 Okay, I'm going to launch the YouTube that is on and now I will open up the webinar and we're live. Welcome friends. We're going to get started in just a moment. Hello everyone. Welcome. We'll give it one more minute to fill up the room. Hello and welcome YouTube viewers. Welcome everyone. Welcome to the virtual library. Putting a link in the chat box for today's doc and this has library news as well as links to our presenters and any resources that come up. I'll add those to it as well. All right, let's jump in and get started. Welcome to today's event. This is part of our women's history month, which the library calls her story. And we're so excited today to have Dr. Seema Yasmin and Zara Norbash for a conversation about Dr. Seema's book, Muslim Women Are Everything. You can get this book at the library, your favorite local bookstore. You can probably order it from something called Starts With an A, but we don't like to promote that one as much. Shop Local. Check it out at your library. You can get it instantly at the library too as well as the audio book. All right. And as I said, this is part of women's her story month. We will be having events all month long, as well as promoting lots of good stuff to read and watch all about women. And we do want to acknowledge that we are occupying the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ram Yutush Auloni tribal people. And we acknowledge that they are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples in which to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ram Yutush community. And I'm going to throw a link into the chat box right now that has a reading list about First Peoples, Auloni land, land rights in general, and great places that you can donate to, including the Segurate Land Trust, which is based in Oakland. And they have a thing called the Shumi Tax, which you can donate, pay your tax to the land that you're inhabiting. So check them out. They're amazing. All women run organization as well. Someday we'll get them. They're very busy. I have tried many times. All right. And San Francisco Public Library invites you to read Post-Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz. This is our On the Same Page author for March and April. On the same page is our reading campaign that's been going on for 17 years. Can you believe that? So Natalie Diaz, amazing poet. She'll be in convo with Michelle Cruz Gonzalez, who is an educator, author, and ex punk rock drummer. And this book is available at any library you walk in today in San Francisco. You can pick it up on the shelf right now. And now I'm just going to breeze through some other events we have coming up, a small business spotlight with the owner of Papa Lama, and we'll be doing a craft. That's Monday. We partner with NPS, the National Park Service, our soulmates of the natural world. We'll be doing a film and panel discussion. And then we have Yasmin Darsnik, who will be talking about her book, The Bohemians. And of course, we can never do any of this without our friends at the San Francisco Public Library, who helped sponsor. And I see right there on that slide, we're sponsoring more than a month, but it is her story. And they did sponsor more than a month too. They helped us with all of our programs. So thank you, friends of the San Francisco Public Library. All right. And now I want to introduce today's panelists. Dr. Seema Yasmin and Zahra Norbesh. We're here to talk about Dr. Seema Yasmin's book, one of many. Muslim women are everything. A beautiful book, beautiful illustrations, and amazing writing to it as well. I read the book and listened to the audio. They're both great. Get it today. Hello, Ocean View. All right. So let me do an introduction. I'm going to condense Dr. Seema Yasmin's insanely amazing, brilliant bio. So here we go. Don't make that face because it's true. Dr. Seema Yasmin is Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, professor, and author. The director of Stanford Health Communications Initiative, clinical assistant, professor in Stanford University Department of Medicine, and visiting professor at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, where she teaches crisis management and communications. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News in 2017. She is the recipient of two awards from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. And her reporting has appeared in New York Times, Wired, Scientific America, and others. She's a fellow at the Cundiman and Ten House writing workshops. Her poems, short stories, have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. And her scholarly work focuses on the spread of health misinformation and disinformation, which means she's been very busy the last two years. The growth of medical and news deserts, news deserts, a new term that we've all learned again this year, this last two years, and the impact on public health. And she teaches creative and nonfiction and global health storytelling. So yeah, amazing. Zara Norvash is a feminist Muslim, Iranian, American comedian, and cohort of the award-winning podcast, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. The podcast was listed as the must listen by Oprah Magazine and was invited, and she was invited to the Obama White House to record an episode. Norvash is a senior fellow on comedy for social change with a pop culture collaborative. In addition to her two sold-out performances and her stand-up comedy special on behalf of all Muslims at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, her solo performance, All Atheists Are Muslim, a Romantic County, was originally directed by CNNs at Bay Area, W. Campbell. All right. And without further ado, I want to bring on our two amazing panelists. I'm going to stop sharing and turn it over. Hello, hello, everyone. Thank you for that overly generous introduction. Hello. Hello, everyone. Hello, Dr. Seema. Hello. Hello. Can I just call you Dr. Seema the rest of the time? I just really... ...takes me back to the future fandom. Dr. Seema. Coming in. Fixing misinformation. Yeah, really good Iranian messaging in that movie. Yeah. Okay. So I kind of want to dive in and talk about the book and expand out into the world and from there, the universe. Okay. That sounds like a really doable scope in all right, let's do it. I've actually been thinking a lot about you the last week as really tragic world events have been unfolding. Okay. But I was thinking there's another stand-up comedian whose name also begins with the same letter that your name begins with and he is becoming a war hero and trying to lead his country out of an invasion. But you know, President Zelensky started off as a stand-up comedian and I was wondering if your parents had been saying anything recently about your career decisions. Get out. I did not know that he started out as a stand-up comedian. That's phenomenal. Yes, that's how he started off and I think in fact he played as a comedian in a TV show who ends up becoming president of a country if I remember correctly. So what's happening now is really life imitating art. It's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. I mean, not to put more pressure on you or anything, but like, I remember when I was researching your life story to put in this book, Zara, I was coming up against all these interviews you had given where you were giving, they were really actually lovely, endearing, reminiscent things if you like of your dad and the way that he would talk about, you know, your life choices or your academic achievements. So tell us about that. Yeah, you know, I don't think he ever banked on, you know, me becoming a president that shepherds folks through a World War Three. He might be now. But yeah, now. But I don't know if you had this growing up too, where like your parents would see something close to something you're doing and be like, oh, you can do that. Oh no, mine was completely anti-aspirational. Really? Yeah, yeah, my dad was like, she better be a housewife and have loads of kids. By the time she's 19, which is what my mom's life was. And yeah, and my mom was like, I have to get you out of this hellhole. We will escape. But also she would always remind me she was like, never, ever think that you are going to have an easy young lady. So my mom was like, the world is not your oyster. She was like, the world is going to be really difficult for you. You're going to have to work 10 times as hard to go one tenth of the way compared to men, compared to non-brown people. And it was actually a really good setup for somebody who wanted to become an author. Because this industry like seriously, and actually that's the kind of backstory behind Muslim women are everything is myself and Fahmida, the way that this book started out, was a tweet. I was like, I was pissed off. I sent off a rant on Twitter and I was pissed off about like corporations and celebrities, whatever, like purporting to celebrate Muslim women. Yeah, a few years ago, we had amazing Olympians who were competing in hijab. We had like boxes. This was amazing. And people were like, oh my gosh, they're amazing. And they're Muslim. And I was like, what the heck do you think we are? And so in frustration, I sent off this tweet and then got interest from a publisher. Well, at first it became a newspaper article that was very tongue in cheek. And then where it really got difficult is as we started to turn it into a book, there were all these publishers that were kind of like fake interested, wanted to be interested. But then we heard things like, well, there's already a book about. See, this is, yeah, exactly. There's already, this is what I wanted to talk about too, is like, I feel like a lot of times these conversations about role models, preexisting in the world, tropes that were up against stereotypes were up against, news that were up against, you know, and then each other's competition that we get pinned up against as tokens, always get sort of talked about in these kind of like little bubble buckets. But I feel like kind of in a lot of the same trajectory that you talked about is how Taz Ahmed and I found our way to the good Muslim, bad Muslim podcast was like a tweet and conversations we were already having and things we were already frustrated by in our everyday lives. And I'm always curious, like, especially me right now, I'm working on my memoir and thinking a lot about the human beings that my parents were, and kind of what it was like for them to sort of role model and kind of set up a path for me or name a path, and the pressure of that, that pressure of being that parent. And I it's so interesting to hear that your mom just like laid it down. And her friends were horrified because they were like, what kind of parenting is that you're supposed to uplift your child, you're supposed to make them feel like they can be whatever they want. My mom was like, no, she's a little girl, she needs to know how hard it's going to be. And I appreciate that. I mean, I'm a very optimistic person. So I probably do some of that positive self talk myself. It was really helpful to have a mom who was like, just telling you, it's going to be really, really hard, it's going to be frustrating. And it's true, like bringing it back to book publishing, the way that we get deals as authors is through a process known as comping, where you put your proposal out, your agent sends your manuscript out, publishers might love it, but they're making financial decisions. So they are comping it next to all what else has been written by an Iranian American stand up comic who's Muslim, but she eats bacon talking about you. What other memoirs do we have like this? You basically need something similar to what you are writing to have sold well in the past for someone to be brave. I say that ironically, enough to give you a deal. And in our case, for me that I was like, so pioneering, no one had done the kind of book that we had created that it was like, we don't know if it will sell. And it was like, no, but that's the whole point. It's not out there. And for anyone who wants a data on this, because I'm a nerd, obviously, there's a great essay in the Los Angeles review of books called Comping White. And it was actually written by Stanford professor who took all these data, all these figures about publishing to show how you're screwed if you're not white, because the comparisons about what you are writing and how it might sell are made against authors that are nothing like you. And it's so hard when you are the pioneering one trying to create a book that doesn't exist, you're basically penalized for it. The industry is a mess. Well, it seems like no matter what, it's a lot of what your mom foreshadowed for you, you're penalized because, you know, if you have as a manuscript, something that is does exist in the world, then they say, well, we already have that. So why do we need you? And then, right, if you don't, one of us, right? So you have to, and then if you don't, then you're in the trap of, you know, well, we're not sure if we're ready for this innovating. Right. It's like, oh, we already have one memoir by a Muslim woman that came out in the 2000s, like give another decade, or we might be ready for another one. So you're kind of damned if you do damned if you don't. And therefore what you need is a really good team. You need a really good agent. I'm wrecked by Lily Garrow. Amazing. And you need to have a ton of self-belief and persistence and people like you in your life because you've become a friend of mine. And I've called you up and said, Hey, I'm working on, I'll just call it. I remember this conversation I was in bed. I remember it very vividly. This was the summer. And I was like, I'm working on Project X. I've been trying to work on it for about six years. It's not happening. Is this a sign from the universe that I need to be smart and move on to the house? And you were like, no, no, going. But sometimes you need those pep talks because it's, it's a lot of no's. Yeah. Say more about your team because I think sometimes folks don't realize like they think that because it's hard, it must mean that it's not meant to be. You're not following the secret. You know, it's not your path. You know, and I don't think there is an answer in our lives to ascension and infiltrating spaces that isn't hard. Yeah. It's, it's kind of built that way. That's what the journey is. It's like how many B12 shots and vitamin supplements to take to like counter that fatigue gets a lot. I'm getting mine on Monday. Monday is my B12 shot. Okay. I'm not an advocate for them. So I don't know why I said that, but it's kind of like a bit rude, but I do empty the minerals, vitamins, minerals, sachets into my cup, but I don't know about B12 shots. I was just saying that because it sounded cool, but it's a lot of no's. So yes, you have to. I already wrote it in my brain as advice from Duxima. I tell my students here in the future, I tell my students this that writing comes off as this like really solitary activity. It's like a writer. You go away to a cabin and actually we do do a little bit of that, but you need to have community because otherwise you will just be down. So I have an agent. I have a TV agent, a lit agent and a manager. And then to me, community obviously expands far beyond that because I have people like you that I can call and say, Hey, I'm a smart person. I've been getting rejections on a particular project for six or seven years. That's a sign that I should quit that and work it on. You're like, no, no. Nope. Sometimes that's, sometimes that's the hard thing to hear, right? Is like, no, don't quit. No, it wasn't actually what I needed to hear. It was perfect. It resonated. It felt right, but there's a part of me that's like very logical and data driven. So it's like, doesn't six or seven years worth of rejection mean quit while you're ahead, like funnel your energies into something else. And so I needed to hear that. But what does your community look like? How do you keep my community? Yeah, it looks like you. And I think you and I have had those talks with my comedy special and post production. And yeah, and it looks like, you know, groups and other sub communities, you know, like, because I'm, you and I, something we have in common is we're multifaceted folks. And so I write, I also perform. And so I make sure that I have a lot of community support in, in all of the niche works that I do so that I have like a comedy community, I have multiple writing communities like Vona, the San Francisco writer's grotto, the LitQuake community, the SF Public Library community of folks, the, my Bay Area fan base that, you know, I came up in the scene with the, like I, my mentor W. Camel Bell, like I, I, who I text often for No, we need that. Yeah, it, I can't tell you how many times I've been also so grateful that I teach because just seeing, you know, my students working on stuff that I'm wrestling within that moment and hearing my own advice out of my own mouth to them, you know, and being reminded of it, like, Oh yeah, that's right. It goes like this, you know, I feel like we forget that we have to do this hustle as a regular part of the business and you break through in, you know, some rungs and you gain some, I feel like sometimes as a brown woman, I'm gaining respect, you know, it's not a baseline, like I have to earn trust, I have to earn, you know, my reputation as a colleague. And then sometimes with in conversations with myself, I'm earning my own self care, you know what I mean? Like there's constant vetting that's exhausting. And so I'm always the anybody who knows me knows that I'm always reaching out and building recruiting community because I think we need a lot of folks, you need a lot of support. We do. So where are things at with your next comedy special? I'm still working on post production for this one. And I've started building my next comedy special from stuff that I cut in my previous comedy special to kind of like build out and build out and sort of like collect material. And some of it, it's funny, you think that it's no longer fresh, right? That like, Oh, yeah, aren't we pass this down? No, actually, it's just worse. Yeah. Yeah. And so I wanted to ask you like, in the misinformation train, are there things that because like watching the Muslim misinformation train like the Islamophobia machine was big, it was a $206 million fear industrial campaign that was actually proven, you know, it was a whole expose. And so I was curious, because like when I saw the COVID misinformation campaign, I was like, how is this bigger? And it's all connected in so many ways. And same underlying fears are often used to fuel disinformation campaigns that seem to be about quite different content areas. So whether it's fomenting more xenophobia, or nationalism, or Islamophobia, or or whatever that might be, it's interesting that whether you because one of the things I track is anti-vax and anti-mask sentiments, and I've been doing so for the last decade, right? And of course, some of it is very what you might consider like content specific, it'll be lies that say vaccines are toxic, or vaccines contain microchips, for example, right? And that you can very much debunk on like a scientific level. But increasingly what you see is this messaging that will say vaccines and masks are anti-American, they're anti-freedom, they go against the American way of life, therefore if you get a vaccine or you wear a mask, you are opposing all that this country stands for. And so that's not necessarily about a piece of cloth or about a particular medicine, right? It's about these underlying issues that far predate COVID in particular. Like I said, I've been tracking them for about a decade now, more than a decade actually, because I first moved to this country in 2011, 2010, to serve as an officer in the epidemic intelligence service. My job was responding to epidemics. And I thought, Zara, oh, it's going to be such a sexy job. I got the job the same time that Kate Winslet's movie Contagion came out where she plays that exact role and officer in the epidemic intelligence. Oh, that's fantastic. Right. And I mean, she doesn't have a good ending, but I was like, I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I was like 29 and very, like, you know, felt very resilient and like nothing could touch me. And I was like, I was like so many random outbreaks and there were, there were weird and wonderful, bizarre epidemics. There was an outbreak of paralysis and immense maximum security prism that I had to investigate. There were outbreaks of weird things in weird places. But mostly what I was dealing with were outbreaks of like whooping cough and measles and infections that I actually had not seen as a doctor in England because we had vaccines. And yet they were killing American kids. American kids were dying of whooping cough. That was like such anathema to me. Where we have the vaccine access. And yeah, except we have also the circulating sentiments that you can't trust the government, which actually for many Americans might be quite a legitimate sentiment based on modern day, you know. So yeah, and I think I saw somebody in the chat saying like, wow, I don't know if they were being sarcastic, but some people do ask me seriously that do anti mask sentiments predate COVID. And actually there's a talk I give where I start off the talk by saying, imagine this scene, it's from real life. There are these people, they're holding a town hall in San Francisco near the pier, and they're talking about how evil and how anti freedom masks are right. So this group has got together that anti mask coalition. And I'm like, and by the way, the year is 1918. Because wow, this ain't no it's been over a century and and until we deal with the sometimes legitimate reasons for which people don't trust the government. And of course, many other issues to unless we deal with that underlying stuff, we're not going to convince people to wear masks and get vaccinated and trust in the scientific process. So but again, that all leads to the fact that the underlying reasons aren't always about the vaccine itself. It's so much to do with everything that's around it. Some of what you do so well is explore framing. And so much of the books, gorgeousness was in how everyone's stories were framed and how they were being featured, you know, and I was curious, like, in your sort of curation of that. And as you think about how you want to frame the narrative, what are your strategies around that? How do you approach it? Because I know there's a lot of talk right now about framing our stories around resilience. And at the same time, how do we celebrate that resilience and not talk about where it's coming from, you know, and visualize that and acknowledge that and it always feels like this tension of opposing forces of highlighting my joy, but then folks want to hear about the tragedy. How do you navigate that? I think it's like it's what Chimamanda reminds us about when she says there's the danger of telling that single story, right? For me, this book was about blowing that up, although maybe I shouldn't make any jokes about blowing things up, given we are too muscly. Definitely do. If there's one thing we get from that stereotype, it's the jokes. The jokes get to be ours to make. And even if they're good jokes and we bomb, right? Right. Yeah. So part of it just came from my frustratedness as someone who saw myself, my faith, my community, my sisters misrepresented or represented in a very like, this is how we want Muslim women to appear. And this book, I remind people, it is blowing up that sentiment of Muslims or Muslim monolith, because there are women in there that would probably hate each other. There are women in there who are and then there are women in there who are Muslim women, who are military strategists, who were all about rolling up their sleeves, mounting a horse, wielding a sword and being like, yeah, let's go to war. So we don't all like each other. We don't all agree with each other. We don't even all agree on what Islam looks like or should look like or how it should be practiced. I mean, there's people that drink and then there's in the book I talk about Generation M and this whole rise of like Halal liquor or like, you know, like a no alcohol, but we want to drink cocktails. So I mean, there's just multitudes, right? And so for me, framing this was almost like moving the frame and then breaking the frame and then rebuilding the frame somewhere else and kind of reminding people that you've had narratives, but this book is jam packed full of counter narratives. And when you thought about the artwork, something that strikes me so much about the book is it's gorgeous artwork by Fahmida Azim. It just pops. It's just so bright and colorful. Take a look, folks. It's gorgeous. And for me and Fahmida, we were looking at these really depressing stats. Oh, look who's here. This is you. Hey. We were looking at these really depressing stats of how few Americans say they know a Muslim, how few have met one in real life or think they know what one looks like. And so we were like, yeah, this can't just be a book of words. This needs to be really visual. And even thinking about the cover, you can see it doesn't have a single woman on it. But initially, we wanted one particular image or it was like bounced around that one particular woman's face would be on it. She happened to be light skinned. She happened to wear a hijab. And we were like, nah, we can't do that on the front of this book because we don't all look like that. Some of us look like this. Like Dr. Abdul Khabir. And then others look like this chick who likes taking you know, saucy pictures. So we didn't want to put just one image on the cover again to break this idea that we all look the same or dress the same. And also again with this in mind that a lot of Americans say they don't know a Muslim. And so bam, you have in your face a scuba diving hijabi midwife from Singapore. And then you have a weight lifter from the UAE. Like, you know, look at that. Wow. But how do you broach this in your comedy? Well, you know, I try to think about comedy as always being a celebration. That that's what a punchline is. That's how I define a punchline. A punchline is a celebration. And it's not really about the laugh. Like thinking about it as being about the laugh is kind of like when actors play an emotion. You know, it's the thing that it's the laugh is the byproduct of the work that you do. And there's there's been this, you know, kind of running conversation about whether or not Hannah Gatsby's piece in a net was a stand up special or for it was like Ted talk or for it was, you know, something else, a one person show, therefore not a stand up special. And my philosophy on that is always number one, the artist decides that's up to the artist. And you can't decide how it's perceived, though. Yeah, and that's a separate thing. I think for us as audience, our job is to relate to a piece and to have conversation about the piece and about how it landed on us. And our relationship to what the artist has called it, you know, and how we relate to that. I don't think it's our position to take it from the artist and say, no, you know, and, and especially take it from a major Hollywood distributor and say we disagree, you know, I think, and I'm not going to say never. But in this case, Hannah Gatsby's performance was such a classic example of stand up comedy. Stand up comedy in its storytelling is very much stylized or structured like a personal essay. Okay. And it doesn't really care about loose threads or not loose threads of story. You know, it doesn't care so much about its A plot and B plot and C plot. It cares about its central argument and how hard you land it. And at the end of Gatsby's piece, theirs was a celebration of leaving the audience with the discomfort and emotional labor that they'd been carrying. And what a triumph. What a mic drop. And they just landed in our laps and they get to walk off the stage a little bit lighter, you know, and that's a form of celebration. And so I always say the way to guide ourselves towards what is that punchline is to lead by celebration. What are we celebrating? There was a clip that I watched of you when I took one of your comedy writing classes, which I recommend everyone take because interestingly, maybe this isn't that much of a shocker, but I found so much of what you taught to be applicable to writing across other genres. And I found it really helpful in just crafting nonfiction and journalistic work too. But you know, you made us watch so many clips of yourself. And one of those clips is brilliant. I wish I knew exactly like how to find it immediately. But I think you're talking about the Frank talk and the TEDx. No, I don't think so. Maybe it's the one where you're doing stand up and then you ask people if they think they're funny. Yes, the Frank talk. Okay, that's the one. Tell us about that. I'd like what you ask the audience and how you respond to that. Yes. And I can ask the folks in the chat today, raise your hand if you've ever felt like you aren't funny. You're being complicit in white supremacy. Don't do that. Don't do that. And it's actually a thought that sort of came to mind inspired by a joke of W. Kamau Bells. Was just like one of his, I think, when he was touring around, performing around the Bay Area building a show where he talked about, you know, there's so many beautiful people in the world and so many different ways of thinking about beauty. I'm entirely paraphrasing this. And so, of course, there's so many standards of beauty and the way that we think of beauty is so rooted in white supremacy and colorism. And that really got me thinking about laughter. Same thing. Because he was like, of course, everybody finds each other beautiful and there's so many standards of beauty, there's not one empirical standard of beauty because so many people are having sex. And I was like, yeah, so many people are laughing. People are getting it on. And people are laughing. There's so many folks cracking each other up all of the time. Why is it and what happens that our sense of humor all of a sudden falls into this like formal framing of what's empirically funny and what's not that funny and who is really funny and who's just trying? Yeah. How does that happen? And why is it that whenever Black, Indigenous, and people of color are innovating in the field of comedy, we're doing something different with the field. But when folks like Louis CK get up on stage and tell meandering stories, then they're innovating the in the field. Right. Right. What's going on with that? And why are we doing that? And what is that about? It's like when I moved to America and I could not find SNL funny or Seinfeld funny, I just know it doesn't or doesn't work for me. But you've talked about not just the way that comedians tell jokes, but the way the whole pipeline is set up, too. And that's something you've been working to obliterate, maybe not obliterate, expand. Blow up. Destructive words here and make it more expansive and inclusive. Yeah. What I found with my report, popcollab.org slash funny is funny is where you can find it is that the pipeline to becoming a stand-up comedian is so heavily vetted based off of what is already accepted as stand-up. That it just entirely prevents anybody outside of the heteronormative cisgendered white male experience from really innovating in the field at the base entry level. Because it's all in bars and it's every night and it's very, very specific. Can you say more about that? Because I think a lot of us who aren't in comedy don't think about what you all are doing behind the scenes in order for us to go out on a Friday and watch one of your stand-up shows. Yeah. You know, I'm glad you started it there because I always forget to point out that a comedian is performing seven nights a week three times a night. Right. If this is the career that you want to have, you want to be, yeah, a touring comic. Like it's often, you know. And if you think about how often you sit down to write at your desk, right, if that was always with an audience of, you know, 20-something white guys all telling jokes about their dicks, your book would start to look really different. Terrible. It would be terrible. Yeah. Muslim woman at the bar, telling dick jokes. Different title, probably. Probably, yeah. Yeah, probably. How would you mention it? But you were saying it's this complete bar to stage pipeline kind of thing at the expense of this other, yeah, way of joke-telling and, yeah, comedy. And some of what I see happen is folks who are brilliant and funny, like you, that go, you know, oh, I want to explore comedy, then get put at the mouth of that scene. Yeah. As though you have to start brand new. Yeah. And this is your entire audience. And here you're coming in with a rich sense of audience and varied demographics that you've spoken to and you've built all these instincts and all these skills and to begin there makes folks who have done that and gone that route think my instincts must be wrong and I must not be made for comedy. I got really lucky, though, in that I found was found by this group that was merging science, storytelling and comedy. Right? I don't know if I told you about this. Oh, that's brilliant. No, tell us about that. So the sets that I did and my last ever stand-up was on February 14, 2020. Right, before lockdown, there was probably so much COVID circulating in that comedy club in San Francisco. And it's funny because I had friends from the CDC who were in the Bay Area to investigate this new outbreak of viral pneumonia who came to my stand-up show. Oh, gosh. Yeah, anyway, so I haven't done anything on stage since then or no, no comedy since then. But the reason that worked so well for me and I've done a couple of shows with that group is because they were all about merging science, storytelling with comedy. And so it was an entry point for me. And in fact, because of what I've been studying for over a decade, my whole set was about misinformation and disinformation and the crazy wild things that we humans believe that are not based in science at all. Because I grew up a conspiracy theorist, right? And I have found I don't want to get vaccinated. And it completely makes sense, right? Or I have found members that I cajoled into getting vaccinated to now 18 months later, like my knee hurts and it's because of that vaccine you really get. I'm like, oh, no, that's not how it works. But anyway, so that was my whole set up. But you're so right. My life is not set up in a way where I am going to do three shows a night, 365 days a year, but even in taking your comedy class. And when you and I have talked after that, you're like, but that's kind of what you have to do if you can. And I'm like, well, I just, I'm not going to make it as a stand up comic. And it's fine, because that's not exactly what I'm trying to do. But I'm certainly trying to learn elements of that and borrow elements of that for the other things I do. Well, that's something that folks at folks watching at home folks in the chat that you can really be a part of changing the more low stakes stage spaces we create where we bring up folks to, you know, try a set, try some materials, share a humorous story that they're workshopping that they're in process with. That is how we change not just the field of comedy, I think, but our entire expanding sense of humor. And it's just like for good storytelling foundation. Yes. I remember like starting off my set and talking about my cousin Osama and everyone's like laughing. I was like, oh my gosh, that wasn't even the joke. We haven't got to the joke yet. But it was just really nice to have in my case, an audience that loves stand up comedy, but had bought a ticket that night, because they also wanted a dose of science. So I really hope that we see more like that. And what you're trying to do, which tell us about that, kind of moving away from the bar pipeline. Yeah, I create workshops where at the end of the workshop after eight weeks, you get to put on a show. And a lot of folks in the Bay Area as well have workshops like that Martha Reinberg. I think for a while, Lisa Marie Rollins was also teaching and also just playwriting, and just trying to create opportunities for us to have our expansive narratives that we then tighten down. I think a lot of times folks start tight, and then try to just get tighter and tighter. But then you have to sort of give it room and breath to figure out what it is that you're actually saying before you really find it. And I'm sure you found this as well. The more you perform and the more you talk about the same thing, the clearer and clearer and clearer and clearer you get on what it is you're trying to say about that thing. Yeah, and your class was a good way of narrowing into that kind of earlier in the process because of the way that you taught us over, was it eight weeks? I can't remember now, but if you can drop a link into the chat, at least here on the Zoom for people to sign up. Check it out at ZaraComedy.com, my best student in the house. And it was really, you asked about framing earlier on Zara, and it was so important to me to have a section in this book that was called Muslim Women Laugh, because I don't know if that's the side of us that others know, like we are hilarious. I mean, not all of us, but again, not monolith, right? But some of us are hilarious. And some of us have had really interesting journeys in terms of crafting careers as storytellers and comedians. So you're there, but there's other women from North Africa or France via North Africa, from Southeast Asia. And it was like, I'm not just going to make this a book about our pain and our struggles, because yeah, but it's going to be about our triumphs and about our screw ups, and about us cracking each other up. And I don't know how did, it's a funny thing, actually, I don't know if I've ever done this, but how was it for you reading the part that I wrote about you? Oh my goodness. I mean, it was just, it was really exciting to see, and it was excited, like, how to explain, you know, especially in comedy, your work is so isolating. It really is really lonely. And especially when you're working in a job and niche that already is really isolating and really lonely, you know, in the sense that it's just you, you know, out there on the stage, you don't get to share that always, you know, and sometimes you do, and sometimes it's just like, onto the next one, onto the next one, onto the next one. And you don't know if you're making an impact, and you don't really know what it is that you're doing, and you're like watching TV every day, being like, I guess today is the day I quit, maybe, and save some money, you know, and then this life at all. Right. And it's just like so much hustle all the time. And then to hear from you, and then to see the book, and to see all of these women that I'm in the book with, and to know that this book exists, you know, one day, my children's children's children's children's children's children will have this. It's just absolutely incredible. I just was so honored, and so grateful, and so proud of our community, of our colleagues, of the work that we do, of the ways that we create spaces for each other. It was so powerful in it. I cried a lot of tears of joy. Well, thank you for sharing that. And it was incredible to discover you, because I didn't know you personally when I was writing about you. But then in the course of it, I sat next to you at dinner, and it was like, I wrote about you in my book, which was a little. Thanks, our friend Serena Lynn. Yeah, I love her. Thank you, Serena, for the introduction. And there was that whole drama about your dog, and I was like, wow, who is this lady? This is all like so weird. My dog ruined Serena's screen. Now it's on tape. Now it's on tape. I can never go back. Lucky is the best. But yeah, it's really, there's a question in the Q&A about this as well, in terms of like, who to pick and did I pick? And yeah, I did. And that's a beautiful thing about being an author is you do get to pick. Although I'll tell you a funny, frustrating story is in that early stage in the, oh, we've seen this tweet go viral, and we've seen your piece in the newspaper go viral, we want you to create a book. So Fahmida and I create a proposal, right, which for nonfiction books, anyone that wants to write them, it's a table of content, it's an outline. And it's just a couple of samples that you're not writing the whole thing. So we do this, and we start to get this feedback from publishers that's like, wow, this is really cool. But like, maybe you could pick some people who are like more well known. And I don't know how I feel about that. But I'm kind of open to adding somebody who is a bit of a household name, maybe I don't know, tell a bit of a different story of their life. So then we add them. And then it's then the feedback we get is like, oh, you put Milala Yusuf's sign there. She's like so overexposed. And so like you write so you can't win. And so I was like, screw this. Me and Fahmida are going to put in the people that we want to put in. And I think I had actually ended up having more of a say just because of the terrible hierarchy in terms of authors and illustrators. But I was like, no, I want this woman in and I want this person in. And so it was liberating to get to pick who goes in. And of course, I wanted volumes two, three and four, because there was so many amazing people that we just couldn't fit into one book. But it was amazing coming across your story. I've watched a video you did for MTV where you talked about your brother's illness. Yes. As a kid. And I put that in there because to me that was, poof, it was a lot. It was sad and frustrating and scary actually. And then thinking about little baby Zara in the cereal aisle in the grocery store in California being so little, but understanding what humor was doing in diffusing what could have been a terrifying situation in terms of a not so friendly person. Your mom, I think she was still wearing a head scarf at that time. Yes. Yeah. And you and your mom potentially being cornered by somebody potentially scary. We were regularly cornered. Yeah. That was a period of time where people saw my mom's head job. And that meant hostage taker as Iranians during the Iranian revolution. Or even the years after the years that continued after. Yeah. And that was a moment where I first started to see the power of managing tension and using humor to diffuse tension. Because I really badly wanted Lucky Charms. And my mom would let me have it. And this old Santa looking man came up to us and was like, why do you hate America? And I said, we don't hate America, sir. And would you tell the stupid immigrant that there's no pork in Lucky Charms? My mom just doesn't get it. And, you know, white white supremacy teaching us to undermine our parents. And he said, actually, there is. I didn't know this part. Yeah, there's pork in Lucky Charms, Lucky Charms. I'm not going to explain to folks how you're going to have to just Google it. You're going to have to just figure it out. I will say, coming from a family that is extremely ridiculously observant, they're real sticklers. So there's argument in the family, because somebody will say, I have a letter from Cadbury's, you know, the great chocolate maker. And the letter says, it was like, why did you write to Cadbury's again? No, no, no, it just says that this one chocolate that's your favorite, your favorite. Yeah, it's made in a factory where there's alcohol. At one point, Colgate toothpaste was apparently haram. Like it gets very, very comical. Or like when you open a bag of potato chips, as you call it, we call it crisps. There's the, you know, you get that hit with that smell and apparently some alcohol is used to kind of like push those. Oh, you're ruining everyone's lives right now. We ban the library talks forever, but before we get banned from the Reddit friends, I think Colgate is fine. I think Colgate is hello, Mal. They've, they've made changes, folks. Don't be scared. We've got a couple of, we've got comments, but we also have some Q&A that I want to pivot to. Okay, here we go. We've got Zara, have you ever listened to the podcast, Radio Hamra? I would be curious to hear your perspective. I have not. I will check it out and I will get back to you. What else do we have here? We've got, we don't have to do all the Q&A. We don't have to do rolling through. We've got a lot of questions. We have a question about your research process for the book. Okay. My research process was actually really fun because I was going through some things in life at the time I was writing this book. So actually digging into stories about really inspiring women was very strengthening and inspiring. And, you know, like you mix the joy and the pain with the humor, with the resilience, and just with the FUs. One of my favorite pieces of research I was writing about these women races in Palestine, Speed Sisters, which you can read about in the book, but there's this amazing documentary that's made about them. So my research process was really varied depending on who I was writing about because Muslim women are everything, includes modern day women, but also historical figures. That was tricky because they were historical figures who happen to be women and therefore not that much was written about them. You know, they were kind of referenced as, oh, the wife of so-and-so, right? She is the wife of so-and-so also happened to have founded this one mathematical equation that like solved all the problems of the time, but she was so-and-so's husband and that's how she was known. So accessing archival material and actually getting some of the juice that we wanted was a little tricky at times. Less difficult with modern women, but again, there were like difficult editorial decisions to make. Like there are so many amazing Muslim women comics. How do we pick the few that we're going to introduce our readers to? So yeah. Yeah. How did you figure out how to kind of narrow down like what was your sort of scientific method in that like just that curation process? I had a spreadsheet because I have a spreadsheet for everything in life because I got for spreadsheets. I mean, seriously, like, and I was saying it's for a friend kind of like berating myself at the time, like having to do it that way. And he was like, but how else would you make sure you've got everyone you want? And I was like, yeah, you're right. Like there isn't another one because it was really important to me that I wanted disabled women in there. And I wanted dark skin women, you know, like so much of the conference, like I get invited to panels all the time as a journalist who is Muslim. And I have to check before I join these panels at these conferences, like, is anyone other than like Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims going to be on the panel because like, you know, Muslims in America are black and why are we not including all kinds of Muslims in the conversation? So I did not want to create a book that just kind of continued the erasure of certain kinds of Muslims. So I had a spreadsheet that was my scientific process. I wanted to be a graphically representative too. Yeah. Right. Like a lot of people forget this, like we talk all the time about, you know, Islam as a, you know, breaking the monolith. But then there is also real work that we individually have to do to make sure that that representation is happening. And it can be tough when you're already part of a disenfranchised group to then also within that realize some of the privileges that we have. Yeah. But we have to like, don't, I've learned my lesson, like, don't be on a panel unless you've done your due diligence about who else is on that panel. I learned the hard way with that. But you know, you learn, you learn to ask questions and you also learn to say thanks thinking of me. But no, like you need some different people on your panel, not me this time. But yeah, we kind of just has to be done. Otherwise, we're missing out like half the conversation and half the perspective. Yeah. So, so much of that learning came for me from being a part of writer's collectives like Vona's, not just its retreats, but the communities, you know, that come out of the Vona voices community. Yeah, where did you find your community support to, you know, for that kind of vetting and for those kinds of strategies? Because it's the if you're new to that, if you're new to it, you know, and you're working within pipelines just thinking about your ascension, I think it can be really challenging to find, you know, that methodology. For me, it actually wasn't in any Muslim spaces. It was among friends and community who were doing anti-racism work. So I think almost like by osmosis, I picked up some of the ways that they were addressing these issues and was like, oh, yeah, I can apply that to book writing or I can apply that to public platforms that I have or conferences I'm asked to speak at. So I mean, it's not that complicated in a way, especially if you're the one that holds more of the privilege. And again, you're right when you're part of a marginalized group, it can be really easy. And I've had so many frustrating conversations with people like, but I'm a Muslim and I suffer Islamophobia. And it's like, yeah, but there are these intersecting identities we hold, like I'm able bodied, right? And so I need to think about how much I miss out on a on perspectives from disabled colleagues and disabled advocates, for example. So yeah. Nice. Thank you, folks, for all of these fantastic questions. We've got time for two more, I think. Let's see what we have. Oh, can I ask you a question, Zahra? So you know, you're working on the post-production phase of your comedy special. Where and when will we see it? So it's in the process of getting edited down. And so though where we're shopping it, okay, and we're looking for producing partner. So if you're out there, and you've got connections to that, please reach out to me. And in the meantime, I'm putting on a series of shows with stage works theater on Valencia in San Francisco. There'll be a Zoom component and there'll be live show component in person. I don't want to jinx it, knock on all the things that that folks can check out. Yeah. Yeah. Man, it's like doing comedy right now. It's so difficult. I can't stress how like how much of a support it is to have room and stage space in various other programs to do a little bit of comedy, you know. And so I just want to one more time plug like if you have an event and you have room for a five minute set by a comedian that you can invite, do, do, you know. I've seen so many people take the time to put together shows and then a surge happens and they have to cancel the whole thing, you know. And it's incredibly challenging in this time especially because you gear up with promo, you gear up, you gear up, you know. And so I've been really encouraging folks to do a hybrid where you have like the live stage version and you also have the Zoom so that if you don't have the live stage version then you can, you know, use the Zoom version as well. And I'm always falling back on my old UC Berkeley theater roots for strategies. And with the comedy special from the outside looking in, I think many of us would assume that the dream, the hope, is that you land a Netflix special, right? That your special land somewhere like that. Is that accurate or are there other like actually more meaningful ways for you to be accurate? I mean, of course, yeah, why that's, you know, the bee's knees, but nobody gets that, you know. I mean, everybody who has a Netflix special first pitched it to a smaller production company that then brought it to a production company like Comedy Dynamics and, you know, there's 800 pound gorilla. There's also Blonde Medicine does comedy albums out at the Bay Area. There's so many production houses that all sort of get funneled in and even something that a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of the specials that we saw on Netflix were first produced by Comedy Central and then Netflix purchased them. So, you know, sometimes you're watching a comedy show that you saw actually taped in 2017, you know, but then came out in 2019 or later. When you start learning how these industries work, like the mechanics of it is always so interesting. We have like three minutes left and I wonder if we can do that annoying thing that always happens to us at parties. For me, I get cornered and asked medical advice. You, I'm hoping get cornered and asked like, tell me a joke, make me laugh. So I wanted if we could just do that to each other. You asked me a question and I asked me to make as well. Okay, let's do it. And I'll, yeah, okay, I have, and I have mine. Here we go. Okay, what's your question for me? My question for you is to take us back to my first promise that I was going to break it out then into the universe. Oh, okay. And ask you, when you're sitting in your moments of pandemic existential crisis, what is your go to self care? Oh, I thought you were going to ask about like your knee pain or your shoulder or something. That's what I was thinking. My self care. Nowadays, it's changed over the last two years because I have changed. But it's been two things recently, weightlifting, and then picking up the phone and cold calling friends without texting first to see if they're free and just having an impromptu like super old school style conversation. That might not sound radical to people, but I'm not a big phone talker and I have become more so recently. I feel like I am not being true to my extrovert self in my self care. You need to fix that. Okay, but now make us laugh. 60 seconds. My self care has been the X files. Oh, wait, no, you're still as a joke. I love that. That was the joke. That was it. That was the joke, folks. I get it. I don't care. Have you not got like even like a knock knock who's there? What kind of comedian are you, Zara? What have I done? What have I done? Is it your Netflix special going to be a series of knock knock jokes? I'm laughing. I'm laughing. It's working. It's working. It's going to be me as Mulder telling knock knock jokes. Okay. I'm down for it. The fungus episode is my favorite, by the way. Oh, it's so good. I was going to ask you if you had a favorite. Oh, hell yes. I'm an ex-files fan. How about you, Anissa? Absolutely. It's been a while. I could not watch the new one. Not a new ex-files. Oh, the new one was Islamicphobia because heck, the first one was like hauling a mosque in Texas and weird. But go back to the 90s and the fungus episode is hands down the best ex-files episode. I'm looking for something good to watch. So I will do that. And as I promised, these two brought the links, brought the resources. So please, you can check that all out in this one handy dandy link. And Seema and Zara, oh my gosh, thank you so much for spending an hour with us. And no pressure, Zara. But remember, there is another comedian out there whose name begins with a Z who is saving his country right now. I don't know what I'm going to do. I've got work to do. I've got to make my parents proud. All right. Thanks, everyone. Sign up for the class. Yes. Definitely sign up for the class. Bye-bye. Get the book. And get the book. Get the book. Muscle and Woman Are Everything by Dr. Seema Yasmin and Famita Azim. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you to the SF Public Library. Thank you. Thank you to libraries.