The Exiles: Report From Literary Syria

Throughout the past year, white tents with the letters UNHCR stenciled in blue on the top have been showing up in the countryside around my home in Madaba-Manja, Jordan. They’ve appeared in the campgrounds of the Bedouin herders, who usually live in more traditional gray and khaki tents. The stencils identify them as belonging to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—the tents are part of the international influx of supplies for the Syrian war refugees—and their appearance in my neighborhood means they’re being sold on the black market.

I call a friend of mine in Amman, Jordan, who makes a quick phone call and then rings me back. “The tents are selling for fifty dinar [about seventy-five dollars] in Mafraq and seventy-five dinar in Amman,” he says. There are two theories about where they’re coming from. Some people think there’s corruption in the supply chain and that the tents are hitting the black market before they’ve been distributed to the refugees, but a second, more plausible theory is that the Syrians are selling the tents because they need the money. “Two families will move into one tent,” my friend says, “and then they’ll sell the second one.”

In July, when the government stopped releasing information about the number of Syrians flooding into the country, there were 144,000 Syrians in the Zaatari refugee camp, which sits on a barren plain five miles south of the Syrian border. The Jordanian authorities built a six-foot-high dirt berm running parallel to Highway 10. Beyond the mound, I can see seemingly endless rows of white tents. In January and February of 2013, seasonal rains caused flooding, and the Jordan Times carried front-page stories about demonstrations organized by refugees who were upset about the poor housing and food shortages.

I loiter by the Jordanian Army’s armored personnel carrier at the entrance and watch the people flow in and out. Families walk past carrying suitcases tied with string; unsupervised kids run around; and what appears to be a crazy man lurches about in the road, misdirecting traffic.

On the drive back to Amman, my mobile phone rings; a friend has arranged an interview with the Syrian screenwriter and director Muhammad Bayazid, an exile whose successful business has enabled him to avoid the camp and rent an apartment in Amman. He has agreed to meet me and talk about the impact of the war on his life and work.

Muhammad Bayazid fled from Syria into Jordan on November 19, 2011, after twenty-four hours of imprisonment and torture at the hands of shabiha—thugs working for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. It was a startling turn of events for a young man who five years earlier was shaking hands with Asma al-Assad, the first lady of Syria, and agreeing to use his talents as a screenwriter and filmmaker to help publicize her many charities.

We meet in early June at Gloria Jean’s Coffees, a Starbucks-style café on Madina Street in Amman. It’s a neutral public space. The Syrian border is less than an hour away, and Bayazid remains cautious. He’s thirty years old, with finger-combed hair and a four-day growth of beard, dressed in a red shirt, jeans, and a watch with a blue denim band. He tells his story using the English he taught himself as a kid in Syria and improved later during stints in Los Angeles and London.

Growing up, Bayazid fueled his passion for storytelling by reading classics such as A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, which were supplemented by American comic books checked out from Syrian libraries. “I adored them,” he says. “Batman, Superman, SpiderMan. When I was a kid, I drew comics of my own.”

Bayazid’s father was a successful Sunni Muslim businessman in a country riven by ethnic strife. Having attended Al-Azhar, a famous Muslim theological university in Egypt, Bayazid’s father wore a beard but was not radical. He was just a “normal Muslim,” Bayazid says, a businessman who moved between Italy and Syria looking for a stable environment for his clothing business.

When Bayazid was in high school in Damascus, he volunteered for a nonprofit organization that cared for orphans. The company wanted to edit documentaries for one of its projects, and Bayazid volunteered to help. His experience led to an interest in filmmaking and eventually a trip to Los Angeles for a three-month course in film editing.

Afterward, back in Syria, he continued his education and worked part-time as a film editor. After earning a bachelor’s degree in business from Damascus University, he opened his own production company specializing in public service announcements and commercials for nonprofit organizations. To improve his writing, he finagled an invitation to study documentary filmmaking with the BBC in London and ended up spending eight months under the tutelage of Julian Doyle, the editor of Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) and the assistant director of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985).

By 2006, Bayazid says, his business “couldn’t have been any better.” He employed six people and was expanding into 3-D production. He had clients in the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, and Syria and had just met with the first lady of Syria, who was impressed by one of his short films.

All was going well until the Arab Spring uprisings began in Tunisia in December 2010; the demonstrations were well publicized, and they expanded into Egypt and Syria in January 2011. In Egypt the military chose to remain neutral, but in Syria the armed forces sided with the government against the protesters.

Bayazid witnessed one of these clashes in Daraa, a Syrian town adjacent to the Jordanian border and one of the hot spots during the earliest days of the Syrian revolution. “It was the trigger of my standing against the regime,” he says.

He was in his car, returning to Syria from working on a project in Jordan. At the border, the guards told him gangs had closed the main road; it wasn’t safe. They advised him to turn around and head back to Amman, but Bayazid decided to risk it. He drove north toward the town of Daraa and watched security forces—not gangs, as the border guards had claimed, but government forces—burning tires in the road.

“Since they closed the road, I cut into one of the Daraa villages, Sanamen. A funeral went past, and I pulled the car over and joined them. As a Muslim, [joining a funeral] is pretty common. Firing began, and I saw with my own eyes a man with a bullet between the eyes.” Bayazid could see a sniper on the roof of a building inside a government compound. “It was very clear who was killing who,” he says, certain that government forces were shooting unarmed members of the funeral procession. “After that day, I couldn’t shut up anymore.”

Soon thereafter he criticized the regime in an interview with a Lebanese radio reporter, and after the piece aired, a representative from the Republican Guard—al-Assad’s praetorian guard—called him and politely told him to focus on his filmmaking and leave politics alone. Bayazid responded with a Facebook post that accused the president of killing his own people. He received a second phone call that threatened to hurt him and his family if he continued criticizing the regime. Unnerved, Bayazid started planning to move his filmmaking business to Jordan.

He had nearly completed the move—his office was moved and his bags were packed and waiting in his apartment—when he got in a car with a friend to grab some dinner. As they drove toward a café, they saw three shabiha harassing three girls in a car. He asked his friend to stop the car. One of the men was going through the photos on a phone belonging to one of the girls, and the girl reached from the car window and snatched the phone back. “That was her mistake,” Bayazid says. The shabiha yanked her out through the window of the car, banging her head in the process. Bayazid got out to help.

He tells me his plan was to claim he was a friend of Asma al-Assad, the first lady. He would accuse the men of creating a disturbance that would swing public opinion against the regime, and the girls would escape while he argued with them. But he never got the chance to speak. As he stepped from his car, the shabiha attacked him.

“They hit me with three-foot sticks and an electric cattle prod to the chest,” Bayazid says. Using plastic zip-ties that cut into his wrists, they handcuffed him, then blindfolded him and dragged him into a nearby basement under an abandoned store. The basement was filled with other prisoners. Bayazid listened to the shabiha beating and torturing the others. Then they came for him.

“I’ll tell you about being tortured,” he says.

The roots of the Syrian revolution are twofold. On one hand, there is the desire of the Syrian middle and upper classes to have greater freedom of speech and a larger role in their own governance. Hafez al-Assad, an air force general, took over the country in a coup d’état in 1970; upon his death in 2000, he was succeeded by his son, Bashar. The father rose to prominence as a member of the Baath Party, a secular, nationalist, and socialist political party that pays lip service to Arab unity. During the cold war era, Hafez al-Assad aligned Syria with the Soviet Union, which provided military aid to Syria, and he used Syria’s army and the secret police to control the populace.

When I visited the country in 1990, I discovered a repressive, Orwellian state. Secret policemen, identifiable in matching leather jackets, rifled through my luggage at the borders, tailed me in the streets, and followed me into shops. One day I got a shave from a barber who glanced nervously back and forth from my bearded face to the mirror, where he could see a member of the secret police sitting behind us.

Most of the middle-class Syrians fighting against the regime want an end to Big Brother and the civil violations that accompany the endless surveillance: They want an end to censorship, an end to wasta (the Arabic word for nepotism, “connections,” and corruption).

But there is also a second, separate motive behind the revolution. A large number of lower-class Syrians view the revolution as a religious war. The al-Assads belong to a religious minority in Syria; they are Alawis, a sect that forms about 12 percent of the Syrian population and whose members adhere to a branch of Shia Islam. Most Syrians—three-quarters of the population—are Sunni Muslims. In some ways, the split between Shiites and Sunnis is similar to the Catholic and Protestant split that divides Northern Ireland and the Republic to its south. Of the states in Syria’s neighborhood, Iran and Iraq are majority Shia states, and there is a sizable Shia population in Lebanon, while Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States are majority Sunni states.

In 1982 in Syria, there was a Sunni revolt against Hafez al-Assad, who responded by ordering his brother, the head of the armed forces, to shell the city of Hama, flattening the old section and killing at least ten thousand of its Sunni inhabitants (some reports claim the number was forty thousand). When I visited the country eight years later, the old city of Hama was still in ruins; no effort had been made to clear the rubble. Burned-out cars sat amid the wreckage of flattened homes. Hafez al-Assad let the bombed-out neighborhood sit untouched as a warning to the survivors.

I witnessed these things as an outsider, as a tourist with a camera and a pen, but for the Syrian poet Amjad Etry, the happenings in Hama changed his life.

In mid-June, when Amjad Etry arrives at my cousin’s apartment in Abdoun, a posh neighborhood in Amman, Jordan, he is nervous about the way he looks and reluctant to talk. He has swept-back shoulder-length hair and a full beard flecked with gray. The long hair is new, he says; the chaos caused by the war has him too exhausted to visit a barber. He speaks Arabic and French but no English. After four months in the country, he is still struggling to find work in Anglophone Amman.

Francesca de Châtel, a Dutch author and journalist who speaks French and Arabic, and who served as editor in chief of the Damascus English-language magazine Syria Today for four years and published a book that is part travelogue and part survey of water resources in Syria, kindly serves as an interpreter during our conversation.

Etry is reluctant to talk about how he got into the country or exactly why he left Syria. He lights a Winston. “I don’t smoke much,” he says and then tells us about his life.

His parents fled the fighting in Hama in 1981 when he was three, moving the family to a leafy suburb of Damascus called Ghouta. Traditional Arab families dedicate time each week for visiting relatives—aunts, uncles, and cousins—to play cards and chat about the news of the day, but Etry says he never felt comfortable in these group settings; he needed time alone. His siblings—five sisters and three brothers—teased him about his solitary nature. “Even in my own family, I feel like a foreigner, a spiritual foreigner,” he says. 

Adding to his sense of alienation was his family’s very real displacement. The cities of Hama and Damascus are only 130 miles apart, but in 1981 they were on opposite sides of a religious and cultural war. When Etry entered school in his Damascus suburb at age six, the students called him Al Hamwi, “the one from Hama,” and when he returned to Hama with his family for visits, his cousins called him Al Shami, “the one from Damascus.”

“I live as an outsider,” he says.

I ask him if the massacre in Hama had any impact on him personally, and his eyes mist over. “To people from Hama, the events of 1982 are like the birth of Jesus,” he says, meaning that the massacre has become a historical reference point. “People in Hama will say, ‘That wedding was five years before the events,’ or ‘she died five years after the events.’” There is nobody from Hama who wasn’t affected, he says. Everybody lost someone.

Contemplative and soft-spoken, Etry took refuge in books, words, and poetry. At age thirteen, he began memorizing aphorisms, proverbs, and poems. In particular, he fell in love with the poems of Nizar Qabbani, a famed 20th-century Syrian poet, diplomat, and publisher, and he also began writing his own poems.

After high school, he earned an undergraduate degree in French literature and a master’s degree in audiovisual translation from Damascus University. During this period, he supported himself through a variety of jobs: teaching French, transcribing and writing footnotes for handwritten Arabic scholarly commentaries for commercial publication, and working beside his brothers in their tailor shop.

In 2008, Etry had enough poems for a collection, which he assembled and succeeded in getting sanctioned by the Syrian Ministry of Culture, which censors and approves all books published inside the country. A Kurdish friend designed the cover, and Etry contracted with a publisher to print the book. (As is the case throughout the Middle East, most poets and creative writers either win a state-sponsored contest and have their work published by the ministry of culture or they submit their work to the censors and, after receiving their okay, self-publish for distribution to friends and for use at public readings). At the last minute, however, Etry grew dissatisfied with his collection and canceled the printing.

Even at the university, he says, he continued to live a solitary life, spending the bulk of his time “studying, working, or daydreaming.” It wasn’t until 2009, when he discovered online poetry forums, that he began to build a community of writers. That same year he published his first poem online, and since then he has worked to find his own voice. Although he is an admirer of Qabbani, who is noted for his erotic poetry and his poems devoted to the Arab nationalist cause, Etry says his own poems are neither erotic nor political. “They’re more like Sufi poetry.” Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam whose most famous adherent was the 13th-century poet known in the West as Rumi. “Sufi poetry is more about love and the spirit,” Etry says. “It’s more abstract, more cerebral; it doesn’t discuss daily routines.”

I ask him if he can recite one of his poems for us, and he nods. He explains that the events of the past two years have had an enormous impact on his writing. His neighborhood in Syria lost telephone service and electricity for more than five months. And his vocabulary has changed, he says. He notices that the words lost, sadness, shelling, bombing, and death now appear frequently in his work.

He recites softly and confidently. Most of his poem is in classical Arabic, which means the grammar creates natural rhymes between subjects and their modifiers. When he’s finished, he translates a line for us: “The heart echoes our worry for Damascus, and the sigh is as fearful as the eyes around us.”

Prior to the revolution, Etry says, there were a number of places in Damascus where poetry readings were held. Poets who were members of the government-sponsored writers union, which Etry describes as “like a retirement home for poets,” read in government-run cultural centers to very small audiences. But in the neighborhoods around Damascus University, “people were actually interested,” he says. There were cafés and private cultural centers where readings occasionally attracted audiences of more than a hundred people. Since arriving in Amman, Etry has given one reading—at Jadal, a small, private cultural center located in the city’s historic downtown.

Like Bayazid, Etry currently has enough resources to avoid the refugee camp, but his money is dwindling. I ask him what ethnicity he is and which side he supports in the fighting, and he replies, “I am first human, second Arab, and third Syrian. Hama is Christian and Sunni, but the villages around it are Alawi and Sunni. I have Alawi friends, Kurdish friends, Christian friends, and Druze friends, and it doesn’t make a difference.”

Ultimately, Etry hopes, the conflict will lead to greater freedom of expression. “The pens will be liberated,” he says.

In Syria the government censors everything that is published. Writers and publishers live in fear that they will pay to print a book, magazine, newspaper, or journal only to be prohibited from distributing it. “There is no freedom,” Muhammad Bayazid says. “You can’t cross any line; you’d be destroyed immediately. Bribery and wasta is everywhere. Assad’s family owns the whole economy, and there is nothing we can do regarding this.”

Filmmakers in Syria have to have all scripts accepted by the raqabeh, the supervision arm of the state intelligence services—the secret police. Technically, the censor is a member of the ministry of culture, but in Syria the members of the ministry of culture are also members of the intelligence service. “As Syrians, every one of us has his own internal raqib [a member of the raqabeh]. We don’t cross the lines,” Bayazid says.

The soft-spoken Etry is more optimistic; he describes a slow easing of restrictions. “Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have seen a kiss in an Arab [television] series; now it’s normal to show kissing and all that.” However, Etry agrees with Bayazid that writing about sex, religion, or the government remains taboo and results, at the very least, in the government’s refusing to permit a writer to publish.

The Syrian writers union—like writers unions in Vietnam, Myanmar, and China—is complicit in the censorship. The organization is run by the government and, in exchange for government loyalty, its members are provided with health insurance as well as small stipends for reading in government-run cultural centers.

The Syrian writers I meet with outside the country are critical of the union. “The writers union is under the control of the regime; it is Baathist. It is a killing cliché of slogans that bore me to sleep,” Syrian poet Hala Mohammad tells me during an interview at the Saint Severin café on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris. “I don’t like boring people at all; I’m attracted to people with the courage to fight boredom.”

Mohammad won a state-sponsored contest for her first collection and has since published six books of poetry, but she never consented to joining the writers union. “In Syria, writers are stuck between ‘not forbidden and not allowed,’” she says. “I think the revolution started because people are tired of being stuck in the middle.”

Mohammad speaks French and some English, but she prefers to respond to my questions in Arabic. Dressed in a simple black outfit, she is accompanied by her friend Tamara Alrifai, who works for Human Rights Watch and who translates for us.

An outspoken critic of the al-Assad regime, Mohammad has received threats. She came to Paris in June 2011 in order to undergo treatment for breast cancer, but she chose to remain in France with her husband, the Syrian film director Haitham Hakki, because she did not feel safe in her home country. “Maybe I’m pretending I’m courageous, but I’m scared,” Mohammad says.

She shows me her latest book of poems, which she just received from her publisher in Beirut. The collection is about the revolution. “This is my kind of resistance; this is my kind of love; to tell the world there is a Syrian poet who belongs to a people who are noble, who don’t like killing, whose only crime is that they dream dreams of freedom, of justice, of individuality.”

Mohammad grew up in a family of nine children in the Mediterranean coastal city of Latakia. Her father was a liberal schoolteacher who educated his daughters and permitted them the freedom to run about the neighborhood. Two of Mohammad’s sisters who were educated in the West became doctors, while Mohammad knew from an early age that she was a poet.

At fifteen, she secretly fell in love with an older man and poured her emotions out in private poetry. Later that year, she gathered her family and some guests—about forty people in all—for a private reading. When she started reading, they began laughing. “They were not laughing at me, they were just surprised that I was standing there saying, ‘I am a poet,’” she recalls. “We are a family who like to mock each other. I remember being happy I could give them this happiness. I liked that they were laughing. After that, they kept asking me to read them my poetry.”

Fifteen years later, in 1990, after her physician sisters helped her with the tuition to attend the University of Paris 8 in France, her first collection of poetry won an award and was selected for publication by the Syrian Ministry of Culture.

While Mohammad is outspoken in her enmity for the regime, she is complimentary of one former member of the government, Antoun Makdissi, the former head of Authorship and Translation within the Syrian Ministry of Culture. Mohammad remembers Makdissi as a man who tried to increase freedom of speech from within the government. Unfortunately, he was ousted after writing an open letter urging Bashar al-Assad to allow more unrestrained expression.   

In 2005 Mohammad combined her passion for writing and her background in filmmaking to make a documentary film about Syrian writers in prison. “If you can’t find a way to be free under the dictator,” she says, “you won’t be free when [the dictator is] gone.”

Members of her family have been similarly active in pushing for greater personal and political rights. Her brother Osama is a filmmaker who made a movie under the auspices of the Syrian state cinema institute that was shown at the Cannes Film Festival but was banned at home; it was thirteen years before he was permitted to make a second film.

Mohammad says the revolution began as a peaceful fight for equality and freedom but has now been co-opted by radicals on both sides. “The government won’t allow the revolution to succeed because it will lose its power,” she says. “And the [religious] extremists don’t like it because they can’t be equal to other people because they have been sent by God.”

Mohammad is angry about the situation, but she is also worried about oversimplifying things. She points out that American notions of Islamic religious extremism are often shallow or mistaken. More than any other subject, Mohammad is passionate about the need for people to avoid black-and-white interpretations of world events. “My mother wears the hijab, but she is not an extremist; she is an angel,” she says. “It’s so bad the way movies make things so black and white, having a hero who kills all the bad guys. We’re all the heroes. Human principles are the heroes, not some guy. I don’t like the word hero. I feel sorry for the villains in movies.”

I ask her about her influences, and she says she likes the poetry of Ezra Pound, that she loves the music of Joan Baez, that she admires the work and writings of Angela Davis, and that she is a great supporter of the political activists seeking more freedom in Iran and across the Arab world.

She agrees to read a sample of her poetry. She writes in classical Arabic—typical among educated Arab poets—and she speaks in a deep, pleasant voice that commingles the objective intonations of a broadcast news anchor with the emotional inflections of a blues singer. Introducing the poem, she explains that Hamza al-Khateeb was a thirteen-year-old boy who was tortured and killed by the Syrian regime on April 29, 2011. When his mutilated body was returned to his parents and their protestations went viral, the government filmed a public service announcement in which a nurse with red-painted fingernails tried to argue that the boy’s wounds were not caused by torture. The poem, which is dedicated to the boy’s mother, describes the murder and the cover-up.

For now, Mohammad says, she will stay in Paris, where between her savings and her occasional work as a writer for various Arabic newspapers she is finding ways to make ends meet. But she yearns to return to Damascus. “We built all our lives in Syria, and we’re impatient to go back; we’re dreaming of going back.”

Muhammad Bayazid is sitting in Gloria Jean’s Coffees in Amman. “I’ll tell you about being tortured,” he says. I nod and ask him to continue.

“They took me to an old basement under a store. The place was filled with other people. I’m sure people were killed. One guy was hanging from the ceiling with his wrists tied behind his back; it pulls the arms out of the sockets. They stripped me naked except my underwear, cursing me the whole time, calling me a traitor, and beating me with an electric cable. I was lucky; they threatened to hang me from the ceiling, but they just beat me. They would hit me for five minutes and then rest.

“I remember the guy beating me looked exhausted. I was looking at his face. He was about twenty years old, and I was sad about him. They’ve changed him forever; he needs psychotherapy.

“They burned me with a cattle prod. I have a permanent burn mark here.” He points to his left shoulder and tugs down his shirt collar to show me. “It’s a nice memory. Do you want to see it?”

I shake my head. I want to look away.

“I lost the feeling of pain. After hours of being beaten, you feel nothing. An officer came with two security officials with AK-47s, and he asked me why I insulted the soldiers. I told him I didn’t want this drama in Damascus, that it would turn the population against the regime. He kicked and slapped me and told me I would be transferred to a security center. I thought I would be killed there.”

Instead, he got lucky. He isn’t sure why. Perhaps they believed his story about being friends with the Syrian first lady, or maybe they were worried because news of his detention was being broadcast on Al Jazeera; his friend in the car had called the news agency hoping publicity would help gain Bayazid’s release.

The security officials blindfolded him again and took him outside to a car where they told him they were releasing him. Bayazid, fearful that in his bloody and disheveled state another group of secret police might see him and arrest him again, paid the men the equivalent of a hundred dollars to take him to a friend’s house.

“Really?” I ask. “You bribed your torturers to take you someplace safe because you were scared that other secret police would see you, recognize that you’d been tortured, and rearrest you?”

“It happens,” he says.

Once he had made it to the home of a nearby friend, Bayazid called his driver and asked him to bring him a change of clothes; his were soaked with blood. He drove himself to the Jordanian border. Inside the crossing checkpoint, there was a television in the waiting room playing Al Jazeera. News of his detention was among the lead stories, and he worried that the border guards would see the news and keep him in the country. They didn’t notice and let him pass.

Later a friend in a government ministry told Bayazid that if he had waited twenty-four hours, he would have been arrested a second time. Since fleeing the country, Bayazid says, his name has been added to a list of people the regime has ordered to be killed on sight. His family quickly followed him to Jordan.

He was worried when his passport expired in March 2012, but he discovered that he could send bribes to officials inside the country, and he soon had an updated passport.

Still, he remains nervous. He arrived at an earlier interview and discovered a suspicious-looking man waiting for him. As he neared, the man “reached for something that looked like a gun,” Bayazid says, so he sped off in his car. He hopes that the regime has become preoccupied with other problems and no longer has time to worry about killing him.

In Jordan he continues to work. He has been commissioned to make fund-raising ads to be shown on American cable stations for the Syrian Support Group, which backs the revolution, and he also creates ads to be shown in the Arabian Gulf countries for a group raising money for the refugees in the Zaatari refugee camp.

“We don’t want the war with this dirty regime to change the purity of us,” he says. On his computer, he shows me a sixty-second public service ad he made for a group called Al Jasad Al Wahid or One Body. It’s a call for Syrian unity, a plea for the country not to fragment and factionalize.

In it, a young Arab boy is seen flipping through a coffee-table picture book in an all-white, futuristic-looking apartment. The book is filled with colorful photos of the revolution: There are shots of peaceful crowds waving Syrian flags, a photo of an elderly gentleman genuflecting with a Syrian-flag bandanna wrapped around his forehead, and several shots of beautiful Syrian monuments. A clock on a nearby table shows the time and date: 3:00 PM, March 15, 2025. The boy closes the book and walks to a massive picture window overlooking Damascus’s famed Umayyad Square, bright and beautiful. The scene fades to white and an Arabic sentence appears:

“Syria, we build it together.”

Stephen Morison Jr. is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. He has reported on the literary communities of Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Jordan, Myanmar, Vietnam, and North Korea. He lives in Madaba-Manja, Jordan, and is working on a children’s book set in Beijing titled “Emily and the Grand and Terrifying Dragon” (www.emilyandthedragon.com).