e. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017. Bissell, Sally. "Alyan, Hala. Salt Houses." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 73. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA481649053&asid=15f59a83c29d529de8d134278a84103a. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017. "Salt Houses." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 65. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA487928064&asid=ea9977e1b50104c61a72179d63faaa2b. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017. Thoreson, Bridget. "Salt Houses." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA488689487&asid=a7792a44c24af36634be9bd27bf169e6. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017. Boullata, Issa J. "Hala Alyan. Salt Houses." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 5, 2017, p. 77. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA502351939&asid=2cc5bfb61d2a332cd64927492b66e5d3. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017. Ajiri, Denise Hassanzade. "'Salt Houses' examines identity in diaspora." Christian Science Monitor, 9 May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491355430&asid=3269e2ff3d5fbde824088d4d666ab702. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

• Gulf Coast
  http://gulfcoastmag.org/reviews-and-interviews/art-and-reviews/hala-alyan-hijra/
  Word count: 298

  Apr 18, 2017

  Conor Bracken's work has been nominated for the Best of the Net, and appears or is forthcoming in Forklift OH, Handsome, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, and THRUSH Poetry Journal, among others. Originally from Virginia, he lives in Houston.
  Micro-Review: Hala Alyan’s HIJRA
  Conor Bracken
  Apocalyptic, unflinching, flinty yet lush, Hala Alyan’s HIJRA is a gathering of vivid lyrics on flight and exile. As the title suggests (hijra refers to the prophet Muhammed’s migration from Mecca to Medina while being pursued by ultimately unsuccessful assassins), Alyan’s central concern is transition: the crossing of a liminal boundary from familiar—though dangerous—to promised—though alien—lands (Medina had been prepared as a refuge for Muhammed and his followers).
  What is perhaps most interesting about this collection is the sustained ambivalence the speaker feels for both termini: home is coated in “luminous dust, / a soil red as zinnias,” a simile whose power lies in its conjunction of the floral and the sanguine, whereas the land of exile (Wisconsin maybe?), a “necklace of grungy cities” and has “a scientific god,” is a place where the exiled say their names “as if someone has cleared [their] mouth[s] of bells.” The best poems in this collection thrum with this tension.
  Others have an almost magical realist quality to them, which at its strongest highlights the awful extremity of war (“After we buried our men / no rain fell for twelve moons, / a eulogy of famine”), but at its weakest feels unfocused and strained (“borders like the maps we ate, grit tangled / between our teeth, the years swelling // like one hundred arrows”). When Alyan deploys her habit for the rapturous surreal within clearly elaborated scenarios, her poems keen and sing.

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