Daniel Nayeri: Truth, Story, Hospitality, and Hope

Stories shape the way we see the world, connect with others, and find hope in the midst of hardship. In this episode, I had the privilege to interview one of my favorite living authors Daniel Nayeri, whose books Everything Sad is Untrue and The Many Assassinations of Samir the Seller of Dreams have captivated readers with their honesty, humor, and heart. From his childhood in Iran and experiences as a refugee to his reflections on truth, memory, and hospitality in storytelling, Daniel shares how stories help us love our neighbors, cultivate empathy, and face suffering with hope.

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Meeting Daniel Nayeri: A Life Shaped by Stories

Daniel Nayeri was born in Iran, lived as a refugee, and immigrated to the U.S. at age seven. “Books have been my life at this point, and I’m really pleased about that,” Daniel reflects. From his earliest memories of family storytelling in Iran to working as a library page in Oklahoma, stories became both his refuge and vocation. His career spans literary agent, editor, publisher, and author of award-winning works such as Everything Sad is Untrue and The Many Assassinations of Samir the Seller of Dreams.

Childhood Wonder and the Power of Fairy Tales

Daniel recalls how folk tales, fairy tales, and comics shaped his imagination. Meeting his wife, who majored in fairy tales, deepened his love for the genre. “When I was young, I was often finding myself in the fantasy stories. Tolkien, of course, becomes a foundational one, but so was Terry Pratchett… I realized the value of comedy in even the most serious spaces.” Today, he still returns to Arabian Nights and Calvino’s Italian Folk Tales.

Storytelling as Hospitality

Hospitality became a natural theme in Daniel’s writing. He describes storytelling as a mutual act of welcome:

“The writer inhabits the reader… you are letting this writer take the control for a second and put a bunch of words in your head. That’s a very invasive, intimate description of what reading and writing is like.”

For Daniel, the author must be a careful guest in the reader’s mind: “When I’m in somebody’s mind… you just try to be careful.” Stories, he believes, teach us to honor others and love our neighbors.

Truth, Memory, and Storytelling

Daniel acknowledges the imperfect layers between memory and truth. “We fundamentally do not have access to perfect truth-telling,” he explains. Stories told in love aim toward truth, while those told to deceive create distance from it. His memoir Everything Sad is Untrue embraces this complexity by portraying a flawed narrator.

Different Modes of Story

Daniel contrasts one mode of storytelling, often influenced by film’s invisible lens, with Eastern traditions like Arabian Nights, where stories nest within stories. “I want to know who’s telling it. Because the minute I know who’s telling it, the layers of my interpretation expand exponentially.”

Stories, Hope, and Suffering

Hope threads deeply through Daniel’s work. Drawing on Tim Keller’s teaching, he describes how belief about the future transforms present suffering:

“What we understand to be not only the nature of life, but the nature of our afterlife, will absolutely affect how we conduct ourselves, but also how we experience it.”

For Daniel, stories are reminders of hope that transcend mere optimism.

Encouragement for Writers

Daniel urges aspiring writers to practice: “I really believe there’s no such thing as a talent on this topic. It’s entirely built on how much you’d like to work that muscle out.” His new book, How to Tell a Story, offers both inspiration and practical prompts for developing storytelling craft.

What Daniel is Reading

Lately, Daniel has been revisiting Arabian Nights, enjoying the Redwall series, and reading manga with his son. A favorite discovery is Yotsuba!, which he calls “the closest thing I’ve read to Calvin and Hobbes.”

Homeschool Wisdom: “Let’s Go Make Something”

Asked about hard homeschool days, Daniel shares: “I am a big believer in cut the day right there and go do something physical… or go make something.” Cooking with his son is a daily practice, reinforcing his family’s balance between consuming and producing.

Key Takeaways

• Stories are both hospitality and friendship between author and reader.
• Childhood storytelling traditions shaped Daniel’s imagination.
• Fairy tales and comics deeply influenced his reading and writing.
• Stories reveal cultural morals and shared humanity.
• Truth in stories exists beyond strict historical accuracy.
• Eastern storytelling embraces “stories within stories.”
• Hope transforms how we experience suffering.
• Writing is a skill to practice, not a talent.
• Daily life should balance consuming and producing.
• On tough homeschool days: “Let’s go make something.”

You May Also Enjoy:

• Stories and Sanctified Imaginations (with S. D. Smith)
• Reading, Relationships, and Restfully Homeschooling (with Sarah Mackenzie)
• Stories, Truth, and the Reading Life (with Megan Saben)
• Raising Readers and Embracing Creativity: A Conversation with Glenn McCarty
• Joe Sutphin and Kevan Chandler on Friendship, Faith, and Creativity
• Traitor: an interview with author Amanda McCrina
• Strategies for Teaching Homeschool Writing (with Janie B. Cheaney)
• The Joy of Writing: Millie Florence and Beyond Mulberry Glen
• Identity, Grace, and a Literary Life (video interview with Missy Andrews from Center for Lit)
• Cultivating Discernment and Delight in Children’s Books: A Conversation with Redeemed Reader

Find Daniel Nayeri Online

Daniel Nayeri was born in Iran and spent some years as a refugee before immigrating to Oklahoma at age seven with his family. He has had a long career in publishing, first as a literary agent, then an editor and publisher for houses such as HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Macmillan. During that time he edited books in every category, from memoir, cookbooks, board books, picture books, literary fiction, how-to, novelty, and more. He is the author of several books, including Everything Sad is Untrue (A True Story), winner of the Michael L. Printz Award, the Christopher Medal, and the Middle Eastern Book Award, and The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, winner of the Newbery Honor. He lives in the U.S. with his wife and son.

• www.HowToTellAStoryWorkshop.com
• www.DanielNayeri.com
• Books

Check out all the other interviews in my Homeschool Conversations series!

Amy Sloan: Hello friends, today I am delighted to be joined by Daniel Nayeri. He was born in Iran and spent some years as a refugee before immigrating to Oklahoma at age seven with his family. He has had a long career in publishing, first as a literary agent, then an editor and publisher. During that time, he’s edited books in every category from memoir to cookbooks, board books, picture books, so many more, a whole list. He’s the author of several books, including Everything Sad is Untrue, A True Story, and The Assassinations of Samir, The Seller of Dreams. He lives in the U.S. with his wife and son, and I am just absolutely delighted to be chatting with you. Before I let you kind of introduce yourself a little bit and tell a bit of your story, I just have to tell you a story about my experience with your books. I love recommending books to people. That’s always fun. But there are a handful of books that I feel like I hold in my hand and bestow them as precious gifts to others, and there’s just a few books that I have that level of memory of giving. One was The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt. I just remember reading it and then coming down the stairs and handing it to my oldest children, like, this is beautiful. You must stop everything and read it immediately. One of my daughters had that same experience with A Long Walk to Water. She finished it and brought it to me and was like, Mom, you must read this book. And that for me is how I feel about your book, Everything Sad is Untrue. I feel like whenever I recommend it to people, I’m handing them something precious. So I’m really excited to chat with you.

Daniel Nayeri: Thank you. Well, you just named two of my absolute favorite people in children’s literature. Both Linda Sue and Gary are people that I look up to and have, in fact, weirdly enough, the very first book I published solo, my first book, the back of the book is a quote from those two people. So they’re just about my faves.

Amy Sloan: Yeah. I think, I mean, now I’ve talked to you, if I ever talk to Gary Schmidt, I might as well just just, like, retire from podcasting because I will have reached the pinnacle. But here at the beginning, why don’t you, I’ll stop talking, you tell us a little bit about yourself and your family and your story.

Daniel Nayeri: Well, sure, yeah, I mean, you know, nowadays, I sort of, when I describe to people what, you know, if they want a quick introduction of who I am, I mean, books have been my life at this point, and I’m really pleased about that. You said everything from, you know, having grown up, I was born in Iran, and the first stories I remember are very much from a storytelling tradition of sitting around where there wouldn’t be a TV in that space, and so dinner parties, if you can call them that, sort of dinner time, supper time in the evening, adults and kids would all kind of be in a mixed space, and storytelling would be the entertainment. That’s sort of among the vaguest memories I have or earliest memories I have of Iran. And so I kind of credit that a little bit to my love of stories, but I also credit an incredible era of deep boredom, right? So in the sense that we didn’t really have books or packaged stories in the sense of TV or anything like that when we were sort of traveling to the United States. And so there was quite a lot of just imaginative play. I think a lot about imaginative play for young people. And then by the time we got to the United States, the greatest, one of the greatest, I should say, aspects of living in the US is the proliferation and robust quality of their library system. My gosh, like go to any small town in America and you can still like walk into their library and there’s just thousands of books thousands of things. I find it amazing. I’ve been a nomad here in the U.S. like we lived in a trailer for a while so I’ve been to a lot of towns and you know the first thing you do we would do when we would go into a town would be like look up the library and I’m always amazed at that. So when we came to the U.S. I kind of lived in that little library. It was my first real job with like a you know paycheck so to speak. I was a library page as a 12 year old And then kind of immediately knew I wanted to be a writer, went to school for creative writing and English literature, was an agent, as you said in your bio. I’ve been, for 25 years, my career was as an editor in New York and edited all sorts of things and wrote. I’ve written across a lot of genres as well. So in the meantime, I’ve like, I’ve built bookshelves for people as a construction worker. I’ve done book repair for like rare books. I just adore everything about them. I like everything from what they house in terms of stories to their actual physical experience of having them. So yeah, there’s a lot of other things to say about me, of course, books are not the very first thing I would say, but in this context they might be relevant. Nowadays, of course, I’m a husband and a father, I used to be a chef, so a lot of my writing has a lot to do with food. But yeah, always a broad question, but I think those would probably give us enough hooks to kind of get a sense of what I like to do all day.

Amy Sloan: Yeah. I could totally resonate with what you’re saying about the library. That was always one of my favorite places growing up. I was a library page as well as a kid. You were. And you know, it’s like the thing that I was so excited about when I found out I was pregnant with my first son. I was like, I get to take him to library story time, you know.

Daniel Nayeri: We were both pages. Does this mean we have to have like a shelf off? Did you do this as one of our big things among the pages was we would take one of those carts, the rolling carts, and every each page would get a full one. And then, you know, you would go and whoever could shelf their full cart first was like, you know, the winner. Did you did you ever race your shell?

Amy Sloan: I didn’t. You had a more fun library than I did.

[00:06:28] Daniel Nayeri: It might have just been a way to incentivize us to do more work faster.

Amy Sloan: Yeah, maybe so. Harness that competitive spirit.

Daniel Nayeri: I got Tom Sawyer’d.

Amy Sloan: Now you know. You just figured it out. Well, you mentioned, you know, your early experience with the storytelling around the dinner table or the imaginative play where you’re telling yourself stories even without a book. but I’m wondering if there were any particular stories as you began working in the library and had access to all these books that particularly captured your imagination and then how has sort of your approach to your own personal reading developed over time?

Daniel Nayeri: Well, yeah. In terms of the stories that kind of captured me early, I’ve always been a fan of and return to folk tales and fairy tales quite a lot. It’s actually something that my wife and I really connected on. We met when we were 18 in school and she was majoring in fairy tales and I just thought that was the coolest thing in the world, you know, and so I would often ask her about it and, you know, if you take the thread of what fairy tales have meant to us, like where are they functioning now, there was a lot of crossover with what I was studying. I was studying comics and so, you know, the superheroes and stories of the 60s and 70s seemed actually to cross over in theory with fairy tales a lot. So the short answer to your question, when I was young, I was often finding myself in the fantasy stories. Tolkien, of course, becomes a foundational one, but so was Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett is a fantasy writer who most notably for being so funny, he’s a comedic fantasy writer and I remember when I first read that I thought you can be funny like what are you talking about you know I up till then read you know Tolkien style high fantasy and never occurred and of course Tolkien nowadays I read and he’s quite funny um but he’s not like uproarious or you know slapstick he’s not as much that and whereas Pratchett really is um and that that I I think was a major influence on not only my reading but my writing was that I realized the value of comedy in this sort of, even in the most serious spaces. And so I would say those were kind of the early, the biggest, and to this day like if you ask me like what I just finished reading right now over there is a translation of the Arabian Nights, specifically the heroic stories. so Sinbad, Aladdin, Alibaba, those kind of later additions to the Arabian Nights. I’m reading Calvino’s collection of Italian folk tales, which I think is great. It’s one of those like big, thick books kind of scares people, but actually every story is like four pages long, and it’s really like the Italian version of what the Grimm Brothers did, or the Grimm Brothers. And so that, I think, um, is kind of still what I’m reading, uh, in terms of what, what gets me excited and what, what my writing is kind of trying to do. So I would say fairy tales in short. Yeah.

Amy Sloan: Well, you know, folk tales, fairy tales, mythology, they all kind of, they share something in common. I think not only do they tell you a lot about the culture and we could link in like the, the superhero tales, right? Which is sort of like our American version of, of, of a myth or a folk tale. But they also show across cultures this shared humanity because you see so many of those same themes that come up again and again with fairy tales, mythology, folk tales, which I personally find really fascinating. And one of, I think it might have been the very first season of the podcast, I interviewed someone who, the entire episode was about the gospel and fairy tales and how we see these elements that are, like, baked into the law, you know, the goodness of God written on man’s hearts across time and culture, and how you can really see that in fairy tales. So I’ll try to link that in the show notes for this.

Daniel Nayeri: Yeah, fascinating. You’re absolutely right. I mean, if you want to know what a culture thinks about its morals, that’s the fastest way to get it, right? Those are the questions at the heart of fairy tales is what is heroism? You know, what is good? What is bad? They’re pretty straightforward about it. And so comics is a good example for the United States because it would be hard to characterize the United States at any given moment. But go to the golden age of comics, the silver age, the sort of current age, and you’ll get a pretty good sense.

Amy Sloan: All right. Well, I have a question about this idea of hospitality in storytelling, because kind of unintentionally, and now I’m bringing it in intentionally, but unintentionally over the past season, that came up as a theme, this love of neighbor, this idea of being hospitable, with a wide range of guests talking about a lot of different topics. And so it was really interesting to me to see this sort of naturally occurring as a common theme. But I noticed as I I was rereading Everything Sad is Untrue and the many assassinations of Samir recently, that you bring up this idea of the relationship between the storyteller and the story hearer in this idea of friendship, that being at the root. And so I was wondering how you see the act of storyteller and story hearer, like hospitality, is it a way we’re honoring one another, regardless of which side of that relationship we’re on? And then from there, big picture, how do stories in general help us learn to love our neighbors more? Long question. So take that however you want to go.

Daniel Nayeri: I’ll take the first part first, if it’s okay. And then if I forget the second part, you can remind me. In the stories, that comes up a lot. In fact, it’s funny you say that as you were asking the question and noting that it comes up in Everything Sad and in Samir, I have a book coming out called The Teacher of Nomadland and it comes up again in the theme, but in this case, I mean there’s sort of iterations on the theme and in this case being in the context of being not hearer and reader, but reader and writer, but rather teacher and student. And so I think along these terms quite a lot and and I suppose if I address the version of it that is kind of explored in Everything Sad, it began when I was in a critical theory course in undergrad, and I forget who this writer was, I want to say it was Roland Barthes, but it was just this sort of one-off sentence that was read that stuck with me forever, and it was that the writer inhabits the reader. This idea that the writer’s words are quite literally placed into the mind of the reader, the reader when you take on the role of looking at these little markings on a piece of paper, you are letting that voice sort of take over your tongue, so to speak, or your brain, whatever you want to call it. You’re letting this writer take the control for a second and, you know, put a bunch of words in your head, which when described that way is a very invasive, you know, intimate description of of what reading and writing is like, right? I mean, this idea of inhabiting and some, so much of the metaphor there is, I mean, inhabiting something is like being, you know, possessed by someone, but also in the way that maybe your mouth is being puppeted, right? You know, by someone else. And, and so I suddenly, you know, when I, when I heard that I was, I was struck by, you know, as a college student, I’m constantly told to read lots of authors and some of the books I’m reading, I don’t agree with, I don’t really like, and that feeling some of us get when we say that we were so disgusted by a book that we threw it across the room. We ejected this person from our mind as fast as possible, right? So I think, one, I think it’s perfectly fair as a result to throw books across the room. I fall on that side of the cat. You should feel free to do that. You should feel free to kick someone out if they have misused their welcome. should feel free to kick them out. And in the same way, because suddenly I started to take that metaphor, and you can see it’s a very easy step from the writer inhabits the reader to the reader welcomes the writer in. And there are obligations when you are welcomed into something like someone’s home, certainly into someone’s mind, and those obligations are first and foremost to want good for them, right? And so I have often felt while reading a book, especially in undergrad, I remember feeling as if I am reading a work and this writer wants me out of some deep well of anger or bitterness, like would like me to agree with them about this particular topic or whatever it might be. They want me to, they’re coercing me. I would feel the hand of the author pushing a little too much. And I remember as a result sort of rejecting it, feeling as a reader, and this is why being a good reader, being a critical reader is so important, is that fundamentally you are engaging with the writing, right? You are saying like, I’m going to let this in and I’m not going to let this in, right? And so that obligation always stuck with me, that dynamic always stuck with me. And so fast forward to when I’m writing a book about a young man who is himself a refugee and is new to the country and these kind of metaphors of being welcome are particularly potent to him, you can see that it comes up very quickly, this dynamic of speaking to the reader and wishing to be a good guest, wishing to be the kind of writer that they would not only want to welcome but, you know, would befriend. And so that becomes probably the central theme, I would say, of Everything Sad is Untrue. And really, I mean, he’s too young as a narrator to know that quote of the writer inhabits the reader, but he’s very clearly intuiting it and reacting to it. And so I think that’s where a lot of the hostly themes in my writing comes from is trying to manage and also, especially when you’re with kids, I mean, like, you know, I write and often children read my work or, you know, and so I think doubly, you have to be careful as a guest and to sort of, well, to honor the influence that you have, honor is the wrong word, right? To fear. To fear the influence that you have properly enough to use it gently and for good purpose.

Amy Sloan: With great power comes great responsibility.

Daniel Nayeri: Yeah, why didn’t I just say it the easy way? And so, yeah, exactly. So that’s where I think those themes become triply true for someone like me, right? I think of it very often as, you know, have you ever been invited into a kid’s tree house or into those toy houses that are kind of just big enough to be in the living room but not bigger? And I don’t know if you can tell from video, I’m not a small person. And so to be invited for like a tea party inside like a plastic house is a kind of environment where I’m aware that I could like break every chair and if I stand up too fast I’ll wreck the house and everything is small and breakable. And I think of that all the time when I’m in somebody’s mind, you know, and so you just try to be careful. be careful.

Amy Sloan: Yeah, being both a good guest and then a good host as the reader, it makes me think I just finished reading Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis and was discussing it with some friends recently and you know that’s one of his whole points in that book is having this willingness to listen, right? If a guest comes in you don’t start like criticizing everything about them, right? That wouldn’t be very kind or welcoming. So from the reader’s perspective, you know, having that willingness to have an open ear, right? Not that you have to accept and agree with everything that your guest says, but at least to listen because you care about them and you want to actually know what they think, right? So I think C.S. Lewis would probably agree with everything you were just saying. So you’re in good company.

Daniel Nayeri: I love that. Could we maybe just pull that sentence out and use it in every context? C.S. Lewis would agree with everything Daniel was saying. I appreciate that. Mr. Lewis. Thank you.

Amy Sloan: Well, how do you think, kind of in a broader context, does being the reader of the story help us learn to love our neighbors more?

Daniel Nayeri: Um, goodness, you know, maybe I’m going to go back to Lewis. Uh oh. There was a quote, and I always get his quotes wrong, but there was a quote that was something like, you know, if we saw people as they were meant to be seen, we would be tempted to worship them, right? This idea that, you know, and it goes back to the idea that we were all created, you know, in the image of God, the creator, and so there’s something, there’s some deep, beautiful, you know, sacred thing that we can see inside each other, right? And I most see this, and I know it relates to reading, I think we’ve all heard the kind of the notions of reading one’s story and walking in in someone’s shoes, empathy, these kind of good ideas, and they are, they’re all true, so good. I find it most apt when I talk to people, I’m like, have you ever noticed that when you watch like a reality show, even if you’re watching a show that’s like full of people who are just total messes, by the time you’ve watched like, I don’t know, 12 episodes, there’s, you have this odd fondness and love for them, for no other reason than the fact that the camera has been pointed at them for something close to 30 hours, and you go, I really believe that that’s the case. I believe it’s very true that if we were to just watch others on camera for 30 hours, long enough to get past the parts we dislike and past all the ways they are annoying to us, and to even watch them through several instances of hurting people but also being hurt and whatnot, you know, just seeing them in life, if we were to observe them for 30 hours or so, we fall into some kind of love with them, you know. And I find that fascinating because reality shows kind of like make their hay on finding really challenged people and putting them in even worse situations and having everybody misbehave. But at the same time, just watching them is kind of fascinating. Just seeing people, because I think you get a glimpse of how they were intended. And so I think with a story, it’s all the easier. You don’t have to wash a bunch of trash to do it. What an easier and better way to do it would be to just read a work and to start to understand. So that’s one. It’s this metaphor, this idea that when we watch people as they were intended we see some glory of God in them that’s one the other is actually because we understand the world in shorthand right we understand our world in the shorthand of characters and I’ve said this before that you know we’ll say things like well be careful about him he’s kind of a Don Juan you know like be careful about her she’s all about Eve um or you know he’s such a quixotic guy or she’s you know and we just we have our shorthand of understanding that Pangloss is a character who is optimistic to a fault or that this person’s a little sneaky right and you know Moliere does such a good job of giving us these short Shakespeare does the best job of giving us shorthand characters that allow us to quickly understand the world and you know even discuss and understand each other. I can’t imagine having to explain people without the benefit of stories. If we went, for example, to undergrad, as happens, and you have to explain everyone back home to all the people you just met in your dorm. If you didn’t have the use of stories and characters to shorthand some of this, it would take forever. I would need you to sit down and watch 30 hours of reality television about every single one of my friends in order just for me to tell you a few things about them. So I think stories are also both in terms of the spiritual side, but also in terms of this practical logistical side. They just simply help us understand each other. And so yeah, I think it just on its face is the only way we could do it.

Amy Sloan: It’s like as we read the story, we recognize the characters because we recognize something true about them that we’ve seen in people around us. But then the more characters we read, the better able we are to understand the real people around us too. So it kind of works in unison, like both directions, I guess.

Daniel Nayeri: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It’s a cycle, right? So, you know, every one of Austen’s characters is very helpful when you’re talking about dating. Or every one of, you know, or you know Anna Green Gables I think is just one of the grand Shirley rather is one of the great like character studies and we can see pieces of you know you can insult somebody just by saying which character they are right you can you can get or you can also give them a certain sense of uh complex insult right not just like like um like do you know Ignatius Reilly is a character in the confederacy dances he’s the main character confederacy dances and he’s sort of famous for being a character who refuses to go on the heroic journey, right? He will not learn anything. He’s the most stubborn character I have ever encountered. But he’s also a visionary and someone who is fighting against the tide of the 20th century. He quite literally refuses the 21st century. And there’s something about that that I think is heroic and funny. But to call somebody Ignatius Riley would be a fascinating and very complex kind of assignment. Same thing with Don Quixote, right? At your heart, you are heroic, but you’re awfully misguided as well. I think that’s helpful.

Amy Sloan: My dad grew up in rural North Carolina, and I grew up, you can’t really hear it in my voice now, but when I’m with that side of the family. My dialect changes.

Daniel Nayeri: Say banana pudding.

Amy Sloan: Banana pudding.

Daniel Nayeri: Okay, cool.

Amy Sloan: Yeah, I hear you. But I did not know until I went to college that I had been dropping the H on the word humble my whole life. I had been saying humble. I had no idea that that was wrong. That was just how everybody said it. And so when I found out, my first thought was, oh no, I’m like Uriah Heep. So, I was like, that was not a character I ever wanted to be like.

Daniel Nayeri: That’s right. It’s funny. Yeah, there also are guardrails, right? There are certain characters that I want to be so little like that I actually, you know, shift myself, uh, over. That’s so funny.

Amy Sloan: Oh man. All right. Well, another thing that I noticed in your, in your books, and I don’t know, so I feel a little awkward. Like, I’m like, I’ve noticed a theme. I don’t think like, well, that wasn’t there. I don’t know what you’re talking about. So feel free to be like, you are seeing things that do not exist. But something that seems to come up to me in both books, again, was this difference between the stories we remember, then the stories we tell, and then like the events as they actually occurred. And sometimes there’s overlap, and sometimes they’re very different. So I was curious what your thoughts were about, you know, the truth of story that is maybe separate from its historical accuracy, and then the power, the difference between the power of a story told in love versus one that’s used to manipulate or deceive.

Daniel Nayeri: Wow, that’s a great question. Well, yeah, I won’t spend too much time on the fact that it’s true that we don’t have very good memories, right? I think we can all agree on that one, that we’re not all accessing the truth all the time, despite the fact that we, you know, we might with good intention be thinking that we are. Some of that is natural when you have a young narrator because, well, because young narrators don’t actually often perceive all the complexity of a situation and so they catch on to the wrong side of things and maybe are misperceived. So So there’s just a knowledge gap there that kind of creates a layer. So I think of these in terms of layers of accuracy, right? Like the veils between us and the truth, right? And I don’t know if I am saying anything controversial here, right? Like every single person who’s ever, you know, like I believe, you know, there is an objective truth and I believe it was even given to us. And yet also, we quite often fumble the bag with our sort of limited ability to understand it with, let’s face it, some of our desires to misunderstand it in just the right, most convenient ways. So there’s a lot of layers to get put, even if you were to say, hey, this thing, this, I can point to it, this is the word of truth, this is true, maximally true, inherently true. You can say all those things and I agree with you, frankly, But that doesn’t change the fact that layers of misperception occur almost immediately. And that’s the nature of our world and our consciousness. Frankly, we see but in a mirror darkly, right? So we fundamentally do not have access to perfect truth-telling. And on top of that, our egos and our pain and our heartbreak, when some fight has occurred, and we wish to preserve our dignity, or we wish to walk some of that back the way we behaved, or we wish to win. Whatever it is, we there’s a suddenly there’s a lot of incentives to misunderstand. and so I think that part’s pretty easy. I think the question you had on the second part of that that was a little more, well it would be more challenging to sort of break down, would be what is the distinction between a story told in love and a story told, what was the second discussion? To manipulate or deceive. So that’s great, right? The second part helps us in a little bit easier than the first part because the first part has a lot of common landmines that people walk into. Because if a story is told fundamentally to manipulate or deceive, what we’re effectively saying is it’s layering your vision, it’s farther and farther from the truth. I think it’s pretty, we’re pretty all pretty commonly, I think the problem here is when we start to accuse each other of doing that and try to, and this happens in families all the time, of trying to adjudicate and excavate, you know, a memory that we all just fundamentally disagree on. I think that ends up being a large part of the dynamic of families that had really, maybe all families, I try not to speak for all families because I have no clue what any of them are like. So I don’t know which part of my family made it so. Maybe being a family, being a family that went through a bunch of dramatic stuff, being a family that had a lot of difficult personalities in it. I don’t know. Whatever category we fit in that made it so, it was so. And so I spent a lot of my adult life just trying to adjudicate what was true. And to be very honest, why I wrote Everything’s Sad the way I did was because as an adult I was trying to, I wanted to hone, hue as closely to the truth as I could and in trying to excavate those stories realized that it was an impossibility just with some of the characters involved, with some of the information that wasn’t available because I can’t go back to Iran, but also I don’t know if we’re ever going to get down to it. Ask any couple that have divorced and had had, unfortunately, a rancorous relationship. Try to go and get to the bottom of why it happened. Boy, it’s just not going to happen. You’re not going to get consensus. And so I think a lot of the stories we tell each other are defensive positions, you know? And so I think a lot of what I was doing when I was writing this book was reacting to that notion. I’ll quickly explain so that I’m not rambling. One of my jobs as an early editor, as a young editor, was editing a lot of celebrity memoirs. And one of the things that happens when you edit memoirs is you realize this exact thing that you’re describing, right, of telling stories as a weapon, as in this case, a defensive posture of saying, well, you know, I’m a celebrity, you think you know this stuff about me, but let me set the record straight, let me tell you what it was really like. And that’s what’s promised on the cover of the book. But of course, what’s actually happening in the edit is, you know, I would notice a lot of times celebrities would react to when their ghostwriters or their co writers had written a scene sort of more objectively, they wanted to make sure that it was massaged so that they didn’t look too stupid, so that they didn’t look malicious. And you’ll note this, like if you read memoirs a lot as a genre, you’ll notice that like conveniently the narrator is never, you know, the villain, you know, it’s like, it’s just, it’s always written by the good guys. And it’s always, they were always the smartest one at brunch. I always joke, right? They always had the comebacks that we all think of later, they all thought of right then. And so I remember becoming fairly cynical about that genre and realize thinking like, well, are all these just people making themselves look good? Is this all just lies and and how malicious is it and the answer is of course if you were the other person at the brunch it’s pretty malicious right and so when i started to write everything sad i one of the things i really wanted to address in the form of the story was how flawed this person is uh this narrator is and how um he’s doing his best and he’s even doing his best in good faith he’s you know he tries to present that but that he’s sort of woefully inadequate as a person to you know kind of be given the mantle of truth teller um and so and he’s he’s you know buckling under that the very first sentence of the book is you know all persians are liars and lying is a sin um he’s put that into persians but the category is people um and so uh that’s that’s where the book begins because that’s where the nature of memoir begins.

Amy Sloan: Yeah. And then in Samir, you have more of like the trickster tales, right? So, like, stories, you know, you kind of are like, wait, am I supposed to believe this story? I don’t want to, you know, spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t read the book. Yeah. But would you see, like, as a difference there, too, it’s, well, it’s part of that, part of that manipulation, I guess, or the way you want someone else to perceive the story. right? As opposed to seeking to actually communicate as close as you can to the truth. Although we will all be flawed in that.

Daniel Nayeri: Yeah, I’m just thinking about this one. The attempt is where we put most of the emphasis, right? We all assume everybody’s flawed, but then I’m doing my best here versus, I think you’re right, Samir is, that’s not a story that purports to be true in any way. So the narrator is telling you his kind of adventure across the Silk Road, and you’re right. There’s a lot of questions as to exactly how reliable is he going to be. I think everything said, the narrator is much more incompetent than unreliable.

Amy Sloan: Whereas in this case- Or maybe an immature. There’s the youthfulness of the narrator that comes across more than, I wouldn’t say he’s incompetent, you just see he’s young, like he’s limited, right?

Daniel Nayeri: Well, he wouldn’t get the job of narrator if it was a bit, if it was a job. He’s not, he’s not qualified is what I’m trying to say for that, for that position. And he knows it and he’s very afraid as a result. And so, whereas, yeah, you know, it’s, I think of, you know, if I have one way of storytelling, telling stories that I really just love as stories within stories. I love knowing who the narrator is. Often in stories, your goal is to just be an invisible narrator. You don’t want to have all that frame of, okay, so who’s telling me this? Oh, it’s this professor who’s writing it 10 years later. Or, oh, it’s this guy is telling the story to someone else and we’re seeing them fidget. But for me, I really enjoy that. I mean, that’s what the Arabian Nights is. We’re very aware that these stories are being told by this woman Scheherazade to the king. I think I do that almost every time. That to me is not a type of story. That is how stories work. I want to know who’s telling it. Because the minute I know who’s telling it, the layers of my interpretation sort of expand exponentially. Because now I’m thinking, Okay, so, well, you’re saying this person was, you know, a villain, but what does that say about you? And what do I know about your presuppositions in this situation? And so on and so forth. So you’re starting to question the teller. And I’ve always found that fascinating. I do that in picture books all the way up to, you know, novels.

Amy Sloan: Well, would you say that that is a distinction or a difference? story within stories of like a Western mode of storytelling versus Eastern? Or what are there? Are there other things that you would see as kind of a distinction there?

Daniel Nayeri: Yeah, I mean, so broadly speaking, right? The East doesn’t own anything and the West doesn’t really own anything. But yeah, broadly speaking, the terms like in literary discussions, some people call that story within story within story structure. They call it the Chinese box narrative. So like boxes in boxes. And then some people call it the Arabian Nights narrative, which is kind of probably the prototypical version of that. So yeah, it’s much more common in those kinds of stories. But, you know, great exemplars have, you know, we have now in the West as well. And in the West, I think it’s, well, I think, you know, the film tradition, if you start from the moment film occurs, the film tradition has, I think, influenced the American novel to want to be an invisible lens a little bit more, you know, and as we’re speaking broadly in terms of like patterns, we’re not speaking in terms of what everybody does, but I think if I had to guess, I would say that the visual nature of a film, this idea of like I’m looking at a frame, it’s why I think, you know, American novels are very filmic and that’s great, you know, but I think that has a lot to do with it is we want to see what’s there, we want to see what’s happening. Whereas I want to know who’s talking.

 Amy Sloan: Yeah. Okay. That’s really fascinating because I was just discussing Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman with my 15-year-old daughter. It’s one of those books that was hugely impactful to me as a teen, so I make all my teens read it. Some of them have liked it more than others. But one of the things he talks about in that book, right, is like the medium itself is the message. And so the kinds of ideas, Because the medium that is being used restricts the kinds of ideas that can be communicated, which then influence the way a culture or society thinks and feels about life. And so that- just what you were saying about, like, the rise of film, right, as this medium and the way then that has trained our brains to think the kinds of ideas, the way we see a story, because of that then has even impacted books. I mean, I’m sure everyone has had that experience where you read a book and you’re like, man, author. I feel like they’re setting this up to be turned into a movie, you know?

Daniel Nayeri: Oh, absolutely. Nowadays, of course, the market has that influence as well, of authors just wishing it was a movie. But I think there’s something that really rewires in us when we think about, for what it’s worth, I think the age of the phone camera and where we’re at now is going to actually reverse some of this, where we’re gonna ask who’s holding the camera and why, and why are they pointing it here? Where’s the rest of the frame? What’s going on? I don’t often look at a movie by like a Spielberg or a Kubrick and go, well, what’s outside this frame? You know, like I’m usually under the impression that the box that I’m looking through is the truth and is all that’s happening in this world. And then I’m gonna cut to the most important thing next. But imagine if it was a movie that was like, I don’t know, like Jurassic Park, right? And instead of like, you know, gong, oh, look, the water just rippled, gong. The water rippled again. Jeff, you know, Bloom, Goldblum just said, uh-oh. And now instead of cutting to the face of a dinosaur, we were to just like, I don’t know, cut to anywhere else in the world with some dude and his wife sitting by the fire reading a newspaper in like Sheboygan, and you’d be like, what? Like our understanding of everything that’s important and all action and truth and is the fact that the camera has pointed at it. And I don’t think we question it all that much, except there’s some great experimental films, but now that we don’t have the Spielbergs of the world and the great directors of the world, curating the frame, I do think we’re going to ask that question a lot more, and I’m kind of excited by that. I think we’ll see. I mean, that’s one way in which stories might start to change. There’s so many others.

Amy Sloan: Yes. Yes, definitely. Well, I wanted to ask about this quote. You say, what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present. And so there’s a lot of hard things, a lot of hard events in your stories. There’s this idea of, is it an accident or is it providence, especially in the context of those difficult times of suffering or difficult events. My family has been in the midst of suffering for the past few years, for sure, in a particular way, but I think just any human has that experience, even if you haven’t been in a traumatic situation. Sometimes just the ordinary heart of daily life is its own form of suffering, this side of heaven. So how does hope, that future hope, impact this current time, especially in times of suffering, and then what role do stories have in building or encouraging that hope?

Daniel Nayeri: Um, well, so that section, I mean, for about 23 years my pastor was Tim Keller in New York city and I sort of credit, I mean that’s my entire adult life, right? So, you know, in a lot of ways I give him all that, a lot of credit and thanks and gratitude for just quite a lot of my understanding of the gospel and also just the theology of everyday life. And in this case that comes very much from a example he’d give us all the time. It’s actually in the book as well, a version of it is in, you know, this idea that, you know, an example he’d give of two people with the same job, right? And the job is boring and horrible and it’s going to be a year long, but at the end of the job, one of them is going to get, you know, $50,000 and another one’s going to get $50 billion, right? And, you know, we all agree, I think, we all agree that the person who’s in their head spending $50 billion is going to have a really easy time of it. And what does that mean? Like, what are we saying? Famously, Einstein, when asked by, you know, he was feeling cheeky, I guess, that day, when he was being asked, like, what is the theory of relativity? And he explained it with the theory of relativity is that spending one minute with a beautiful girl or one minute with your hand on a hot plate are vastly different minutes. And I was like, that’s such a great quote from this. I just remember the only version of Einstein I ever think of is from a romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and Tim Robinson. IQ. Yeah, that’s it. Thank you. That’s like, it’s Walter Matthau pretending to be Einstein, but I always think of him saying it. Maybe it was from that movie, I don’t even know. But the point is, we all implicitly understand these things, right? We implicitly understand that our mindset, now, it’s horrible. I think it’s horribly crass to walk up to somebody who’s in the midst of suffering, especially deep suffering of loss and pain, and to say, hey, buddy, you just got to change your mindset. If you just change your mindset, this funeral wouldn’t be so bad. That’s not, I hope, the way that anyone would deploy this. But it also just happens to be true. I also wouldn’t deploy lots of real facts about the world to people at the wrong time Because that wouldn’t be the right time to tell them. So while I believe this fact that what we understand to be not only the nature of life, but the nature of our afterlife, will absolutely affect how we conduct ourselves, but also how we experience it.

You know, I often hear people being like, well, would you say that to some, you know, and again, the even the examples are horrible, right? Like, would you say that to a parent who’s just blah, blah? And I’m like, No, of course not. Of course, I wouldn’t. But I also wouldn’t tell them, hey, guess what, like, that hospital bill is also going to be horrible. Like, I just don’t walk up to people and say these things. But the realities of life are as they are. And, and I think it’s, I think it’s a very apt and important aspect of understanding the value of hope, Which is not that it is some sort of empty optimism, but rather that it is the belief, and this is a very practical and tactile belief, that there will come a cosmic and true justice. And that that will happen. And, and that, you know, the deep injustices of everything from, you know, childhood suffering to war and famine will be set right. And that’s the epigraph of the book is that sort of famous Dostoevsky epigraph. And I, you know, that was the epigraph that I remember most notably after September 11th that Tim sort of put in our, in this church bulletin, you know, and I remember just saying I always, I tore it out, of course, and it was in my Bible forever. And that’s how it ended up becoming the epigraph of my, of everything sad. Which is, you know, the, you know, I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, you know, the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, you know. keeps going to you know that at the world’s finale something so beautiful will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts that you know for all the blood we’ve shed you know that it will make it possible not only to forgive but to justify all that has happened boy that is a high standard right that not only to for what a fascinating extra he puts at the end of this this is the sort of person and brothers paramounts up but they’re safe skin he’s talking about what he believes right and he says i believe like a child like a child is probably my second favorite phrase in that whole thing. My first favorite phrase is not only to forgive but to justify all that has happened. The standard there is so high and frankly onerous to anybody still alive on earth that I think it’s a nigh-offensive phrase to say. Like, if you were to walk up to anyone in a hospital waiting room and say that, I don’t know if I’d be mad if they punched you in the face. I’m not sure I’d be bad. But it’s, in my opinion, true. And so you have to acknowledge, if that is what you believe, then you should probably tell people. Because it helps.

Amy Sloan: Yeah. And then I think when we read a story that captures that idea, right? Even though perhaps it is, it is a, you know, a fiction made up, but there is something that is still true in that story that reminds us of that hope. Like you were saying, you know, it’s not just this sort of rank optimism, but it’s a hope that doesn’t disappoint. And sometimes we need that story that’s outside of our, like, reality to remind us of the true thing, right? Yeah.

Daniel Nayeri: Well, optimism is so silly to us too, right? Like, I mean, going back to Pangloss, in like Voltaire’s Candide, right? You have this guy who, the whole story is just, is quite literally a, what’s the word? A satire of this. I mean, a satire of probably people like me. You know, he probably perceives this where you have Dr. Pangloss who’s, who’s just kind of a dopey optimist who goes from one horrible thing to the next. And they’re horrible. Like they’ll like come across a sudden like battle that has just happened. And it’s just a field of people who’ve been dismembered and dying. and you’re like, oh my gosh, how horrible. And Dr. Pangloss is like, do, do, do. And at one point his, I mean, his sort of famous line is, you know, we’ll keep going. And you know, if, you know, whatever comes isn’t better at least it will be new. Right. And, and of course it’s never better. The new thing is never better. It’s always worse. And, and I think that’s a completely fair critique of this life. I think it’s completely fair for someone like Voltaire to be like, why do you think it will be better than, you know, why? Like, it might just be worse. And the answer is like, yes, that is fact. In this life, it might just get worse. That is why what we’re describing is not. It’s after. And so I, you know, and as a result, that is a it’s a completely faith based thing. And I have no, I don’t even have a desire to try to make it like, I don’t know, a watertight argument. I just don’t. It is there.

Amy Sloan: It’s the truth we receive, right? It is the truth we receive and then we believe it. It’s just not incumbent on me.

Daniel Nayeri: Yeah, I’ve never felt the, you know, what is that line from, oh golly, I’m going to forget her name. She’s a great poet and her line, though, I never knew how little risk I ran of being asked to set my people free. And in this case, I do not run the risk of being asked to create the watertight argument of what happens to us. That’s not been my task.

Amy Sloan: Yeah. Well, moving from stories a little bit more specifically to the craft of writing. I know that you, I think, either have coming out, or it is either new or about to come out, something about helping writers develop. But what advice would you give someone who wants to grow as a writer?

Daniel Nayeri: Oh, well, so in that field, I know there’s a lot of ways to tackle these things. I really believe in the, I suppose you’d call it the slightly more blue collar or the, you know, the version that is deeply practical in the sense that I really believe that there’s no such thing as a talent on this topic. It’s entirely built on how much you’d like to work that muscle out. And that muscle being like, not only imagination, but the craft of story. And so I actually, yeah, I just finished this book. This is the first book I’ve published a lot of books as an editor and I’ve written a few, but this one is the first I have written and published myself. So I’m really excited about it. It’s called How to Tell a Story and it’s kind of like my 101 course on the topic. It kind of posits this idea that I think everybody who’s going to open this thing will have no problem on the imagination side of things, but my job is to sort of help out with the scaffolding of the underpinning elements of story. So the book has this kind of like inspiring kind of board here, but the trick of the board and that it’s got two big flaps, right? It’s got these flaps and on the flaps are these images and the backgrounds of the images are color coded so that so the book can turn it in self into this little like symbol code system, right? So here it is. So it says all the images with the backgrounds that are orange are people and animals and all the blues are things and purple are places and so on so that now the book can say tell me a story about a orange who wants nothing more than a blue and now that could be a boy who wants a dog or a mermaid who wants a taco like none of this stuff matters that part is completely yours and the sort of emphasis is to put pen to paper as soon as possible. But the chapters are broken down into things like conflict, motivation, dialogue, you know, characterization. And at the end of every chapter, so there’s like instruction on that topic, like what is motivation? And then at the end of that chapter, there are all these prompts using that system. So here, for example, and the prompts are all sort of like color coded. A lot of this is like we homeschool my son and we have a club called the storytelling club where other kids, some of them homeschooled, come in and will do a lot of like, sometimes they’ll do exercises out of this book, sometimes they’ll do like freeform storytelling, there of course the big project is they’ve got this big, you know, story that they’re working on that is epic, gigantic epic fantasy that everybody, big debates, big debates have occurred over what should happen, but you know, as an exercise you can pop this sort of like, jump to these prompt pages and it’ll be like, I found it, said the orange, lifting the blue into the air, I finally found it. Go from there, right? Or the siblings agreed never to blank again, like some verb, you know, or the ruler of this particular any place, the lab or the kingdom or the cemetery, died and all was right and happy for a long time, right? And so there’s just, just dozens and dozens of prompt in here for that kind of play. I don’t know if you heard that, but that was construction happening outside. So the idea is very much to kind of take you through these parts of storytelling and then just sort of build as many exercises in there as possible.

Amy Sloan: So both combining the playing with words and the practice of getting, setting pen to paper, also learning the skills and the techniques and those things as well. So what age would you say that that book is best for?

Daniel Nayeri: Well, so initially I had published it for kids and then this is the totally revised edition. I expanded it into two chapters that are kind of more complex and then you know sort of added and changed a bunch of stuff. So now it is a general audience kind of ages, I’d say 10 and up is probably the best. 12-year-olds are using it in my house as kind of maybe the best answer for that. But yeah, it’s kind of general at this point. And working on, so it’s called How to Tell a Story, and on How to Tell a Story Workshop, a lot of my personal workshops when I go speak is based on this book. And so I’m working on the workbooks that are are built. A lot of what I published later in my career as an editor were workbooks type type sort of like in the trade space. So things like if you’ve ever seen like the Brain Quest summer workbooks we did those or the Big Fat Notebooks which are sort of for middle graders we did those and then later a Tinker Active series and one great series is called Outdoor School and it’s kind of big fat notebooks for nature and they’re really beautiful and visual there’s like a lot lot of paintings in them. So a lot of this stuff that I was working on as an editor was educational stuff that found its way into sort of my first blush with the homeschool community in general was a lot of my, you know, I had come from a, we were doing just like nonfiction and literary fiction. So I’d gotten to work with Gary and, you know, Linda Sue Park and stuff like that and gotten to meet them. And, but then I went into this place and it was all kind of workbooks. And, and so that was first time I really came across that community in general and we were publishing, you know, what we called educational supplemental material, right? It’s not going to be the curriculum, but it sure is nice to have in the classroom. And so kind of building off of that and doing more workbooks on storytelling is kind of what I’m working on next.

Amy Sloan: That is awesome. Well, I will definitely include links to that book and your resources in the show notes, because I’m sure lots of people listening are like, wait, I need to jot this down before I forget. So I’ll save it in the show notes. Don’t worry.

Daniel Nayeri: Fair enough. Thank you.

Amy Sloan: This has been an absolute delight and pleasure to get to chat with you. I’m here at the end. I do want to ask you the questions that I ask all of my guests. We kind of touched on this a little bit at the beginning, but what are you personally reading lately?

Daniel Nayeri: Oh, that’s a great question. Yes. So I’m returning to the Arabian Nights because I’m sort of working on something that touches that. Brian Jacques. I always have people call him Brian Jacques, but I think it’s Brian Jacques. I could be wrong. But the Red Wall series is always easy to read and lovely. My son has discovered manga and so I follow along with him a lot. That’s a category that I watch closely. So there’s one particular…

Amy Sloan: Gotta make sure you don’t let the wrong guest in the house, right? Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Nayeri: Those age ranges on those things are all over the place. But one that I could recommend that I loved is actually the closest thing I’ve read to Calvin and Hobbes in the sense that it’s about a young girl and her dad he’s um and she’s just it’s all just slice of life like a whole episode would be about making pancakes you know it’s not so there’s not like you know it’s not an action uh manga but i boy it’s just lovely it’s called yotsuba and it’s one of those just family stories and over the course of these books you get to meet all their family friends and um i really i really kind of have adored just living with with those characters so that’s kind of what what I’m reading right now. Um, goodness.

Amy Sloan: I think- I have to ask, since you mentioned Redwall, have you ever read The Mistmantle Chronicles by M.I. McAllister?

Daniel Nayeri: I haven’t, no, but I’m writing this down.

Amy Sloan: Okay, well, this is one of those books and series that I do not understand why more people are not talking about it. Um, but for fans of Redwall, I would definitely recommend The Mistmantle Chronicles. The first book is Urchin of the Riding Stars. It’s beautifully written. The story is great, you know, animals with swords is always fun, I highly recommend that to you.

Daniel Nayeri: I’m always, that’s my, I think of that as like the category of, I don’t know, right now I still, I’m very just like delighted by, I say right now as if I haven’t been all my life, but Animal Fantasy has always been kind of the dream category for me, I think it’s just so wonderful. So I will absolutely be looking it up, thank you.

Amy Sloan: Yes, well you’ll have to let me know what you think. All right, final question is, what would be your best tip for dealing with a homeschool day that seems to be going all wrong?

 Daniel Nayeri: Wiggles. Yeah, I am a big believer in cut the day right there and go do something physical, whether that be jump into a pool or, you know, usually I try not to make it like it’s something, you know, chore-like, like mowing the lawn would probably solve this too, but it wouldn’t get as much. But I wouldn’t get wouldn’t be as effective on that front. I think PE class entering exactly at the right time. I’m a big believer in that. And we cook a lot. I cook a lot with my son. So I make him breakfast. He helps make lunch. And then he is my sous chef for dinner. And so often when we’re feeling listless, that’s happened yesterday, yesterday, it was like four, but and we had kind of run out of stuff to do. And we were you know, we were starting to just kind of do, you know, boredom stuff, you know, where it was just nothing was. And I said, well, why don’t we just, we’ll get up and we’ll make something a little bit harder than usual. And what that usually means is not a meal, but rather like a dessert ends up happening, right? Because you’ve just added an hour to your prep time. So he usually is very okay with that. And at the same time, it’s incredible. As far, I’m a believer in, I, you know, I love those skills entering. And I think one of the reasons I think homeschool is so wonderful is, you know, you, I work, I volunteer with Boy Scouts as well, and you’ll meet some of these kids and they just have such a broad, um, base of talents and skills. And so in this case, I ended up doing one of those things where like, let’s go do some wood burning or some cooking or some PE or whatever it is, I’m a big believer. you can’t obviously pull that ripcord every day, so, as you know. But if it’s really going off the rails, if we’re really, I tend to think that’s always my, that’s that big emergency button, is let’s go, let’s go make something.

Amy Sloan: I love that. And actually, you know what, that, like, let’s go make something. I can just see that’s actually, like, also metaphorically, like, you can, that can go a lot of places. That could be telling a story or doing something with your hands physically doing something. I don’t know. Let’s go make something. I think that could be just like a call to action for every day, right?

Daniel Nayeri: The big thing I tell, yeah, you know, because there’s like unstructured time is kind of the beauty, the feature and the bug it can be of homeschooling, I think. And one of the things that I heuristic for assessing how you’re managing unstructured time is I tell my son, I’m like, look, I love consuming stuff. Like I love comics and books and video games and movies. Who do you think I am? How do you think I even became a writer? I love reading books. Sitting and reading is great. But I want every day to be proportionally sort of managed so that there is producing and consuming are happening in equal measure. So if you’ve spent the day, if you’ve been just taking in, great, now let’s go make something. that’s a big one in our family in general. And it can be like, that doesn’t mean we’re like good at making everything. You know what I mean? Like you should see some of my junk crafts. Like I’m not pitching that we’re awesome, but it is the distinction in your mind of being an active participant in the world as opposed to sort of a passive, you know, and I don’t want to ever make them seem bad. I would like to redeem the idea of sitting there and watching a movie, right? but the only way that that can be true is, one, if it’s a good move, two, if it isn’t the only thing you did all day. So as long as we have an equal measure of that, and it can be his guitar practice. It can be making a meal. It doesn’t have to be, but yeah, and as you said, it could be sitting and telling a story. It can be all those things. So that’s delightful, yeah.

Amy Sloan: Yeah. Well, Daniel, where can people find you and your books all around the internet?

Daniel Nayeri: Uh, I’m pretty easy to find. I’m actually a big believer in being easy to find. Um, so, like, people can find, I mean, like, my address is probably on the internet, but, like, uh, uh, you know, all the socials are, I’m, I’m only on Twitter, Facebook, and, uh, Instagram, because that’s the, how old I was. That’s, that’s a function of my age. If, like, I understood the other ones maybe. But my website is easy to find a list of my books. How to tell a story workshop is a good place to look at my storytelling stuff. But yeah, you can just come to my house, eat some cheese or something. I don’t know. I feel like this is- the internet’s a terrible place to meet me. But it is a place where there’s a lot of lists about, you know, and pictures, I guess. And so that would be good. But yeah, just shake my hand.

 Amy Sloan: I will have links to those things in the show notes, not your, you know, actual physical address, although someone wants to go find it and hit you up for some cheese, you know?

Daniel Nayeri: I should be careful about saying that. Like, you’ve got a lot of followers. Maybe this, like, suddenly this kind of turns into more cheese than I can afford.

Amy Sloan: Yeah, right? Maybe they can, they can, they can come bring you cheese. How about that? If you’re gonna go find, find his house, bring him the cheese. Okay.

Daniel Nayeri: Yes, you may beguile me with cheese. Uh, that sounds good.

Amy Sloan: Oh, well, everyone, thank you so much for joining us today. I would love for you to take a moment to share this episode with a friend, definitely, if you have not read all of these books that we have mentioned today. Definitely check those out. Make sure they’re in your library system. This is your, you know, periodic reminder. You can request your library buy new books if they don’t have it. So make sure they have Daniel Nayeri’s books. And until next time, happy homeschooling.