Poet extraordinaire Purvi Shah is now hosting a women’s radio show on Jus Radio. Earlier this year, she kindly invited me to talk about being a woman writer and being part of a team that founded UpSet Press.

Here are my stories of how I emerged from public school ESL student to a grassroots indie publisher. It was only after the interview that I realized my dream of writing and publishing began in second grade. I can still very vividly remember the very first full story I read in English “The Day the Sun Danced.”

Thank you Purvi Shah for always being such a supporter of the work of writing.

Check out the exuberant co-founder of UpSet Press, Zohra Saed, on naughty literary adventures & micro-publishing vanguard voices.

Three Parts:

Zohra Saed Part 1

Zohra Saed Part 2

Zohra Saed Part 3

A Woman’s World airs at 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays on Jus Radio. You can listen online here or download the Jus Radio app to listen on the go.

You can find here an archive of activists, artists, dancers and other groundbreaking women in the community. I’m honored to be included in the mix. (I’m also listening to some great Hindi songs on the station now!)

Eid Mubarak! This was my favorite Eid card and created by Kalimat Publishing, a children’s publishing house in UAE. I wish I had this when I was growing up!

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz are publishing a series of notebooks, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, that is comprised of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations.
A note is a trace, a word, a drawing that all of a sudden becomes part of thinking, and is transformed into an idea. This publication project follows that path, presenting the mind in a prologue state, in a pre-public arena. A space for intimacy and not yet of criticism, dOCUMENTA (13) is publishing the unpublishable, the voice—and the reader is our alibi and ally. Note taking encompasses witnessing, drawing, writing, and diagrammatic thinking; it is speculative, manifests a preliminary moment, a passage, and acts as a memory aid.
With contributions by authors from a range of disciplines, such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, economic- and political theory, language- and literature studies, as well as poetry, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts constitutes a space of dOCUMENTA (13) to explore how thinking emerges and lies at the heart of re-imagining the world. In its cumulative nature, this publication project is a continuous articulation of the emphasis of dOCUMENTA (13) on the propositional, underlining the flexible mental moves to generate space for the possible. Thoughts, unlike statements, are always variations: this is the spirit in which these notebooks are proposed.
The notebooks, designed by Leftloft, will be published from March 2011 on in three different formats, 16 to 48 pages, in English and German.

Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13)’s Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev together with Agent, Member of Core Group, and Head of Department Chus Martínez, this series is edited by Head of Publications, Bettina Funcke

Sahar Muradi and I composed poems for Afghan cities “Misspelled Cities/Falsch geschriebene Stadte.” Sahar’s poetry series was titled “A Secret Life in Misspelled Cities” while mine was titled “The Secret Lives of Misspelled Cities” (title of upcoming poetry collection in press). Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the Director of documenta(13) was kind enough to offer us a space for poetry in the midst of so much important art. The notebook is available as a pdf here: Sahar Muradi & Zohra Saed notebook 105 and it is both in English and German.

Visual aids are very important to me in my writing. I like to see places that I’m writing about, experience things that I’m writing about. So throughout my career I’ve taken photographs of things, which I can then study. The whole business in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, when he talks about the spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility—a photograph can help you do that.

W.T. Vollmann, Paris Review (“William T. Vollmann, The Art of Fiction” Fall, 2000)

I’ve been reading a lot of Vollmann these days and came across this quote. This was in reference to the first book he wrote in his early twenties, after his trip to Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. This quote perhaps explains my latest preoccupation with taking iPhone snapshots and playing them up with instagram filters. This visual archiving has been part of my writing process, not necessarily a new photography hobby. You can follow the photos I take on instagram (@zohrasaed not sure how to link it since it’s an iPhone app).

Until I find the time to upload the instagram photos up on my blog… I will, in it’s place, upload here my favorite purchase of the summer and something I have been remembering how to type — in Cunningham JHS, I learned to type on a typewriter very similar to this. Cunningham was supposed to be a computer savvy junior high school, so they taught us everything from typing on a 1930s typewriter to writing up simple programs, to learning how to use an old fashioned printing press.

An example of the metal movable type that we used to align to print a page at Cunningham JHS 234

Only in retrospect do I feel fortunate to have gone to such a school. It must be where the kernel of loving the texture and mechanical parts that produced the printed word began. Thank you Cunningham for that early lesson. Now, I have this beauty sharing desk space with my Mac.

My latest typewriter circa 1930s

On June 4th, 2012 Afifa Yusufi, Sahar Muradi and I accepted the Silver Medal for Best Anthology Award at the BEA Convention in NYC. The award ceremony was a spin off event and we were in the company of brilliant and adventurous writers.

Afifa Yusufi, Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi (L-R)

The award acknowledged ten years of work bringing this important anthology to the world. Sahar and I were blessed to be on this journey together and to meet so many talented Afghan American writers. Since the anthology’s publication we’ve met more writers and have considered a second anthology. For now, we have been busy coming together with writers and artists to continue the movement of Afghan American art and literature making. Thank you for acknowledging independent publishing. Thank you to the University of Arkansas Press for the support these years.