Writer Interview: Anastasia Ashman in Turkey

Writer Abroad is excited to welcome Anastasia Ashman to share her unique international twist on writing, publishing, and social media. Ashman is a writer/producer of cultural entertainment and a hybrid identity adventuress. Encouraging us all to seek our global niche, she’s founded the neoculture hub expat+HAREM, which Writer Abroad was pleased to contribute to last week. As part of a worldwide series of intellectual dinner parties the Economist magazine calls “jetsetters with a conscience” she produced the Near East's first Global Nomad Salon in Istanbul. Her special brew: the native of counterculture Berkeley, California combines a decade of work in New York and Los Angeles mainstream media and entertainment with a degree in Classical Archaeology and 11 years of expatriatism.Whew. Welcome, Anastasia.

Can you talk about your bestselling anthology, Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey? What gave you the idea and what was the process like from idea to publication?

Soon after arriving in Istanbul in 2003, I created a women’s writing group with a fellow American Jennifer Gokmen. By 2004 we were all writing about our Turkish experiences. Collected, they might begin to piece together the puzzle that is modern Turkey. We played with motifs of female culture in Turkey and were quickly drawn to the anachronistic, titillating concept of an Expat Harem.

A harem can be a positive concept, a place of female power, wisdom and solidarity. The sultan’s harem was made of foreign-born women, a natural source of wisdom about Turkey. We recognized that modern virtual harems exist today. For instance, foreign nationals in countries everywhere can create isolated coteries, confined by language barriers, cultural naiveté and ethnocentricity. It’s an age-old expat survival technique!

Yet, when the protective walls close in, we’re in a cultural prison. Luckily today’s virtual harem doors swing both ways. Open: the harem remains our peer-filled refuge while we enjoy the possibilities of the land.

When we called for submissions we asked what writers learned about Turkey and what that lesson taught them about themselves. By email, we heard from over 100 women in 14 nations with stories than spanned 50 years and the entire nation. They came to Turkey pursuing studies or work, a belief, a love, an adventure: an archaeologist, a Christian missionary, a Peace Corps volunteer, a journalist.

Most pieces received a deep developmental edit and went through several revisions. Thirty writers made it into the final manuscript six months later which we sold in via a New York agent in 2005 to a feminist press in California. That is, after we produced a hundred pages of likely readers: Middle Eastern studies departments at universities, Turkish festival organizers, diplomatic missions, bellydancing groups, olive oil importers, human resource sections of multinational corporations with offices in Turkey, you name it. Ten New York publishers had already passed, saying “charming, but the topic is too small”. Lesson learned: selling your world to the market back home demands a boatload of context.