 Hello, everyone. My name is Shannon O'Zerny. I am the head of Youth Services at the West Vancouver Memorial Library, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the 16th Annual Booktopia Literary Arts Festival for Young People, or the very first ever virtual Booktopia. We miss you so, so much at the library, but we are really grateful that we can still bring you content like this remotely and still celebrate Booktopia. I would like to begin by acknowledging that the library has its home on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, and in particular recognize the Squamish, Slewa-tooth, and Musqueam nations. Booktopia is a very special partnership between the library, the library foundation, and West Vancouver schools. I want to give a huge thank you to Director of Instruction, Mr. Ian Kennedy, and our awesome colleagues, the teacher librarians, who have worked so hard in letting you all know that these presentations are here and always supporting the festival. Finally, the North Shore News, our awesome community newspaper, has been Booktopia's media sponsor every single year when we could actually meet in person, so we're grateful to them. So our format for this video, I am very shortly going to turn it over to Sabina Khan, who's going to talk to you a little bit about her book and her writing. Then I'm going to jump back on and we're going to have a little bit of a cue and a. So without further delay, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Sabina Khan. Sabina's debut YA novel, The Love and Lies of Roxana Ali, is a contemporary love story about seemingly insurmountable barriers. Sabina will be telling you all about it, but I just want to share some words from the glowing reviews of the book. Kirkus said it is a story told tenderly and unflinchingly, balancing the horrors of homophobia against the South Asian men and women who risk their lives to fight it each and every day. And Publishers Weekly said that Roxana's voice offers a steady blend of compassion and humor as she schemes with several likable allies to follow her dreams. So Sabina, thank you so so much for joining us today, and I am going to turn the screen over to you. Hey everyone. I'm Sabina Khan, and I hope you're all doing well and staying healthy. This has been a really difficult few weeks for us and we don't know when things are going to finally get back to normal. But I'm really happy to have this opportunity to speak with you today, and I want to thank Shannon and the Westman Library for including me in this. And I just want to talk to you today about a little bit about what inspires me to write this particular story and all the other stories that I'm planning to write and my process and my journey to publication. But first of all, I want to preface everything I say with something that I was really important to me, which is that there is no expiration date for creativity. There's no age by which you should be published or anything like that. My first book didn't come out until after I was 50 years old, and I plan to write for a long, long time. I've been able to connect with readers and other writers who are also my age or close to my age, and I think that's really important to clarify that there's no rush. You just need to write. You want to write the story that inspires you and that the readers can connect with. So just to start my whole journey to writing, obviously began with reading, my love for reading. When I was young, I loved to read anything, but at the time I didn't realize, but I never really connected. I was never really able to relate to the characters in the stories that I read, because they never looked like me. They never had the same experiences as I did. They didn't speak the same languages I did, and I didn't realize that until I was almost 26 years old. And that was when I first read a book where the main character looked like me and was having similar experiences. And if you think about it, imagine feeling invisible for 26 years of your life and not realizing that that was what you were feeling and that you were missing something. This story, this particular story, and the stories that I was reading in those days were about new immigrants to the U.S. The immigrant story, because I myself was a new immigrant to the U.S. And those stories related to me, the characters' experiences were similar to what I was feeling and it made me feel seen for the first time in my life. And while I enjoyed reading those kinds of stories at the time, when my own daughters became avid readers and when they became teenagers and started reading stories, I realized they too didn't see themselves in any of the books that they'd read. They weren't necessarily going to be connecting with the immigrant experience, because they weren't immigrants. They were born in North America. They were teens who straddled more than one culture and they wanted to see characters like themselves who were having the same kind of experiences, living in two different worlds and seeing the world through different lenses. And I realized that even though I was able to find books that I could connect with, when I was younger, my daughters couldn't. And the more I looked, the more I realized that there were hardly any books written by authors of color about people of color. And that was disturbing to me and obviously many other people as well. And I'm happy to say that now there are more and more books coming out every year, being published every year, where the characters are from diverse backgrounds, having a variety of experiences that many people can relate to. But it's still not enough. It's still a very, very small percentage of what we should have. But anyway, that was what sort of planted the seed for me to write a story about a character that looked like me, like my daughters, who was having similar experiences. And this brings me to my book. I have a copy here. This is The Love and Lies of Roxana Ali. And it's the story of a Bangladeshi American Muslim teen who comes from a very conservative family and they don't know that she's a lesbian. Unfortunately, she gets caught kissing her girlfriend and her mother walks in on her and all hell breaks loose. Her family, her parents decide that they tricked her into traveling to Bangladesh with them, where they plan to marry her off to a man before any hint of a scandal can get out. And once Roxana discovers that this was her parents' true intent and they had no intention of accepting who she really is, the rest of the story basically is about her struggle to carve out a space for herself where she can have control of her own destiny. And I just wanted to write this kind of a story because I felt like there are so many misunderstandings about my culture, my community, and other communities as well, which are a little more conservative than the communities here. And I also wanted to make sure that I represent a variety of perspectives because no culture is a monolith and no homophobia, unfortunately, is not contained to just one kind of community. It's rampant across cultures and their conversion therapy camps still in North America. There's killings and murders and mistreatment of marginalized people. And I just want to say that this is, the Roxana story is one singular story about one family. It doesn't represent all the families or all the groups, which I don't think it's fair for any author to feel that they have the burden of representation for their entire ethnic community or whatever. And so my story is not about her discovering that she's queer. She already knows her story. This story is about acceptance and also about showing how it's a journey often to understanding and acceptance within family members. It's not just a love story between her and her girlfriend. It's a love story between Roxana and her own culture. It's a love story between Roxana and her parents and her sibling and her cousins and all the things that she loves and all the things that she's fighting for throughout the story. Because she's not willing to just give up because her parents are rejecting who she is. She wants to fight. She doesn't want to lose everyone that's dear to her. And so while there are parts of her culture or her community that she doesn't like, she does identify strongly with her community and she loves being a Bangladeshi. She loves being a Muslim. She loves being an American as well. And she loves just being a teenager and she just wants to be, she wants to be allowed, she wants to be able to just live the life that she wants to live. And so I wanted to write a story where, you know, the ending shows or, you know, where you can see a journey from a certain kind of mindset to a different, you know, to a different space or a different place where you can accept people, even though they may not fall into your particular label, you know, or fit into your particular label. So if you haven't read the Love and Lies of Roxana Aliyah, I hope you will pick it up and give it a chance. And I'm very happy to, you know, to answer questions and things like that. If you go to my website, there is an email there that you can contact me through and I'll try to answer any kind of questions about the story or about Roxana or anything else you want to share with me. I think now I'd like to tell you a little bit about my actual journey to how I got published. As I mentioned, I came to publishing pretty late in life. And I knew that writing this kind of story, you know, it would be, I mean, not writing it, but selling this kind of story would be difficult. Getting it published may be difficult because it is a somewhat controversial topic. And it's also not something that's published widely yet. Hopefully that's, you know, going to change or is already changing. So when I wrote this book, I happened to hear about a contest on Twitter called DV Pit, which was kind of aimed towards writers from marginalized backgrounds who could pitch their story on, like write a pitch on Twitter and then agents could look at it and they could show their interest. And so I did that and I had no expectations, but I was actually really happily surprised to see that quite a few agents were interested. And so I, you know, I prepared the sample that they required and I sent off to about 30 agents. And I started to get rejection after rejection after rejection, except for three agents who said that if I was willing to revise based on a little bit of their feedback that they would be okay if I resubmit it. So I was really happy that, you know, it wasn't all rejections, but I was also kind of a little bit discouraged because I realized I didn't know how to revise. I didn't know how to take it apart and put it together again in a way that, you know, that they would like. And so I, it took me months to sort of, you know, kind of try and play around with it. And I was almost at the end of like three or four months I was ready to give up and I figured, okay, you know, maybe this is just not for me and, you know, and you get discouraged when you don't have any sort of feedback from anyone. And I was about to give up when I saw another contest on Twitter called pitch wars. And this one, if you got, if you were able to get a spot on this in this contest, they would pair you with a mentor who could help you revise and polish your story. And I figured at that point I figured I had nothing to lose I was ready to give up anyway and I went and went ahead and sort of applied to that. And a few weeks later I got an email saying that I had gotten in. And I was really overjoyed and the mentor they paired me with was wonderful. And it was just a really positive experience for me after that. And what we did was we spent two months after the contest was over, we spent two months taking the story apart bit by bit rewriting the parts that weren't working, adding things, cutting things. And at the end of two months after it was polished enough, we they put it, they put like first couple of chapters on their website where agents can read the first chapter or so and request either, you know, a full manuscript or a partial manuscript. And again, I got about 22 requests from agents and I was really, really happy because at that point I knew that it was polished and. revised as much as I could have done with the help of my mentor, of course. And so once that happened from there it was smooth sailing for me I was very, very fortunate I got several offers from agents and the agent I picked I've been with her since 2016 and it's been a great ride. It's just been a wonderful, wonderful experience for me connecting with readers and, you know, getting feedback directly from the people that I'm really writing for has been amazing. And what my point of telling you all this is that it doesn't matter how old you are or how discouraged you feel you can always. Just don't give up you can always find a way there is there are multiple avenues there are my my experience is just one experience I happen to you know be lucky enough to see this contest in time and get in there are mentoring, you know, mentoring contests even other ones, where they match you with a mentor and there are. There's this a variety of different competitions and critique groups and this is all available widely on social media and it's just a wonderful community of writers where you know you can really learn how to go through the process because it is a really long process even after you sell your book to a publisher it takes two years before your book usually takes about two years before your book actually hits the shelves. And it sounds like a really long time but now that I've gone through it once and I'm actually in the almost like three quarters of the way in with the second one. It makes sense now to me but at the time I was like wow it takes two years but because what what you've submitted to them. It goes through several more rounds of revisions and this time you have an editor who's on your team and who helps you really shape it and make it even better. And at the end you want it to be the best version of the story that you want to tell. And there's a whole you know a whole team of experts people know what they're doing really well who are taking each word apart dissecting every line of your novel and making sure that every comma every period every apostrophe is in the right place. And that you had there's no mistakes in the you know just typing errors and things like that and there are people that help you you know that design the cover for you that help you promote your book market the book. So it's a it's a really involved process, but it's when you know to get there. It's really hard to get there it's it's hard for most people. You know who are querying and who are trying to get published, but really just don't ever give up and you know just find your community. Reach out to there's many authors. I'm happy to help writers young writers who need some guidance. There are many many authors who are very generous with their time. You can connect with them and you can, you know, tell your story and just you know just tell the story you want to hear tell the story that you haven't been able to find in a book. And that's the story that people readers will resonate with because it comes from the heart and it's important to you. So I think I'm ready to get some questions from you guys so. Perfect I will pop back on the screen here. I love what you said about about age and writing it always seems like there's this sweet spot between like 23 and 37 and if you don't have like your blockbuster bestselling novel you have to like give up the dream you can be younger you can be older. And even even that whole I mean you know blockbusters are there they're obviously the exception otherwise they wouldn't be bestsellers or blockbusters right. Most people are writing books that are good books and they're reading you know people are reading them they're connecting with them. And I think I mean of course who doesn't want to be a bestselling author right to be honest of course everyone wants that but more than that I feel like I want to connect even if I if if one person. Reads my book and find some sort of strength or hope from it. I feel like that's so meaningful to me that's so rewarding to me and it makes it worth it to all the all the rejections and all the discouragement you feel. I think it's really that's what it really boils down to is that if I can connect with the readers out there the people who really need to see a story like this or need to see themselves in a story like this. That's the most important. And you know I mean age is just I don't know it's just a thing right it's I don't I mean I'm not the only one there's tons and tons of authors who came into the game later than other people and it's great if you can. You know if you can get published at 17 that's amazing and if you can get published at 60 that's equally amazing right it's just as long as your story gets out there and. I think that's really the main issue right yeah absolutely and I have to I have to ask I've been asking all of our presenters this year. How the state of the world and and things are impacting your creative process you mentioned your sort of three quarters of the way through the process of getting a new book out but where's your head at in terms of writing these days. You know it's kind of weird like I I'm hearing people like people are getting very stressed and and I mean I it's not that I'm not getting stressed but I'm used to working from home but also the way I look at it. I mean we're just going through this time it's going to end at some point and when that does I feel like I want to have a story finished and written and ready to promote and you know ready to talk about. And I'm working actually on two other novels like the novel that's coming out next year is it's already done that's just going that's just in the process where you know three out of my hand sort of. You know it'll come back to me at some point for like going over it but the story part of it the development part of it is done and it's coming out April 6 next year. But I'm working on two other stories that really like they're just fun light stories but they do have themes of you know family love and you know identity and those kind of things but they were a lot lighter than the next book even and just because I feel like I think after all this is over people just maybe I mean I know I would just want to read happy things you know and I mean I didn't decide to write this just because of this that was what I was going to write anyway. But I'm just finding that I'm very focused at because I don't have to go anywhere. I have nowhere to go so I figure I might as well use this time to you know put out as much as I can story wise and then when you know next year when my book comes out then I can focus on promoting that and talking about that book. But in the meantime I figured I might as well at least you know get started on the other stories that I want to tell and then we'll see what happens. And I'm just trying to stay positive I mean my family is at home with me we're all healthy we're all safe. I feel like I don't know I just I try to be appreciative of that and then some days are just completely just there's no there's nothing I can do so you just binge watch a show I recently watched never have I ever. It's the new main decaling show it's just really really really great. I recommend that to everyone just came out on Netflix last week. I think something probably a lot of our students can relate to because so many of our students in in West Vancouver are just they have an incredible list of achievements they're doing all sorts of things. And I know you're someone you have you have a day job you you know you're a teacher you have a book in the midst of publication and you're working on other books you have a family. Do you rely on routine or how do you make space for for everything in your day. That's a good question. One of the things I think it's easier for me is my my kids are kids they're like 21 and 25 so you know they're they're at school or work and they can do their own thing. My tutoring business it's it's I can work like it's my own I own the business so I can control the number of hours so you know certain times are busier for writing or if I'm traveling. I can make arrangements ahead of time and let them know that you know I won't be available for certain times of the year. I mean I have cut back on tutoring a lot I used to do this full time but since I've been writing more and more I've cut back on the tutoring quite a bit. But I do enjoy I tutor math and chemistry mostly and I love I love math and sciences so it's really it's a good balance actually so if I write I usually write say from nine to two or something in the day with little breaks in between and then I tutor from four to eight. So it's really nice to sort of switch over from like the writing part to doing math and chemistry which I really love. And so I think that's kind of how I keep my brain fresh. I also get bored very easily like I need to constantly be active like I just that's just how I've always been and so it actually works perfectly for me and I like having control of my hours like I just like having control of my day so if I want to go to a coffee shop. Some days the right you know I can write a lot of words and some days I just just the words on flowing but I still want to work on the writing so I can use that time for some research or you know something a little lighter or maybe even just writing a little paragraph a pitch for another idea that I've had something that is related to writing but not that specific book because some days like you just can't. I don't know there's some days just don't work I mean quarantine or no it's just some days writing doesn't flow. But yeah mostly I mean I'm not a plotter or anything like that I just write and then as I'm writing new ideas will come and add them to my synopsis. I've tried doing like a chapter by chapter outline but I abandoned that like four chapters in and just ended up writing the whole novel by like you know without that. But you know you try different things and I'm sure different and you know like different books require different I don't know like different processes sometimes you have to change up your process. And it's the same with like dividing my time and stuff. I mean I guess when my children were younger it would have been much harder for me. But right now I think it's it's not really that difficult just because like I said my kids are adults and so I do have a lot of free time that I mean that I can dedicate to writing so it makes it a lot easier. I honestly I have huge admiration for authors who have young children or babies. I know several who have babies and I'm like I don't know how you do because you're sleep deprived. You know you don't you don't get a lot of me time so yeah kudos to them. I don't know if I could have done it. Well you seem like you know such a gracious person and I'm wondering if there's anything when you kind of look back on your writing career that you're really especially grateful for moments or people or advice or any gratitude you want to share with us. Yeah I mean I have to say my parents I would say because I was born in Germany and so when we moved to Bangladesh I was about eight years old and I couldn't speak English at all and I couldn't speak Bengali which was the language that we spoke there. I could only speak German and I could speak Urdu which my mom is from a different country and so she's from Pakistan so when I when we moved to Bangladesh I felt so lost and really like I felt like I was in this bubble where I didn't understand what anyone was saying. And I was only eight but it was just really hard but as a kid you know you pick up languages faster and you know it's just easier to kind of immerse yourself. But my mom would sit with me while I read these books and she would sit with me she would give me a dictionary she would sit with me while I literally read the books myself and I had to look up everything my mom didn't speak English. But she sat with me and you know she made sure that I read all the books I could get my hands on like not textbooks but just books from the library and we had this nice school library and I literally just read every book on that shelves eventually and it was weird like it was in Bangladesh. The school was owned by a Canadian which was bizarre because now when I think back I was destined to move to Canada I guess at some point it was this Canadian direct principal would open this private private school and the books were about pioneers of the West and just like you know nothing to do with the but they were English in English and I used to read these boarding school mysteries and stuff like that. You know once I learned how to understand the words but I just I feel like my my parents lives and their choices sort of lent them lent themselves to my experience and like I've traveled like I've lived in a lot of different places and I think that opens up your eyes and you kind of see the world through a different lens where you're this newcomer and everything is new to you and other people take certain things for granted but you can't because it's just also brand new to you and then a few years later again you're in a different place. And so I think I I'm grateful to just you know the way my life turned out because of my parents decisions I guess but also just people along the way like I've had great teachers who were patient and very loving and kind towards me when I didn't know how to communicate. Or anything like that. And the people who encouraged me like I remember certain English teachers who would praise my essay writing skills and read them out you know take my notebook and go to the front of the class and read out my essay. And it made me feel so like special like wow you know she picked mine to read like little things like that like this was like in grade five or six right. But it makes a difference and I think and more recently it's my husband is a great great. He's very supportive he's so excited for this you know the right this whole writing career he's so excited and there were so many times before I got published when I was ready to give up and he just didn't let me he always kept me. You know he kept go he kept me going and the other thing is he gave me this he helped me out in a way that you know it allowed me the space and the time to just write without having because you know when I did start my kids were still younger and it's just great to have a partner who knows that this is like an important dream for me this is something I really want to do. And it's something you know it's a passion of mine and for her to have a partner who's equally passionate about something you're doing. It's it's really quite pricey it's like I mean it's it's just it's the best way to kind of you know you sit down to write and you know your husband will take care of all the other things and you know he won't let anyone bother me and so it's really nice like I'm very grateful to have a partner who's so excited about my career you know. And and who really always kind of lifts me up so yeah I love that and we can still do that now like even I mean even if you're in a tiny apartment with other people you can still give people the gift of space and you know clear heads and what a what a priceless gift. It is and like my girls do I mean we've always like we always have all these talks like we don't have extended family here we've never we've always lived far away from our families for some reason like that's just how it's worked out. So it's always just been the four of us and we have really great conversations about life about everything and all my books are completely inspired by my daughters and like the characters in my books. And I always say that like Rukhsana was definitely inspired by my younger daughter who came out to us when she was 17 and I just I was so amazed by her self confidence and you know at 17 I didn't know which way was up like I was like so completely clueless. But she just sat us down one day and she told us you know that she's she's bisexual and I was like wow like to have that confidence confidence at that age and to feel comfortable enough in your own identity to come out and just say here. I'm so grateful and no big you know that's it like I just wanted to let you know by the way you know and I love that I love that and then it's so easy to talk to them and they tell me so many things about their you know their conversations they have with friends how it makes them feel little things they they experience in their lives it's a great thing to have that kind of relationship and so when I'm writing and because I do write young adult all all my characters are so heavily influenced by my girls that if people that people who read them they know immediately wish one of my daughters. I was writing about so. Well, I think we're just about ready to wrap up I want to say a huge thank you Sabina for doing this. For those of you who are watching if you haven't read Sabina's book yet we are getting more and more digital copy so keep placing holds and more physical copies to. And oh I wanted to say Sabina you mentioned writing competitions Vancouver writer festival is doing a writing competition right now for students in grades 8 to 12 I'll put the link in the description I've always wanted to say that. And the submissions are open for that until May 29 so. Well that's exciting yeah that's really exciting yeah. All right Sabina thank you so much. Don't worry I won't disappear when I hit when I stop recording but I'll say bye for you. Thank you again for for having me and I really enjoyed our conversation and thanks for everyone who listens and who's watching. Who's going to watch and like I said if you have questions just go to my website or on Twitter and just shoot me a message or email and be happy to to get back to you. Thank you so much. Awesome thanks.