I’ve been traveling for a while, and meeting with children and reading promoters has been on my schedule. Last Saturday, a group of book reading clubs’ active members and I came together to have a chat and sign my books in Sabzevar, a city in Razavi Khorasan Province. It was held in a cultural center named after Abolfazl Bayhaqi, a noted Iranian author globally known for his beautifully-written Tarikh-e Bayhaqi (literally meaning Bayhaqi’s History). I was standing beside children who were sitting in rows of chairs, teachers and reading promoters behind me.
We started talking with the last and the best book we’d recently read. Their answers were different but Shahnameh, a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi was frequent. I’d heard a lot about Shahnameh in my visits with children before.
They also asked me some questions including how I wrote my first story. I was 24-25 when I wrote The Red Bus. Its main character was a red bus inspired by my uncle’s minibus. My uncle, who passed away in the age of 50, always had some copies of the book in his minibus. They asked me if I could choose the best among what I wrote. As I worked in different realms of writing, I explained that it wasn’t easy to choose one. So I introduced them some of my old and new works. How and why I became a writer or how much I earn from writing were also among their questions. I tried to focus on the importance of reading in my answers. We had a lot of fun and I recited some of my poems.
After talking with children, I had a meeting with some of the cultural figures of the city. The council chairman also joined us. We discussed the matter of providing books for minor inhabitants of deprived areas. I shared the other cities’ experience with them, offering to launch a campaign for donating books.
A few days later, as I was waiting in Shiraz (the capital of Fars Province) airport to get back to Tehran, I opened my Telegram app to see that I added to a group named A Campaign for Equipping Libraries! Unbelievably, lots of books have been gathered and distributed among public libraries in a noticeably short time.
