An Interview with Jacob Reina

Jacob Reina graduated from Fresno State in December 2023 and earned a BA in English Studies. Some of his poems and short stories have been featured in New York Quarterly, Twisted Vine Literary, Free Spirit, Rougarou, Watershed Review, Allegory Ridge, Paper Dragon, and elsewhere. Aside from reading and writing, Reina enjoys photography, cinema, hiking, running, visiting art galleries, and exploring new places.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

The book’s title, Purity of the Sky, is taken from one of Negar’s favorite poems, “Aida in the Mirror” by Ahmad Shamlou. This particular verse is featured in the epigraphs. The poem is one of my favorites as well, and after reading it again during the book’s drafting stage, it clicked: this must be the title! I couldn’t look back.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

Seeing the cover for the first time…it moved my heart. People familiar with the Women Life Freedom protests will almost certainly recognize the unveiled woman standing with her hands above her head—the photograph had been taken from a car’s rooftop, forty days after Mahsa Amini’s death, when tens of thousands of Iranians were marching to Saqez to mourn Amini. This photograph is a symbol of resistance, as well as courage and strength. It’s as if the young woman is saying to the Islamic Republic, “I’m not afraid of you anymore. In fact, none of us are.” There couldn’t have been a better photograph to showcase on my book’s cover.

I also loved seeing the Istanbul landscape, and all the symbols of our marriage and our situation overall: the enormous white hot air balloon that we passed in Tbilisi’s Rike Park on the night of our wedding, the two airplanes flying separate ways, the seagulls and the clouds and the crescent moon and the stars. The red sky behind the white moon and stars capture the Turkish flag on the back cover. The boat is sailing along the Bosphorus Strait past Galata Tower just as we had done.

Lastly, I was happy to see the cover had clear influence from the cover of Adib Korram’s Darius the Great is Not Okay, a young adult book about an Iranian American teenager who visits his ancestral land for the first time. Considering that I constantly allude to Persian writers and artists throughout the book, seeing this same theme on the cover seemed completely appropriate. And everyone seems to like it! So, I’m grateful for the cover designer, Felipe Betim, and the entire cover design team for what they made.

When I held the physical copy in my hands for the first time, I felt an incredible sensation: my lifelong dream of writing a book had been achieved, and I was immediately motivated to revisit that dream again and again. I know that I will.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

Most obviously, Negar was the primary influence. But so was the city of Istanbul—the landscape, the people, the architecture, the culture. All the Iranian men and women worldwide who fought for Women Life Freedom mesmerized me into writing this story (and others). In my opinion, this is one of those special moments in world history—such as the Orange Movement in Ukraine or Gandhi’s anti-colonialism protests in India—where people will look back and understand what it actually means to be a real-life hero. Iranians, however, receive such little international attention in general, or are overshadowed by all the atrocities the Islamic Republic regularly commits around the globe. I’m definitely not the only person who has written about their cause, and Iranian writers themselves, like Marjane Satrapi, are far superior to me at capturing the emotions stirred by this situation. This is one of the reasons I consider Satrapi to be one of my literary heroes.

In terms of style, I pick up things naturally from the authors I read most: Sadegh Hedayat, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Sergei Dovlatov, Elif Shafak…I can go on and on, but these are a few of my favorites. Cinema has its affect, as does music. 19th-century literature and art is something I’m pretty obsessed with, especially the high-romantics like Victor Hugo or the Brönte sisters and the impressionist painters and musical composers. I always wanted to do for literature what Van Gogh does for painting: make the colors of emotions pop!

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

What haven’t I worked in? Like that character from Gilmore Girls, Kirk…I’ve done nearly everything. At one point, I cleaned trumpets for a music shop, but I did it all wrong, and let’s just say it was the only job to let me go. I worked as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant, a delivery and rideshare driver, a busser at a wedding banquet, a microbiology lab technician for a food safety business, a movie theater employee, a tutor, a drone instructor, a substitute teacher, a corner store clerk. For nearly ten years, I worked in pharmacies, as a compounding technician, a clerk, their overnight delivery driver. The variety of ridiculous jobs have exposed me to different classes of people, different cultural backgrounds, different mindsets…I was a totally different person when I first started work, because I knew nothing about anything, even in regards to how I should communicate with others. Now, maybe I still know very little, but it’s definitely more than before. Online English tutoring and language exchange work was by far the most life-changing, as I befriended people from different countries that I got to know well or even visited in-person, including people from both Russia and Ukraine, Peru, Kuwait, China and the DRC. Hey, I even got married to a particular Iranian who needed help with her English (and who taught me some Farsi in exchange)!

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Realizing that people care what I have to say. Realizing that, officially, I am a recognized writer. This is something I promised in the past to accomplish in my lifetime.

Also, writing the book helped me come to a better sense of self-awareness: my struggles, my fears, my goals, my strengths. All of that means something, and I know each new project will teach me more and more.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

I mention a lot of the songs in the book. A musical director would have too much fun with it, I think, because there are so many options, contemporary and old, Western and Eastern, traditional and unconventional, lyrical and instrumental. I’ve always found the mood and the lyrics to “Only Ones Who Know” by the Arctic Monkeys to be relatable. Any song from Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Death Cab for Cutie. Or even Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye. Satie or Debussy or Ravel. For Persian artists, Sogand or Ebi or Googoosh or Mohsen Yeganeh or others. “Baraye” by Shervin Hajipour is astonishingly beautiful and widely considered to be the anthem for the Women Life Freedom movement. It would have to be in there, no exceptions.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

I’m actually anxious to hear the different perspectives and debates people have over my book. I don’t envision a perfect reader for that reason. However, the most crucial lessons I hope people get is that Iranians have been ignored for far too long, and it’s way past time to give them the attention they deserve. So much of what we have in our world came first from Iran, and we must help them materialize the better life that they dream for like we would for a beloved family member or our dearest friend. They are not the Islamic Republic, they are Iranians, and the Islamic Republic is not Iran.

I also hope people will not make negative assumptions about either Negar or myself. We are real human beings, and we have hearts and minds like everybody else. When we accuse the Islamic Republic or any other dictatorship for crimes committed against innocent people, we are not making excuses for anyone else who’s done the same and we do not represent all Iranians or all Americans. I want people to realize we are two people affected by a conflict that has affected millions of others in a variety of ways. I guess a perfect reader is the reader who gets inspired enough by my book to go out and read other accounts by other writers.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

I’m writing two more follow-up books to Purity of the Sky. Part II will be set mostly in Yerevan, Armenia, and will focus on Negar’s immigration interview and the reasons she had to leave Iran quickly. Part III will close the story in the United States, focusing on our first year or so together here.

I’m also writing my first play, which is loosely inspired by the family history of one of my friends in Kyiv, Ukraine.

I have quite a few short stories I’m slowly releasing into the world. Two are out there now: “Waiting for Alyona,” written in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine (and during the month of our wedding) and featured in Free Spirit’s Reaching the Dead End anthology in March 2024; and “To See the Saffron Wither,” published by Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal in May 2024. It’s a historical fiction piece that follows a family of royalists who are torn apart by the 1979 Revolution in Iran.

How was working with Atmosphere Press? What would you tell other writers who want to publish?

I loved working with Atmosphere Press, especially my developer, and already have encouraged other writers to send in their work. I hope to work to send more work to Atmosphere Press in the near future.

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.