“The way to succeed at writing is to treat it like a profession: full of work and failure and further work, rather than the kind of mystical endeavour it is often made out to be…” - Saeed Teebi, SCS learner.
SCS Creative Writing learner Saeed Teebi has made the shortlist for the Atwood Gibson award for his collection of short stories, Her First Palestinian.
Named in honour of Writers' Trust co-founders Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, the Atwood Gibson Prize recognizes Canadian writers for the best novel or short story collection of the year.
Making the list of finalists for this prestigious writing prize has left Saeed feeling gratified and validated. “As a writer, you always have so many arbiters: yourself, your writing group, your publisher, the public,” he explains. “To have a set of arbiters I respected so highly (namely, the Atwood Gibson jury) say that my book was worthy of attention felt like an altogether different level of respect.”
The short stories included in Her First Palestinian, while not autobiographical, were inspired by Saeed’s own experiences as someone born in Palestine and living in North America. “Being human while also being Palestinian in the West comes with a special kind of agony and joy. The stories are fictional, but the emotions underlying them are ones I know and have felt deeply,” he says.
Saeed, who is also a lawyer, says he first casually considered the idea of becoming a writer when he was in his teens, when a high school teacher encouraged him. “And I knew I had to write when I first found a writer who I wanted desperately to imitate,” he adds.
After an extended break from writing, Saeed was looking to rekindle his motivation and get back into a steady writing habit, which is when he found the Creative Writing program at SCS.
Through his classes, Saeed formed a writing community with his fellow learners, a group of talented writers who he still meets with to this day. In addition to making important connections with fellow writers, he says one of the most valuable lessons he learned was to treat his writing like a profession: “full of work and failure and further work, rather than the kind of mystical endeavour it is often made out to be in popular culture.”
Saeed says the most challenging thing about writing is resisting cliché, while the most gratifying part of being a writer is: “The moment I feel my sentences may have finally become beautiful, by themselves and together.”
He recommends that anyone aiming to put together a collection of short stories spend time thinking carefully about their motivation before they begin. “Think hard first: what are the stories I really want to tell? Then do your best to tell them,” he says. “You have to create your urgency.”