An Interview with Mehdi Kashani

By C.C. Cooke & Quincy Saadeh

---

West Branch: The stories in your forthcoming book explore dysfunctional relationships, often in ways so atypical they are comedic. For example, in “Bazaar Bozorg,” Zara’s bizarre experience with her fiance’s infidelity leads to a begrudging acceptance for the situation at hand. How did you frame the conditions of relationships in this collection to be so absurd yet simultaneously so relatable? 

Mehdi Kashani: Characters have no control over what happens to them; what defines them is how they react to the situations, absurd or not. We tend to label behavior “absurd” when we don’t fully grasp the interior logic behind it. If a character, for instance, goes dancing right after learning of her father’s death, it may strike us as outlandish, or even, irrational, unless the writer persuades us that, within that character’s emotional landscape, the reaction makes sense.

In “Bazaar Bozorg,” the expectations placed on Zara by her family are immense, heightening the emotional stakes. It becomes the writer’s responsibility to render her and the world around her in a way that her response to an unlikely or undesirable situation feels not only plausible, but inevitable, or at the very least, understandable. Zara has several reasons to return to Iran and confront her unfinished business. Beyond the obvious—like, her parents’ wishes, the chance to connect with a niece she’s never met—there are more private, self-serving impulses at play. She senses that her inability to fully invest in her present relationship is tied to a past she hasn’t yet confronted.

As for universality, I believe that human emotions, pared down to their purest form, are widely legible across cultures. Jealousy, resentment, guilt aren’t bound by culture. The writer’s task is to clear away distractions and streamline those emotions. Sometimes that even extends to small practical choices. For instance, when writing Iranian characters, I tend to choose simple names that are accessible to non-Iranian readers. Of course, a degree of authenticity is sacrificed by resorting to a limited pool of names, but that can help the reader to focus on what matters most: the emotional core of the story (though I suspect great Russian writers might disagree.)

WB: We are curious about how your personal experiences inform your characters’ relationships. How do the two relate? 

MK: That infamous question, haha. Memoirs draw directly from personal experience, but in fiction, experience is usually just a point of departure. I rarely use my lived experiences in my stories (maybe that’s partly because I’m too self-conscious—the sense that I might be judged through them). But that doesn’t stop me from borrowing from my “lived” emotions. For instance, if I’ve had a long-distance relationship and I write a story about long-distance relationships, I can definitely use some of the emotions I went through in that piece.

Having said that, several of my character-driven stories originate from fragments of other people’s lives. It could be an overheard conversation or something that happened to a friend. For instance, when I was a teenager in Tehran, we once heard a heated argument from outside. Through the noise, we pieced together that a neighbor’s son had been watching a girl shower across the cul-de-sac, and her father had discovered it. Two decades later, it resurfaced and eventually became “The Naked Dream.”

I’m careful about using someone else’s story. I try to ensure that the fictional character shares little resemblance to the real person beyond the initial spark. Sometimes I go to the extreme of changing the character’s gender to obfuscate it even further. A work of fiction should stand on its own, in its own world, without real-life crutches. That’s the goal. The writer is an alchemist who uses real life as an ingredient in their concoction, hoping to tell a broader emotional truth.

WB: The collection presents a number of contrasting worlds, characters, and storylines. What is the common thread? What came first, the “theme” per se, or the stories? 

MK: The common thread is something that tends to emerge after the fact. As a writer, I’m not fully conscious of it while I’m working. Readers, in a way, are better positioned to come up with the common theme as they encounter the collection all at once, with fresh eyes, and can trace the patterns more clearly than I can from within the process.

As for what comes first, I don’t remember ever sitting down thinking, Let me write about loneliness or infidelity. The stories usually begin as a series of unrelated fragments. For example, I might hear a friend mention meeting a woman at a laundromat; a few days later, I notice a museum visitor gazing into an abstract painting that, for whatever reason, reminds me of a washer in motion, then I pass a coffee shop beside a laundromat and see a man pulling his chair closer to a woman. None of these moments, on their own, constitute a fully-fledged story, but at some point—often unexpectedly, on a treadmill or a streetcar—something clicks, and these fragments begin to converge.

The act of writing, then, becomes one of connecting those dots, that is finding the narrative logic that binds them. That said, no writer is entirely neutral. We’re all drawn, consciously or not, to certain themes. So, while the fragments might seem incidental, what I notice and hold onto is already shaped by the themes I’m predisposed to explore.

WB: How would you characterize “The Wedding Of Leila and Hamid” in relation to the stories in your forthcoming collection? 

MK: “The Wedding of Leila and Hamid” consists of thirteen interconnected micro-stories, each of which could potentially be expanded into a fully-fledged short story in the form of the ones in the collection. However, here I was being more playful with the form than in those stories. The way each snippet segues into the next was inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s play, La Ronde, whose style I fell in love with when I was first introduced to it.

It might be interesting to note that the idea for the story came to me during COVID, when I took long walks. I’ve always been infatuated with the stories of side characters, the ones that aren’t in the spotlight. So the idea of a wedding in which the bride and groom are effectively absent felt very appealing to me. I even titled the piece after them, in part to mislead the reader into thinking the story would center on the couple.

It took me years to fully establish the range of characters and their stories. It felt like a jigsaw puzzle (the transitions between characters, the order of their introduction, and the overall structure). I wasn’t sure whether any journal would take it on, given its experimental nature, so I’m very pleased that West Branch trusted this unusually long story.