A book of short stories by Ghassan Zeineddine, B.A. ’02, entitled “Dearborn” (Tin House, 2023), was published this fall to good notice. The Washington Post called it one of “10 noteworthy books for September” and it was reviewed positively in the New York Times and elsewhere.
“Dearborn” contains 10 stories focusing on Arab American characters living in the eponymous Michigan city. The stories are set in various time periods—for example, after the terror attacks of 9/11, or after the election of Donald Trump in 2016—so that the city itself is a bit like a character moving through time. The stories share an appealing mix of humor and sadness, reflecting the tragicomic sensibility Zeineddine said is his default mode of experiencing life.
“That’s the way I process the world,” Zeineddine said. “With friends and family, I try to crack jokes all the time. And I think that carries over on the page. I really feel comfortable in that comedic space, writing about serious matters through comedy. If you want to take a reader down a dark road, one way to do that is through comedy. But it’s tricky, because once you arrive at that serious subject matter, you have to treat it with the utmost respect and try to find the right balance.”
Zeineddine learned something about balance at GW, where he majored in psychology with a minor in creative writing. (Degrees from GW are something of a family tradition: His mother, Wafaa Al-Awar, B.A. ’76, and sister, Jana Abou-Zeineddine, B.A. ’99, are also alumni.) He knew he wanted to pursue writing professionally, but a writing major was established only after he was already advanced on his academic path.
“I thought psychology would complement writing in terms of understanding people better,” Zeineddine said. “And I really enjoyed psychology, too. It worked well with creative writing.”
Readers of “Dearborn” won’t be surprised to learn that one of his favorite courses at GW was on organizational psychology—“basically, the psychology of work,” he said. The lives of Dearborn residents, including a butcher, a census taker and a real estate agent, among many others, are firmly contextualized in the stories, outlining the organization of the city itself.
It was at GW that Zeineddine first began writing about Arab characters and experience. Before that time, he said, his characters lacked national connections and their settings were never specified.
“I grew up in the Middle East, but then we moved to the D.C. area,” Zeineddine said. “I never really had any Arab friends until I got to GW. I made close bonds with a lot of Arab American students. It was really important, especially because at my high school there wasn’t that much diversity. And at GW, there was a lot of diversity. I felt very much at home. My closest friends at the university all came from different ethnic American backgrounds.”
Most, but not all, of the characters in the “Dearborn” stories are Lebanese American. They include, among others, a butcher who secretly likes to dress as a woman; a centenarian survivor of the Titanic shipwreck; a failed actor who works as a census taker; a woman who struggles to respond when her neighbor is a victim of domestic abuse. In “Speedoman,” a stranger in a revealing bathing suit at a community center stirs up uncomfortable feelings in husbands and wives alike.
Some of the writers who have been important to Zeineddine include Gabriel García Márquez and John Irving, who appeal to him with their vivid characters and whimsical tone.
“I have also been very much influenced by the ethnic American short story cycle, story collections linked by recurrent characters, a common setting, common themes,” Zeineddine said. “I’m thinking specifically of Amy Tan’s ‘The Joy Luck Club’ and the work of Edward P. Jones, who started teaching at GW after I graduated. His short story collections, ‘Lost in the City’ and ‘All Aunt Hagar’s Children,’ about the African American community in D.C., really blew me away.”
Influenced by his love for such works, Zeineddine said, he was drawn to creating such a book of his own, capturing different voices from a community and showing its diversity. The result was “Dearborn.” Zeineddine now teaches creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio, but he plans to continue writing stories about Dearborn as well as a comic crime novel set there.
“The chief of Dearborn police is of Arab descent,” Zeineddine said, “and there are a lot of Arab police officers, too. That’s something I'm interested in learning about. And I’ll continue to write stories set in Dearborn, making sure not to become repetitive.”
