Storytelling

Before the break, I attended Firoozeh Dumas' Athenaeum presentation. She grew up in Iran but her family moved to Whittier, Southern California when she turned seven. In her Ath talk, she explained her experiences as an immigrant in America through numerous anecdotes. Dumas has a natural gift for storytelling, as I should have expected from the title of the talk. She said that she learned this skill from her father, an optimistic man who attended school in the US and believed he could achieve the "American Dream". Although her presentation revealed the rough challenges of assimilation into American culture still faced by immigrants today, she tied humor into every experience. She is the author of several novels and is most known for "Funny in Farsi", "a memoir of growing up Iranian in America". Many of the anecdotes that she shared during the talk are incorporated into this novel. When her family arrived in America, many of their American neighbors knew nothing about Iran or where it was on a map. Neighbors welcomed Dumas and her family and helped them settle into their new environment. A few years later, Dumas experienced a second wave of culture shock when a news headline broke out: Iranians take American prisoners hostage. This was a turning point in which Dumas and her family experienced first-hand a hostile attitude towards Iranians. After hearing Dumas' talk, I immediately ordered this novel and started reading it. It is an eye-opening book and tactically includes the same humor as in her verbal speech. If you are looking for a humorous, captivating, and educational book with a twist on immigration, I recommend that you give it a read. This was by far the best Ath speaker I have heard and I now feel motivated to improve my own storytelling skills.