Alia Yunis

Here and There All At Once

Keeping a Full House

Posted on February 5, 2022 by Alia

Full House was my first Hollywood experience…At the end of last semester, I found myself doing something I had never done before: sharing with my students my journey to Hollywood. I told them it began with this show called Full House, which ended before any of them were even born. But they oohed and aahed, a group of students who had grown up all over the world. They had all seen it, connected to it, even though it didn’t represent their worlds in terms of race, gender, social structures or socio economics. I, however, did not ooh and ahh when I was told I’d be on the set up Full House. I had won a comedy writing award from Warner Bros as a student, and prize was to intern on a TV show.

I expected to be put on something edgy, not a show that could hardly be raved about for its writing. But edgy writing doesn’t have as wide of an audience, especially if families and kids are the target market. Jack Gilbert, the internship coordinator told me, Full House is what every studio dreams of: a show that lasts years, remains timeless, and thus can be recycled for royalties for generations to come, and doesn’t cost a fortune to make. “This show’s biggest expense are the actors,” he said. Hearing about Bob Saget’s passing, so soon after remembering those times with my students, has revived the emotional roller coaster of arriving in LA for the first time. John Stamos had been one of the great crushes of my teen years, and I felt a bit star struck in his presence, so it was easier to focus on Bob Saget’s acting. The thing I remember most is when he wanted to change a line in the script, and one of the producers said to him, “No, this laugh is for John; he’s the star in this scene. You play straight.” Saget was the only one of them who was a stand-up comedian. But he just nodded agreement. That’s how ensemble, in real life or made for TV, lasts so long, and that warmth is the part viewers craved and could connect to, despite the show’s lack of diversity. It’s how you keep the house full, as they say in the movies. (of course, there are negatives to what I saw at that time in terms of the writer’s room, but I leave that for another time)

Early Morning Calls

Posted on September 11, 2021 by Alia

How September 11 Made Me a Muslim Writer

When I woke up on Sept 11, 2001 in my apartment in LA, it was still dark. I was a struggling screenwriter up with the sun. I was trying to be like Stephen King, who I’d heard somewhere woke up at 3 am to get his writing done by 7 am. Part of that routine was to not check email, turn on the TV or radio. Thus, in the silence, I jumped when my phone rang at 6:15 am. My caller ID said it was the person I’d had dinner with the night before. “See what your people have done?” he said before I could say hello. “What people?” I asked. “They flew into the World Trade Center.” “How is that supposed to be funny?” I replied to this aspiring comedy writer. By then, I knew who “my people” were, as anytime there was an explosion anywhere in the world, Arabs and Muslims first reactions have always been, “Please don’t let it be us.” But I thought he was in his inner Stephen King writing moment. “I don’t think this is a very funny set up,” I said. Finally, I gave in to his demand that I turn on the TV. There it was and like everyone on the planet, for one reason or another, my future changed. In the blurry hours that followed I remember checking on friends and family in the New York area and began anticipating the way the US would always be different, as it would be for those who would pay the price for this outside the US. The next day, I learned a person in my writing group lost her brother-in-law and my mom’s neighbor in Jordan lost her son, who had just started a job at one of the financial firms. In later years, I would meet a survivor of the towers, who has had respiratory issues ever since. He is Lebanese.

We were told to stay home, but there was something I needed from my car—the water bottles I had bought the day before but was too tired to carry up the stairs when I got home. I was thirsty, and I compared to the other crimes “my people” were being rounded up for that day, a trip to my car seemed fairly safe. Los Angeles had never been quieter. I got the bottles and climbed back up the stairs. An American flag now covered my door. My neighbor across the hall opened his door.

“I heard you going out. I put that up for you,” he said. “So if anyone comes looking for your people, they’ll know you’re one of the good ones.”

He was Irish, like from Ireland. He did not speak like an American because he was not American. I was. But at that moment, I knew that, despite his Irish brogue, he was more American than I could ever be.

“Thanks,” I said, because I knew he meant well. I also wondered how he knew my ethnicity or religion. Maybe it had come up in one of our rare small talk chats on the stairwell. I’d noticed the Honduran family downstairs also had an American flag on the door, but not as big.

“Did you give them their flag, too?” I asked.

“No, they were smart enough to do it themselves,” he said.

The next morning, I woke up at 3 am, not to write like Stephen King but to escape nightmares. I turned on the TV. The cyclical speculation of the media circus was unbearable. I went back to my computer, attempted to escape in writing. But no concentration. As I looked at the dialogue I had written just two days before about two white characters on a mad caper adventure in Baltimore, I knew I wasn’t going to finish their conversation for them. A few months earlier, an agent had told me, “Write about white people, that’s what sells.” But now I would be labeled a Muslim writer and expected to write on “my people’s” behalf, like “Muslim” was a one catch-all person.

“My people” have not always been my best friends—whether Arabs, Muslims, American, females, writers–because they are as diverse as white people and all other labeled groups. Still, I consider it a privilege to write scenes in which “my people” exist, whether good, gorgeous, bad or ugly. I still cringe when people ask me about Islam, as if being born as a Muslim means I know all there is to know about it, that I’m a reliable source, just by birth. No one expects such oracle skills of my friends of other religions. But my characters on my computer screen today do their best to speak as real humans, not merely as “my people” even if I still question if anyone really wants to hear our stories outside of the paradigms of terrorism and oppression of women. For me personally, other early morning phone calls since Sept 11 have shattered my world far more, in ways for which I do not have words, much like I imagine the families of the victims of 9-11 and the wars that would follow it must feel. But for me the writer, 9- 11 is when I acquired a voice as a Muslim writer.

GETTING HERITAGE IN WRITING: This Month’s Aramco World Cover Story

Posted on April 4, 2019 by Alia

These are just some thoughts of mine after my third visit to Cape Town, this time to write this month’s cover story for Aramco World Magazine https://www.aramcoworld.com/en-US/Articles/March-2019/The-Handwritten-Heritage-of-South-Africa-s-Kitabs

Celebrating Heritage Day in Bo Kaap

The first time I saw the Western Cape, I thought “This looks just like Los Angeles,” and then I thought, “This looks just like Lebanon.” I’m not just talking about the magnificent mountains and endless sea. The townships remind me of the camps in Lebanon, certain Cape Flats areas remind me of Compton, and Simons Town, with its dramatic cliff homes and a local museum hosting a meditation workshop with Tibetan chanters, reminds me of Santa Monica. But South Africa’s landscape is all its own, mired in a history all its own. Historian Joline Young has been digging through Western Cape Archives for 20 years to recapture the town’s history, as the archives had been closed to non-whites during Apartheid. As we were walking through Simon’s Town one Saturday afternoon, “We have generations of trauma in our genes.” While that’s not biologically possible, you see a lot of people chasing their genes. That afternoon we ran into a 50-year old woman, Shirleen, whose mixed-race family was relocated (forcibly removed from Simon’s Town) during the Group Areas Act. This was her first time here, and she and her husband were trying to figure out where her uncle’s fishing restaurant would have been.

Simon’s Town’s Harbor

Zainab Davidson, better known as Auntie Patty, would have had an answer. She literally mapped the whole town from memory, which inspired her to turn her family home, Amlay House, which was confiscated during the Group Areas Act, into the Simon’s Town Heritage Museum, dedicated to preserving the Muslim heritage of the town. She is part of the story in “The Written Heritage of South Africa.” She was 60-years old then. She’s 84 today, and lives above the museum with her husband.

I sat down one day with a sheet of paper and I drew a map of Simon’s Town, all the roads, just to see if I still remembered who lived here. I remember the old fisherman, and the old Dutch church, and I remembered lane by lane the cottages, and bigger houses over there. And I took all lanes and went house by house until I had this whole map of our community here in Simon’s Town and it ended at Simons Town Station. Yeah. And then I said to my husband, man I want to start our own museum. –Zainab Davidson (Auntie Patty), interviewed at Amlay House in September 2018

The Schedule for Thessaloniki International Film Festival

Posted on February 28, 2019 by Alia

We are delighted that The Golden Harvest will make its international debut at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival . Please join us if you can!

For more information, visit: https://www.filmfestival.gr/en/movie/movie/11920

TONIA MARKETAKI	04 March 2019 15:30
JOHN CASSAVETES	05 March 2019 12:45

The Blog Tour: My Writing Process

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Alia

(NOTE: This website is currently under reconstruction, so like a first draft, it’s a little disorganized.)

In 2005, I went to the Squaw Writers Conference in what I only partially realized was an attempt to escape the LA screenwriting world and discovered the sweeter side of writing–novel writing. It may pay less and probably fewer people will read your work than see your work, but there are so many fewer human beings to suck up to in the process–and they are overall nicer human beings. Like Patricia Dunn (http://www.patriciadunnauthor.com/2014/08/) and Myfanwy Collins (http://myfanwycollins.com/blog/), who I met at Squaw Valley and who are both the reason I am taking part in this blog tour. Both have great YA novels coming out this year. So proud and honored to have them as friends and writers.

Patricia and Myfanwy are outstanding editors, as well as writers—and I think that is in large part because they are big readers. Their feedback on the first draft of The Night Counter was so vital. And Pat has been my guru on so much in my life, including helping me shepherd my middle grade novel into the world, along with her best friend and fellow writer Alexandra Soiseth (http://soisethwriter.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/my-writing-process-blog-tour/)

Squaw Valley is also where I met Alma Katsu, the incredibly prolific fantasy writer of the Taker Trilogy. Alma’s just plain sharp, and it could be all those years working for a mysterious organization. She’ll be answering these questions next week, along with one the funniest writers I know, Amy Bridges, whose Texas/Alaska upbringing is as entertaining as her hijinks in LA today. (See more about them below)

1) What are you working on?

I wish someone would tell me how respond to this one today. The best answer is somewhere between nothing and too much. I am either cursed or blessed–or somewhere in between—for loving to consume and write television, films, fiction and magazine articles. I even like the orderly, mechanical process of writing academic articles and recipes, but that is my escape

from the stress and chaos creative writing causes. Luckily for the world, I don’t do music lyrics.

Today I’m reworking from first to third person a middle grade novel about a girl trying to have the perfect Christmas in the small town in Minnesota where she lives with her immigrant Arab parents. It only gets worse when a vision of the Virgin Mary is spotted on their driveway. I’m also drafting my next novel, which involves Abu Dhabi but doesn’t have any camels or oil wells in it so far. I’m also going to spend a lot of time logging footage from The Golden Harvest, a documentary that is a multi-country project that has always bound my family together—olive oil. Any of the above could be a screenplay, too…in the meantime, they’re just tearing at my heart and soul, demanding I focus.

2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

We are all as individuals our own genre, made up of all the things that have happened to us, that we hope will happen to us, and that our own individual brains juxtapose together. Sometimes for me that juxtaposition comes out as fiction or non-fiction, written or filmed.

3) Why do you write what you do?

Because it comes out of me—it tells me at some point, “Please write about me” and I try to respect the request. I have also written purely for money but that stuff isn’t worth discussing.

4) How does your writing process work?

I move a lot so getting a process down is hard for me, as time zones and cultural clashes and day jobs dictate making adjustments to the different worlds. But I can speak to what have been the elements of my ideal situation, which I am really trying to capture now as I start this new novel.

I wake up when it is still dark outside and neither my head nor the road is rattled yet. And then I write for a fixed amount of time without stopping even for chocolate, say two hours. Or until I write a thousand words. This early morning joy has been hard for me to capture in the Middle East, where social life often begins at 9 pm, making going to bed early not so easy.
I reserve afternoons for re-reading or editing. And for reading the millions of things in this world that I want read.
I tell myself I can go to yoga as soon as I am done writing.
I tell myself I can watch my latest TV obsession when I am done writing
I tell myself a lot of things to stay put at the desk.
When all of the above fails to happen, I clean my house. I have a very clean house.

Look for these blogs next week:

Alma Katsu’s debut, The Taker, has been compared to the early work of Anne Rice, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander for combining the historical, supernatural and fantasy in one story. The novel was named a Top Ten Debut Novel of 2011 by the American Library Association and rights have sold been in 16 languages. The Reckoning, the second book in the trilogy, was published in June 2012, and the third and final book, The Descent, published in January 2014. The Taker Trilogy is published by Gallery Books/Simon and Schuster and Century/Random House UK.

Ms. Katsu lives outside of Washington, DC with her husband, musician Bruce Katsu. In addition to her novels, Ms. Katsu has been a signature reviewer for Publishers Weekly and an occasional contributor to The Huffington Post. She is a graduate of the Master’s writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University, where she studied with John Irving.

Prior to publication of her first novel, Ms. Katsu had a long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several US agencies and is currently a senior analyst for a think tank. http://www.almakatsu.com/

Amy Bridges is a Los Angeles based writer and blogger at www.jurassicmom.com. Amy’s work has appeared on TLC, HGTV, and Discovery Health. She is a Hedgebrook alumnus, and the recipient of the First Prize Fiction Award at the San Francisco Writers Conference. Her play, Women ofthe Holocaust, was published by The Kennedy Center and The Northwest TheatreJournal. Her play, The Day Maggie Blew Off Her Head, received first prize inthe Edward Albee Prince William Sound Playwriting Lab, presented by EdwardAlbee. Her work has been nominated for The American Theatre Critics Association’s New Play Award as well as The Osborne Award for an Emerging Playwright. Her creative nonfiction has appeared on The Nervous Breakdownand has received publication by New Lit Salon Press. Currently, she isworking on a collection of essays. And of course, living in Hollywood, it is required for her to always be working on a screenplay. Follow her on Twitter @rattleprincess and Facebook at amy.bridges.12@facebook.com.