Luke Rolfes: We are here today with Alex Poppe, author of the new memoir entitled Breakfast Wine from Apprentice House Press, which details her adventures and travels as an instructor in the Middle East, and her subsequent return to the United States. Congrats, Alex, on this excellent book, and thanks for spending some time with us!
Alex Poppe: Hi Luke. It is my pleasure to be here with you. Laurel Review holds a special place in my heart. When I first started writing, you published my story “Room 308” and nominated it for a Pushcart. You also wrote me a nice note about it. When I started experimenting with the essay form, you published a piece which later became part of Breakfast Wine. Your support was a much-needed boost of confidence, which helped me keep writing.
LR: How long did you work on Breakfast Wine? Was it always, in your mind, a complete memoir project, or was it broken into standalone essays?
AP: I started Breakfast Wine at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where I was a writer-in-residence in February 2021. I was writing fiction, but the master writer-in-residence, Randall Silvis, overheard me telling a story about this 16-year-old who had become the leader of one of the most powerful tribes in Kurdistan. He used to dance around the classroom, squirting his cologne in time to the music playing inside his head. I used to leave that classroom reeking of Calvin Klein Obsession for Men. Randall urged me to write about Kurdistan for the next workshop, so I did. I wrote about my friend, Luke, which ended up becoming a later section of the book. After the residency, I returned to northern Iraq, where I taught at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, and started teaching myself the essay form, reading essays, and writing. I didn’t think I was writing a book until I had about five or six finished pieces. I completed a full draft by the end of 2022. I sent it out on submission, and it was kindly rejected for the same issue, so I took the book out of submission and did a major rewrite, which took about 9 or 10 months. Because I write beat by beat and rewrite at the top of every writing session, I had never had to do a major rewrite. It was a great learning experience.
LR: You divided this memoir into ten sections, sometimes containing more than one essay, and presented chronologically. What led you to organize the book in this way?
AP: During the nine-month rewrite process, I was studying other memoirs and noticed that writers were writing shorter chapters, so I broke my long essays into multiple essays and grouped those essays into sections. I think readers start and stop a book, so I presented the book chronologically and added year and place markers at the start of each section so the story would be easier for the reader to follow.
LR: I was struck by this idea in the opening essay. “I wanted to live outside of my culture for the same reasons I wanted an artist’s life.” Can you elaborate more on that? Why did you see those ideas as similar?
AP: Thank you. That’s a great question and the first time I have been asked it. My vision of an artist’s life was a bohemian, constantly surprising, bedrocked in community and relationships existence. I thought an artist’s life would be one of novelty and learning. I was an actor, so I thought I would get a chance to live multiple lives as I inhabited the given circumstances of each character I embodied. I found that my actor’s life could get as mundane as my prior corporate existence. I would wake up, work out, vocalize, practice audition sides/monologues, read (always on the hunt for new audition materials), race to Actors’ Equity, take my two minutes in the audition spotlight, race across Manhattan to my bar job, work until the wee hours of the morning, sleep a few hours, wake up, rinse/repeat until I landed my next role. For a long time, I loved my actor life until I didn’t, but actor training gives a person great life skills. The friends I made from that part of my life I am still close to. I wouldn’t change that part of my life at all, but at some point it became dissatisfying.
I craved adventure and connection. I wanted to have my jaw drop in wonder. I wanted to know people who had had experiences different from my own. I wanted to be challenged so that I would grow, and I thought living in another culture would provide that for me when I had lost my zeal for acting.
Living outside my culture was one of the best decisions I have made. It helped me grow up in a way I am not sure I would have if I had stayed in the US. It made me more tolerant and generous. Most important, my lived experience abroad disabused me of my notion of American exceptionalism and made me realize how people outside the US perceive Americans and our culture.
LR: You lived in Kurdistan (northern Iraq) for about 10 years. What do you wish the rest of the world knew about that specific region of the world that they likely don’t know?
AP: So much! That is one of the reasons I wrote Breakfast Wine. I want people to see that so much more unites us than divides us. People “over there” are just like people here. They have the same hopes and dreams as we do. We all want to live in safety and security. We want to have careers we enjoy, find love, build families, chosen or biological. We want our kids to be educated, have opportunity, and have access to health care. There is so much more to know about Iraq and Kurdistan than what is portrayed in our mainstream media or in our films. I experienced such kindness when I lived there, even when our country’s foreign policy decisions betrayed Kurdistan.
I am always amazed that the Kurds and Iraqis I met didn’t hate Americans. They were able to separate a people from their government’s decisions. I lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn during and after the September 11th attacks. Not everyone I interacted with at that time showed compassion or understanding for people in Afghanistan or Iraq. I remember a restaurant manager who called Angelina Jolie a traitor because she had donated money to help Afghan women. People who wouldn’t order French wine or “freedom fries” because France had not initially supported the 2003 invasion. Meanwhile, I had students who had been beaten by coalition forces during house raids when they were kids, or students who had seen coalition forces kill family members during house raids, and these students did not hate Americans.
LR: Is there something you miss most about living there?
AP: I miss the students most of all. Students are great everywhere; it’s the institutions around them that succeed or fail. But there’s a singular sweetness to the students in Iraq, be they Kurdish, Iraqi, Yazidis, Syrian, or something else.
I miss my friends/colleagues. We lived with one another in university housing, worked alongside one another, hung out together, so many of us became great friends. Most of my fellow teachers are spread out across the US and beyond now. We are still in touch, but it is not the same level of intimacy.
I miss our communal way of living. You could always find someone who wanted to take a walk, go to the bazaar, go get a drink, and yet, you could close your door when you wanted some privacy.
I miss the freshness of the produce. I miss certain sweets we’d get at the bazaar. I miss the way the sky would turn into a band of intense orange squashing a band of intense indigo at sunset. I miss the forlorn call to prayer and the way the air smelled like sun-roasted sand during the heat of summer.
LR: This book is often personal memoir, but there are some parts of it that break into explication of culture/history. Some readers likely know little about this region of the world. Was it difficult to balance the need to contextualize with the need to showcase your personal experience?
AP: It was difficult because as I was writing, I was learning how to write in the essay form. I was constantly thinking about the situation versus the story and how to balance the two. I wanted the personal to speak to the universal so people who hadn’t given birth to me would find the book interesting. I also needed to provide enough context so people would understand the nuances without telling the reader what they already knew and risk boring them, or explaining too much and tipping into academic writing, which this is not. I addressed this challenge in the major rewrite because the first complete draft had more cultural, historical, and political content.
LR: Mistreatment of women is something you highlight in this book, as well as political and gender violence. You encountered a high level of sexual harassment and sexism while living abroad. As well, you found out one of your co-workers was a convicted sex criminal. What made you choose to stay and fight against this culture instead of removing yourself from it?
AP: What gets me out of bed every morning is my desire to see actual equality align with theoretical equality in my lifetime. As long as I do not have full agency over my body, I do not have actual equality. Education, the ability to take in information, decide what is true or false, form an opinion about that information and defend it with proof and critical analysis, is a necessary weapon in the fight to achieve actual equality.
LR: Let’s look at a couple different sections of this book. The chapter “A Pleasant Addition to the Classroom” is told in the form of student progress reports. Can you talk about using this unconventional form?
AP: I could have written an entire book based on the antics of the class sitting featured in “A Pleasant Addition to Any Classroom.” I needed a container that would allow the humor of their antics to resonate while making sure the writing didn’t sound like it was settling a score. The antics of this group lent itself to situation more than story, so I deliberately crafted the last student progress report to tease at the idea of motherhood to act as a transition into the next essay, which is themed around motherhood and the idea of vocation, which was the story.
LR: Chapter five (my favorite section) is about you trying to destigmatize sexuality. Through literature and classroom discussion, you illustrate to your students how sexuality and gender can be weaponized. You, for instance, teach Margarat Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy. This section of the book occurs in the middle. Do you think this section represents an inflection point for you as an instructor?
AP: I am sorry to disappoint you, Luke. For me, that chapter is not an inflection point. It is in the middle of the novel because I arranged the novel chronologically.
That section is a celebration of embracing the intimacy of risk and the strong relationships that grow out of being vulnerable when the stakes are high. Years later, when some of those engineering students grapevining the back row of the classroom were graduating from university, one of them sought me out to say that my class had been his favorite in his uni experience. I don’t think it was because I explained the Madonna/whore complex or female agency in sexuality.
It has been 11 years since I taught that class, and I am still close to a few of the students that took it. I get a thrill seeing how they have matured into adulthood and live their lives.
LR: A crushing blow in this book is when you lose your friend Luke to tragic circumstances. Luke’s death is a powerful moment—perhaps it could be seen as the climax of your experience abroad, yet his passing isn’t where this memoir ends. You continue your work into the pandemic. I’m curious about the placement of Luke’s story within this memoir. Can you walk us through why you chose to place Luke’s narrative when you did, rather than offering it to readers at the beginning (as context) or the end (as finality)?
AP: The piece about Luke is the first piece I wrote, long before I thought it would become a full-length book. I didn’t want to start the book with it. To do so would have seemed like ambulance chasing to some degree. It also wasn’t the end of my story in northern Iraq. I never thought of it as an end because processing his passing took me such a long time.
LR: The essay “Ode to WhatsApp” details your experience of teaching with a technology that is more intimate and personal. For instance, you see your students on the video app, at times, without a hijab—which would not have happened in the physical classroom. We are a few years out from the lockdown stage of the pandemic. How do you think that pivot to “learning through tech” affected this specific generation in this specific place?
AP: Learning through tech was brutal for all young people, but it was especially difficult for students in the global south. They often didn’t have electricity so getting online was tenuous. In countries coming out of dictatorship, there isn’t always a culture of self-directed learning, so being motivated to do independent work was extra challenging. Students in the Middle East are very community-oriented. I had students try to cheat to help their friends pass so the group could stay together even if it meant they got a bad grade. Not being in community, the isolation, was so difficult. Then, as the pandemic started to affect people, my students had the extra stress of having to find oxygen for a mom who was in hospital, loved ones passing, a lack of PPE. We didn’t have vaccines until late 2021. At times, the public health sector went on strike because they hadn’t been paid in months. It was really tough for my students, but they learned they could do things they had originally thought they couldn’t, which is confidence- and skill-building.
LR: When you culled this book, did you have to make any “tough cuts”?
AP: I cut a lot of political explanations. I wrestled with how much info to include about refugee camps versus settlements, how Internally Displaces Person (IDP) camps gets far fewer resources than refugee camps, and when that happens in the same geographical community, it can create resentment. I cut this whole passage about “the capo” in some camps, a person who decides who can or can’t set up a tent and collects money to do so. I cut parts about branding relief aid, the pros and cons. I had a whole section with a few chapters about the work I did in Palestine one summer between terms in Kurdistan. I went into detail about the systematic degradation Palestinians suffer under occupation. I cut some text about the Ja'fari Personal Status Code when talking about gender-based violence and women’s rights in Iraq. I cut some literary references after a publisher told me they took him out of a scene.
LR: What’s next for you? Are you working on any new book projects? Individual essays?
I am working on a book of literary fiction, with the goal of completing a solid draft in the next 8 months. That is ambitious for me as I am a slow writer and only about 50 pages in. I am grateful I will be attending Macondo Writers Workshop in July and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in October to help me reach that goal. I am also writing essays and expanding my freelance business as a development editor and writing coach.
LR: Thanks again, Alex, for spending some time with us. Please check out Breakfast Wine from Apprentice House Press.