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Sara Qadr*
 I am an Arab-American. I grew up between California and the Middle East. I realized at the age of 8, while in Baghdad, Iraq, surrounded by people who did not speak English, and whom I could not speak to in Arabic, that there was still one avenue left for expression, which is writing. I began then, and have cultivated a world within it, nothing fantasized, nothing fictionalized, just a re-creation of my perceptions. I am drawn to character profiles and narratives that highlight depth and truth and inevitably pain. I graduated in 2010 from the UC Irvine Literary Journalism program.
The story behind the story: I wrote this story because there seemed no other way to become a true journalist... how could I ask of others what I cannot first do myself? The deep network of pain and truth that we ask our subjects to explore and yet ourselves have not taken. The wounds we conceal and ask not to be concealed from us. How then can I ask of anyone what I have not given? So in this story I gave all I had hidden, all I had not wanted to face. Here it is, another story, no glory, just a tale, that inevitably made me search the world and in other people something similar, something familiar, a pain that I never purged, a search that inevitably made me into a journalist, asking questions, looking for those answers and those stories that lie within all of us.
*Sara Qadr is the nom de plume of the author of this story, who asked that her name be changed to protect her privacy.
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