Today I have the pleasure of introducing all of you to the brilliant Parisa Akhbari. Parisa has been writing a never ending journal with her friend for two decades and her upcoming novel beautifully pays tribute to this journal. Today we’re talking about writing a never ending journal, how our writing becomes more than just writing, and how writing can sometimes hold our truths better than the spoken word. Just Another Epic Love Poem releases March 12, 2024.
Bookish Brews Snapshot
Just Another Epic Love Poem by Prisa Akhbari
Mitra and Bea have been writing a never ending poem together since they were thirteen. It's the one place where they can be completely vulnerable and honest about anything and everything. Everything except the one thing that could change it all, that Mitra is hopelessly in love with Bea.
🎶 Lyrical Prose 😭 Emotional 🎂 Coming of Age 💖 Queer Romance
- Genre: Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult
Amanda: Hi Parisa! Thank you for joining me to talk about your never-ending journal. Before we start, can you tell us about yourself and Just Another Epic Love Poem?
Parisa Akhbari: Thanks for inviting me in for a chat! I’m Parisa Akhbari, author of Just Another Epic Love Poem, a queer young adult literary romance. When I’m not writing, I’m exploring stories in a completely different context as a mental health therapist working primarily with adolescent, LGBTQ, and BIPOC clients. My down time is spent cooking my grandma’s Persian recipes, ferrying around the Pacific Northwest, and watching some sort of superhero movie with my wife and dogs.
Just Another Epic Love Poem follows Mitra and Bea, two queer, brown best friends in Catholic school who have been writing a never-ending poem back and forth since they were thirteen. Now high school seniors, Mitra is grappling with the fact that she has feelings for Bea, and is afraid to shake up the intimate friendship they’ve forged as a way to survive their conservative environment together. The novel explores how Mitra and Bea’s friendship–and their never-ending poem–transform as the two fall in love with each other. It also tracks the way love and vulnerability intertwine in other forms–in poetry, in Mitra’s big decisions about life after high school, and in her attempt to reconnect with her estranged mother. This book is full of queer angst and queer love. It’s a celebration of poetry as a vehicle for survival and resistance, and I can’t wait to share it with readers.
Amanda: What inspired you to start journaling? How long have you been doing it?
Parisa: When I was a graduating senior in high school, my best friend Emily was in the grade below me. As we prepared to part ways at the end of the summer, I worried about how our friendship might be reshaped by all the changes ahead of us. I wanted to find a way for us to stay connected. We obviously had social media and texting and phone calls at our disposal, but in high school, so many of our conversations played out in notes passed in class or stuffed in the vents of our lockers. We’d write each other serious letters, silly rhymes and songs, and stream-of-consciousness-type journal entries. We’d write poems. It felt like handwritten communication was part of the skeletal system around which our friendship grew.
At the end of that summer, I bought us this big, golden hardback notebook with a ribbon bookmark. I handed it off to Emily with an invitation for the journal to be a common thread between us, keeping us connected. We began pasting photos inside, collaging magazine scraps, writing journal entries, mapping out our travels. We first started the journal in 2007, so our never-ending journal has been around for almost seventeen years now. Sometimes it’ll sit on one of our bookshelves for a while, but we keep going back to it, adding to this living document of our changing lives over the past two decades. In that time we’ve lived in different states and even different countries, we’ve moved through different relationships and jobs and realities, and it’s amazing to see that this journal–and our friendship–can hold all of that.
Amanda: What does it mean to have a never ending journal? How does it work and what keeps you coming back to it? How has journaling inspired your fiction writing and how has your fiction inspired your journaling?
Parisa: To me, the never-ending quality of our journal comes from the call-and-response energy it exudes. I’ll write about something and Emily will riff off that. She’ll comment in the margins of my pages and layer her own pictures with mine, so it’s never just “my stuff” and “her stuff.” That’s what close friendships can feel like. They become more than just the sum of two individuals; they crackle with this magic created in the shared space between people.
Emily and I never had firm rules for our journal in the way that the characters in Just Another Epic Love Poem have rules for their never-ending poem. We give ourselves flexibility with content and timing. What keeps me coming back to the journal is its rich sense of history: I can flip back through the pages and see how much our voices, our faces, and our lives have changed since we began. I’m also drawn to the journal because, since its inception, it’s been this place where we can explore and name the hardest things. The journal was the first place I spoke to Emily in depth about the diagnosis of my disability when I was eighteen, and I was first processing what it meant to be sick. Emily used the journal as a vehicle to write through her own uncertainties and low moments. It’s like a paper confessional. I wanted to create something like that for the protagonists of Just Another Epic Love Poem.
Amanda: I love how you describe the journal as something more than the sum of two individuals. I often feel that words and writing take on a life of their own as they reach others. In what ways do you hope your words will reach readers?
Parisa: I agree that writing takes on a life of its own once it’s out in the world. That’s been a helpful concept for me to understand since submitting the final draft of the novel. It’s not mine anymore; it’s for the reader now. Readers may take things from this book that I never intended, and I look forward to seeing what meaning they might make from the story.
My biggest hope is that queer and BIPOC teens can see little reflections of possibility in Just Another Epic Love Poem. Whether it’s seeing their identities represented, seeing that they have the right to take up space and live main-character lives, or noticing that voices and stories like theirs deserve to be listened to, I hope teens feel a sense of connection and potential.
For readers of all ages, I hope Mitra’s journey toward self-compassion, kindness, and vulnerability resonates with them. Throughout the novel, she asks herself and the poets she admires whether it’s worth it to be vulnerable and trust someone in the hopes of achieving connection, when there’s a chance she could end up rejected or abandoned. I hope that central question sticks with readers.
Amanda: The parallels between yours and Emily’s journal and your lives and your protagonists’ poem and their lives create a beautiful dance between the imagined and reality. Can you speak on how fiction mirrors real life and vice versa?
Parisa: I think real life experiences are like the colors with which writers paint their stories. Fiction writers aren’t taking faithful snapshots of reality, but we’re playing with different combinations of hues and interpreting these shades of real experiences. We create fictional worlds and characters and scenarios in which to explore core emotional truths. My high school self was unlike Mitra, and my high school years looked different from hers, but the themes of vulnerability, trust and connection are as real as can be.
I appreciate how you describe the dance between the imagined and reality. I do think there is a recursive process between imagination and reality, especially when it comes to readers who have been pushed to the margins. We have to believe in the possibility of our own futures, and our own worth, in order to materialize them, and for many, fiction is where they’re given the imaginative space to start believing. This reminds me of an interview I saw with actress Laverne Cox, in which she described herself as a “possibility model.” Stories–whether written or performed–model possibilities for their audiences, and I hope Just Another Epic Love Poem does that for its readers.
