Introduction: Senaa Ahmad

I’ve managed to avoid taking photos for most of the past 8 years (professional photographers have told me I look like I’m being taken hostage). But here’s one from Photo Booth, circa the past few hours.

Here goes!

Do you have a nickname? 
No. But if you need a quick pronunciation guide to my name, it rhymes with “Jenna.”

What do you like to read? 
(Sorry in advance for this stupidly long list. Here goes.)

Jennifer Egan, Angela Carter, George Saunders, Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, Daniel Alarcón, and Italo Calvino have made me re-think my approach to short fiction at one point or another.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and Ray Bradbury were early inspirations & reminders of how elastic weird fiction can be.

In the poetry department, Ocean Vuong and Safiya Sinclair are so good it makes my teeth hurt.

Roxane Gay, Dave Cullen, and Brandon Taylor make me wish I could write non-fiction.

Elena Ferrante, Michael Ondaatje, and Tana French don’t fall into a particular category, but I will talk about them any day of the week.

I’m really, really behind on comics, but: I am obsessed with Adrian Tomine’s line art & beautifully sparse stories. I’ll probably read Brian K. Vaughan until the end of time. G. Willow Wilson’s spunky kid stories were exactly what 10-year-old Ahmad needed. Christian Ward isn’t a writer, but his art is preposterously good and I wish I could write half as well as he draws.

In the SFF world, some go-tos: Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, China Miéville, and Jo Walton. (Not including Clarion faculty, but they are of course on this list, but this list is already so long, good lord.)

What kind of stories do you write? 
For the past few years, I’ve been writing a lot of coming-of-age stories that lurk on the edge of weird fiction. I’m hoping to start a new project at Clarion, so we’ll see how that goes.

How would you describe your personality? 
I outsourced this question to a friend, who says: “A very old cactus on a children’s show.”

I outsourced this question to another friend, who says: “Albert Brooks in Broadcast News trying to be Holly Hunter in Broadcast News.”

What would you do this summer if you hadn't been accepted to Clarion? 
My partner & I would be moving from Toronto to Montreal (which we’ll do later this year).

Who will miss you most while you're in San Diego (cats, kids, partner, boss, coworkers)? 
Partner. Friends. The plants I neglect to water.

Have you participated in an intensive writing workshop before? 
Not like this!

What scares you most about Clarion? 
This is a cheat, but: I get hilariously mundane stress dreams about anything I think about for more than 10 seconds. You know, your standard dream where you have to climb an oil tanker to get to the Clarion cafeteria, or have to sleep in a tiny chapel(?!) with 4 other people. They’re not scary, but I’d appreciate if they went away.

What do you do to relax or for recreation? 
For the past couple of years, I’ve worked at a job that takes many of my days, evenings, and weekend, so the idea of relaxation is a beautiful fever dream. That said, I read the way people marathon TV shows. (I also marathon TV shows.) And I love watching movies at the TIFF Lightbox, which is a local movie theatre with two restaurants, sporadic exhibits, and a bonkers film archives library. (You can basically live there.) (Actually, it’s also a condo building, so people literally live there.)

What 1-2 essential things will you bring to Clarion besides your laptop, watergun, and espresso maker? 
A whole whack of notebooks I use to organize my life. It’s 50-50 compulsion / necessity.

I’m awful at bike-riding but I’ve also never bothered to learn to drive a car, so I might try to source a bike while I’m in town.

What is your ideal career? 
Excluding anything writing-related, I’d love to work on the commissioning end of film/TV. (To get very very specific, I’d basically love to be a less smart version of Marie Nelson at PBS or a producer for Canada’s National Film Board.) Or a configuration of film festival programming that isn’t stressful and pays a living wage (I’m 98% sure this career doesn’t exist).

What else do you want us to know about you? 
As a child, I was 100%, couldn't-use-the-bathroom-out-of-fear convinced that Rita Repulsa was going to come to my house and murder me. And equally, adamantly certain that Michael Keaton-era Batman would rescue me from my life if I solved jigsaw puzzles fast enough. (Needless to say, I was terrified of the dark.)