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Welcome to the Tuesday Telegrams, a semimonthly newsletter from award-winning author Naseem Jamnia. You're currently reading a writing-related Telegram, where I update you on projects, offer behind-the-scenes looks, delve into craft, and other publishing and writing topics.

Exciting news—my first speculative poem is out now at Strange Horizons!

For years, I've been trying to get at a retelling of the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab, which is a defining story of Iranian literature and lore and Persian cultural identity (via the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings).

I'll do my final writing Telegram of the year—the next one!—on speculative poetry and how this poem came together for me. I'll also save my colloquial retelling for it too. For now, I hope you enjoy "somewhere, there's a version of you that still sings"!

Now for my exciting second news: I have a new short story in The Sunday Morning Transport THIS SUNDAY!

I actually wrote this Telegram on speculative nonfiction while I was waiting to hear what my editor thought of the story, so it was fortuitous timing!!

I wrote a relatively recent personal Telegram a bit about autofiction—that is, fiction that is deeply drawn and rooted in someone's experience. Of course, as I said in that Telegram, all fiction draws from our experiences, no matter how fantastical the story, but autofiction treads the line of "based on a true story."

I shared how much of my skepticism of autofiction comes from also being a nonfiction writer. Often, in workshop, someone will write nonfiction under the guise of fiction, and the reality is that the little-t truth of what happened in one's real life can be distracting or break the immersion in fiction. This makes workshopping a story that is so deeply rooted in someone's life difficult, because the genre expectations of fiction are different than that of nonfiction, and the approach to story can be too.

Imagine my chagrin, then, when I was struggling to unlock a short story and finally figured it out because I wrote it as speculative nonfiction before fictionalizing some elements of it.

I am excited to say that my editor did end up buying the story, "Misdelivered," and it will be forthcoming in The Sunday Morning Transport THIS SUNDAY!

But I realized, as I waited for her to decide whether she'd buy it, is that when the rights revert back, I'm going to rewrite the story as fully speculative nonfiction—which I think will make it stronger. So I thought I'd talk a bit about speculative nonfiction in this Telegram.

Speculative nonfiction, I learned this year, means slightly different things to different people. To some, speculative nonfiction means "perhapsing," or supposition of a thing that the writer cannot definitively know. This might come in the form of writing from someone else's point of view (such as a loved one), imagining an event that may or may not have happened, or admitting the fuzziness of memory and using that to explore what might have happened. (These kinds of suppositions can be potentially signaled using syntax changes.) What startled me about learning this definition of speculative nonfiction is that I've always thought of good creative nonfiction as something that inherently wonders about and wanders away from what is "actually known." But apparently, it's hotly contested in nonfiction; there are some who believe if you cannot definitive "prove" (whatever that means) something you mention in your writing, then it's no longer nonfiction.

For others, speculative nonfiction means inclusion of the speculative. An important caveat I always give: Speculation is cultural. There are many cultures where conversations with ancestors, with other-than-human relations, and with what some would deem the spiritual or supernatural are common. Yet in a US publishing context, these are considered speculative, and so nonfiction that engages with these beliefs might be labeled as "speculative nonfiction."

But speculation can also look like the bringing together of speculative elements that many would agree are speculative—time travel, alternate universes, folklore and myth—into nonfiction in order to get at a capital-t Truth.

It's a fuzzy genre. Sofia Samatar and Del Samatar's Monster Portraits is, according to the former, a work of speculative nonfiction, but the publisher placed it under fiction. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House is probably the best-known example of speculative nonfiction; with the exception of an original fairytale and a retold version of Bluebeard, the story mainly deals with genre and genre tropes rather than out-and-out speculation, as far as I could tell. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior blends different approaches, from "perhapsing" the story of an aunt to imagining herself in the shoes of Fa Mulan to her mom's fight in medical school against ghosts. Jami Nakamura Lin's The Night Parade is my favorite work of speculative fiction, relying on folklore to explore the body, illness, diaspora, and the knowing of self. It's followed closely by Shannon Gibney's The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, which uses wormholes and parallel universes to explore the experience of racialized adoption and the reintegration of one's fractured identity.

In my story, I used the backdrop of the apartment building my maternal grandmother and paternal grandparents lived in, and the conceit of a child going to different apartments and meeting future versions of themselves—future and past versions of me. I fictionalized important bits about my life to write the story, partially for word count and time constraints, partially because... well, it's supposed to be fiction. I needed the fiction to hang together, even if what I wanted to explore in nonfiction would need more room.

When I eventually sit down to rewrite this story as speculative nonfiction, I might want to add a few more versions of myself that my child-self encounters, depending on what each version would say to the child. What, in other words, would I have told my age-eight self at sixteen, twenty-two, twenty-eight, and now at thirty-five? What might I say at forty-five, and sixty, and eighty? I can only suppose at the future, but I know what I would have said in the past.

This is a story I never would have attempted to write—or thought to write—even a couple of years ago. Know Thyself: It's because of what I've been working on in the last year in therapy that I feel ready to tell a story about my childhood like this.

That's the thing about good nonfiction: You have to be ready to tell that story, distanced enough to shape it so that it's more than a cathartic exercise for you. Writing as catharsis is important, but if you seek publication (whether that publication is posting on your blog or sending it to magazines), you do yourself and your readers a disservice if you're not ready yet to tell that story publicly.

What speculation adds is a different understanding of one's experiences. I could write an essay, linear or otherwise, discussing the kind of lonely juggling act I had to do as a child: watch my brother, bounce between my mother and father's families, wonder what it would mean to have a large family in the United States that I'd regularly visit.

Or I could write a story watching that lonely child, tap them on the shoulder, and say, Hey, I see you, and here's what you could become.

Does a story about you, the writer, engaging in the speculative necessarily become fiction because of the speculative? I think that's what's so beautiful about speculative nonfiction; it can allow us to understand a true experience through the speculative. No, I do not have a childhood memory of walking through that apartment building steps away from Lake Michigan, meeting future versions of myself. But in those conversations between child and adult, I can reveal things about myself I only now understand: I'm neurodivergent, not broken; my stories are worth telling, no matter who is listening; I am more than a constant caregiver.

Speculation in my own history is a gift to my past, present, and future selves.

I feel raw from writing this story, poking at a bruise that hasn't discolored into healing yet. But I don't feel a gaping wound, or a festering one. Part of that is the fictionalization of it, yes, but I think the bigger part is that I feel ready to turn and look at my childhood as a writer and tell that kid something I would have needed to hear.

And to listen to whatever that kid says back.

​Solidarity Corner​

After discovering Lnk.bio, I've finally migrated my personal Linktree there! I'm currently in the process of updating links and migrating my Solidarity Corner.

I'd again like to spotlight Eva Rosin's GoFundMe, as Eva is such a supportive member of our community and deserves to be safely housed. Again, send me a receipt if you donate for a chance to win a signed and personalized copy of one of my books!

If you have organizations, causes, or mutual aid requests you'd like me to spotlight here, please send those links my way. We get through these things when we do so together.

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