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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.

Thank you to everyone who voted in the IGNYTE Awards! The results will be announced sometime in the fall. Crossing fingers!!

I'm writing this Telegram early, but by the time you read it, The Bruising of Qilwa's fourth anniversary will have passed.

On one hand, I can't believe it's only been four years. I feel very, very lucky at Qilwa's reception, that readers (like you!) continue to mention it during the Trans Rights Readathon, Pride Month, Nonbinary Day, and other reading challenges that happen throughout the year. Lately, it's begun to pop up for its aro/ace and SWANA reps, too, which I'm extremely grateful for. I'm especially grateful for those who are putting it on lists of Iranian authors.

On the other hand, I can't believe it's already been four years. Time is an illusion! And also: The Bruising of Qilwa's message is even more relevant in 2026 than it was in 2022.

I began drafting Qilwa in 2019, the summer before my second year in the MFA. I'd begun creating the world (which I've been calling the Qilverse thanks to a friend's suggestion) years before, for an ambitious but quiet novel about two friends helping a third cope with the traumatic death of their brother while political truths and lies unravel around them. In 2019, I was trying to unlock how to write a short story (let's be real, I'm still trying to figure that out), and so I decided working in a world I was intimately familiar with would fair better than trying to invent a new one from scratch for something short.

I was very wrong! That first draft was over 10,000 words; it was clear right away that the project wanted to be something bigger, so I spent the next year expanding it.

That fall, I took classes in postcolonial lit and theories of oppression and began to analyze the role of colonization in my world. I worked with a professor on an academic book review about undocumented storytelling and began to consider migrant access to healthcare, and how queer and trans migrants face an additional challenge.

Then it was March 2020. The plague described in the pages wasn't due to Covid, but became prescient during lockdown. But Covid absolutely made it into Qilwa by virtue of what I was seeing around me: medical racism, healthcare worker burnout, and exhausted Millennials and Gen Zers who were inheriting a world rotting from the corruption of unchecked white supremacy and late-stage capitalism. I drafted Qilwa with one deeply vile president in office, and revised and sold it when another also vile (as many would see for with the continuing genocide in Gaza) president took over. And now, of course, we are so past the fears of 2016 or even 2019.

I wrote the afterward of Qilwa—a thing even people who disliked the book were struck by—in 2021, six months after the January 6 insurrection. I've finally posted that afterward on my website. Almost six months into a war with Iran, and its relevancy cannot be understated. As I've been saying since March, it's never a good time to be Iranian in the US, but especially so now.

Anyway—watching the mishandling of Covid and knowing that our healthcare system wasn't prepared for long Covid (I wrote an article about it for Bitch Media, RIP) led me to include a second plague in Qilwa, one that spurred the blood-bruising that is central to the book's conceit. It also helped me understand Firuz better. I had already written in them my very Millennial exhaustion, but now I understood that healthcare worker burnout was such a huge part of why they are (what Vida Cruz-Borja calls) an inactive protagonist. Of course, Firuz uses their work at Kofi's clinic as a coping mechanism; while I talk about them having c-PTSD, in reality, they hadn't yet gotten to the "post" part of their trauma.

The Qilverse, as a whole, is my way of grappling with Iranian history. It is my Roman—or in this case, Persian—Empire. And it's exactly that: once I started thinking postcolonially, I couldn't stop myself from drawing the line from modern-day US empire to ancient Iran. And that led me to reexamine the world I had been playing with for almost a decade (by that point) and complicate my understanding of it.

By necessity, The Bruising of Qilwa is bursting at the seams. That, plus its slice-of-life, days-blend-together structure doesn't work for everyone, but it accomplishes exactly what I intended: you cannot help, as a reader, but be overwhelmed, just as multi-marginalized people move through the world powerless to affect change on larger scales, hoping the everyday is enough.

I am one of those odd people who does, in the daily, think about my political positionality in our world. Firuz is not. Firuz has a firmer grasp of empire than maybe I would write them to have now, but not enough to understand how the Free Democratic City-State of Qilwa behaves the way it does on a political level. But they see the fallout in their little but major sphere of healthcare, and they see the personal stakes in their found family. Still, empire intrudes on their daily life, even when they don't realize it.

The original title of The Bruising of Qilwa was The Last Free Clinic in Qilwa. It is, in some ways, a more accurate title, as I intended for this to be a snapshot of a story of the last bastion of hope in a city terrified of its own recolonization. But I think "Bruising" ended up being the perfect title for the story at hand—a story that still, these years later, lingers with me as one I'm proud to have written.

Upcoming Events

By the time you read this, I would have just finished a ten-day teaching stint at the low-residency MFA in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, at Lake Tahoe, where I began teaching earlier this year.

I'm not going to Worldcon this year, but I will be at World Fantasy in Oakland!

​Solidarity Corner​

After discovering Lnk.bio, I've finally migrated my personal Linktree there! I'm planning on migrating my Solidarity Corner asap.

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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