Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Adam Al-Sirgany. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Adam, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?
For the better part of my life, it’s been my goal to be my own generation’s Gertrude Stein. I worry about how pretentious that sounds, but it’s true to what I’ve intended to be. I want to be remembered, as a dear friend has put it, as “a den mother to lunatics” who reshaped the world through their creativity.
I grew up in Stockton, IL, a town of about 2,000 people. It was this really idiosyncratic, redneck space in the Driftless Midwest. I’m the son of a vagabond Arab jeweler and a local school superintendent, and was very much raised by my grandparents, who were hog farmers. We were weird, even there. We didn’t have so-phis-ti-ca-tion, but we had our own sense of taste. And we had music and books!
When I was in maybe 7th or 8th grade, I found this copy of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” and it drug me straight out of my chair. Really. I was wandering around trying to step out the rhythms of “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree/ In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity/ On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained/ In the hollow round of my skull.”
I started chasing the literary Moderns after that, started learning about their lives. Eliot was magic to me, sonically. Though, off the page, he was a little too stuffy. But, Stein. Stein was this person unto herself, who out of her attention to the arts helped support and elevate the voices of a complex and vibrant, if loosely-connected community of writers, painters, and general oddballs, people who were daring to face a world that must have looked like it was falling apart the whole while.
In Stein, I saw someone who understood that fame was not the objective of doing great work. Obviously, she wanted to be known, to be “a lion,” but she put so much of her mind, her energy, her love into others who were manifesting potential beauties and artistries no one had ever seen. To me, that was her accomplishment. And she did it all while staying so deeply, fixedly to her own radical vision of the language arts.
With that guide, I’ve set myself to works that have given me the freedom to craft my own peculiar writing—lyrically-driven prose about the Middle East and Middle West—while also allowing me to support the artworks of significance to my own vision of what remains possible in this universe of untouched wonders.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Like many literary artists, my endeavors are multidirectional. While I can point to many things I “do,” the most significant have been these:
I am the Executive Director of 1-Week Critique (1WC). 1WC is a nonprofit digital editing studio, which aims to provide literary education and pedagogical support to writers, whatever genre they are operating in, whatever their level of formal education, and regardless of the means by which they have found themselves compelled towards the literary arts.
The organization is the kind of grassroots, community effort I always dreamed my artistic life would yield. At 1WC, we have sought to rethink the sometimes Ponzi-esque elements of professional arts training, which for many folks places high bars to entry and offers few professional rewards. It’s been our goal to lower the bars for learner’s wanting to engage creative writing and to provide literary educators tools that make their lives easier.
So we have formulated a diverse set of services:
Every Thursday we work with the Iowa City Public Library’s Teen Space, hosting free, weekly poetry workshops for teens and tweens.
Via our website, we offer feedback on short literary pieces to writers who are looking for swift responses and/or who can’t afford the time and commitments of MFAs, PhDs, or traditional workshops. (That’s actually where our name comes from.)
We publish several free resources for educators—including The Interview Series, discussions with authors demystifying the editing process and comparative texts of the works of those authors; Appreciations, wherein literary magazine editors share work from peer magazines they admire; and Teaching Takeaways, a monthly poetry break-down, which we encourage educators to use in their classrooms as single-poem lesson plans.
As an organization, we’ve tried to be legitimately democratic. If one of our volunteer team members wants to try something and it fits the vision, we’ve done our best to be supportive and to extend our arms in a manner that lets us reach into the realms of lit our staff is passionate about. We’re “follow our nose,” and that’s let us dare to take on tasks that don’t suit—and need not suit—more conventional models of literary education and exploration, and we’re damn proud of that.
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Professionally, I’m also the Acquisitions and Developmental Editor for Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP). SFWP is an independent press founded in 1998 by Andrew Gifford. We publish exciting fiction and creative nonfiction of every genre, maintain an online literary journal and run an annual internationally-recognized Awards Program.
My work with SFWP is to help select books for international publication and to work with authors to shape those books into their most readable and most marketable forms.
People often ask me about how I ended up doing this work. And, like many things in the arts, it happened out of an organic collision of luck and ambition. As I mentioned, I always wanted to be Gertrude Stein, and I connected with the press through my long-time friend, the press’ Managing Editor, and the world’s foremost choreopoet, Monica Prince. By way of that connection, I was lucky enough to have Andrew Gifford take me under his wing. I worked as a ghostwriter for most of my professional career, and think I’m good at it—still do it and still enjoy meeting remarkable people with remarkable stories—but I wanted so badly to work on books from an angle that let me shape not only narratives but also canons.
When I started doing work with SFWP, the press already had more than two decades of publishing under its belt. Our history and our catalogue is, as Andrew likes to say, as diverse as our bookshelves.
Now, at the beginning of our 25th year, we are publishing some of our best books ever. We have multiple six-figure film deals in the works. And that’s happening because we’re passionate about books and remain bold enough to work with the books we believe in.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
There are ways of orienting your life towards achieving normative successes. By that I mean that you can aim yourself in the direction of what the average (mode) wants. You can also hope, out of aiming strategically, to achieve above the mode—financially, in accolades, in children, whatever. You can pursue your victories such that the mode notices. But I’ve never had any real interest in normative successes. I’ve never cared at all about the mode.
In that way, it’s often very hard to be understood when I share things about my professional and artistic trajectories. I’ve lived amongst folks who were homeless and worked directly with billionaires. I can draw you a line between those things, but none of it was as simple or linear as that sentence implies. Those decisions, like most of my decisions, haven’t been made because I had some clear vision of, say, demonstrating a political awareness of financial diversity in America, or capitalizing on some dream position by proving my mettle. Rather, my choices were made in the course of a more spiritual journey, one of seeing the self through the many kinds of wholenesses of others.
Something or someone comes into my life. And I say to myself, “There’s a story here.” For me that means there’s something about someone, their situation, that is leading me to comprehend more of the universe that remains unknown to me. I’m never trying to wrangle it. As Whitman says “Myself moving forward then and now and forever,/ Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,/ Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them, Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,/ Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.”
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Everything’s rewarding about being a creative. I’ve had more than 30 jobs in my lifetime. I’m not talking about projects. I’ve had 30 plus different titles: the Baskin-Robbins of gig work. I’ve lived in around a dozen towns and cities. I’ve never had a single life long, but I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing so many lives, in so many places, in so many ways. If I wasn’t a creative, that likely wouldn’t have been the case.
But, also, a creative’s life has given me what I believe is this insight: there are no better or worse lives. There are lives folks accept and those they don’t. My life has been about art. I’m not always happy about individual circumstances, but I accept my life. It’s been an incredible one to live as the person who I am.
One of my favorite thinkers, Hannah Arendt, frequently quotes St. Augustine’s definition of love, Volo ut sis. Meaning “I want you to be.” Art is reshaping something by helping it become what it wishes most to be in its thriving.
Art, in other words, is to see, to really witness, that which is in front of you. Like every artist, every human, I fail at that endeavor more than I succeed. But every day I wake up with the chance to love again and more fully. My works, and the other works I adore, and the people I admire greatly, and the spirits in my life, I get to try to love them into their finest self-becoming. And in those moments it goes right, everything is.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.adamalsirgany.com
- Instagram: adam_al_sirgany
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adam.sirgany
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-sirgany-8a8172124/
- Twitter: @adam_al_sirgany
- Other: For 1WC https://www.1weekcritique.com IG: 1weekcritique Twitter: @1WeekCritique Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@1weekcritique FOR SFWP https://www.sfwp.com IG: santafewritersproject Twitter: @SFWP Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sfwp98 Designing Context-Rich Learning by Extending Reality https://www.igi-global.com/book/designing-context-rich-learning-extending/309084
Image Credits
Ingrid Claire Wenzler