8 Questions for... Noha Beshir

Letters from a Muslim Woman

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Noha Beshir

is an essayist and poet based in Ottawa, Canada. She shares honest experiences of life as Western Muslim through the lens of mental health, relationships, faith, and the multi-generational immigrant experience in Letters from a Muslim Woman.

1.     Why Substack?

I came to Substack almost by accident. I had been on a writing sabbatical for several years after my kids were born, mostly due to being exhausted and having no capacity to think, much less to write. About two years ago, I felt my creative energy returning but I didn't want to write alone.

Sadia

, a friend I made in an online writing group for Muslim women, told me she had started writing on Substack and that I should try it. 

It felt like a huge commitment. Could I start a newsletter if I couldn't consistently guarantee new work? Sadia helped by nudging me forward. "Just start! You're not making any promises." Late last June I took the leap and within a couple of weeks, I was hooked. 

I didn't expect the social aspect of it to have such a huge impact. I tell people who don't know Substack, "it's Twitter for writers". Once I was on the platform, I kept finding more writing I wanted to read, and that, in turn, would inspire me to write more. And on and on it went in the opposite of a vicious cycle.

Some people are really great at writing in solitude. I am not one of those people. Until my words are read, I feel demotivated, almost depressed — this is probably why I can't finish a long writing project — ha! But it's also why this platform works for me. The regular engagement and feedback help me write more, and the thing I was most worried about, publishing at a regular cadence, has been no problem at all.

2.     How long did it take you to find your groove?

I'd say about 6 months, partially because of the complexity of the platform, and partially because I was still feeling into my voice.

Given my creative fragility, I made a conscious decision upfront not to put any pressure on myself with the writing. This meant that I wrote a different style on a different topic every week: a blog post about anxiety, a lyric essay about the lake, a list of songs that make me cry, whatever! As long as I kept writing, I considered it a win. 

The first piece that resonated with the wider community was a poem about the concept of home, and I realized I wanted to explore the diasporic perspective more. Soon after, I travelled to Southern Spain and saw so much Islamic cultural history. That made something click inside me, and the idea for "Letters from a Muslim Woman" was born. 

Once I had that umbrella to write under, I rebranded the newsletter. It's all felt more natural since. But I never would have arrived there if I hadn't started writing when I still had no idea what I was writing about.

3.     How has it changed you?

Two ways:

It makes me so much happier in my day-to-day having this connection to other writers again. I did a creative writing program in high school and had a cohort of other writers I was with for 2 hours every day, but I haven't been in a space like that for over 20 years. I was craving creative interaction. My day job is in IT, which is about as far from creative writing as you can get. This fills my cup. 

The second thing is that I am thinking like a writer again. Every conversation, every idea, everything I observe is now the potential seed of more words. I missed that so much. It's literally life changing to have found a version of it that fits in my day-to-day again. 

Substack being virtual is heaven sent. My life is not set up in a way that it can logistically revolve around writing. I'm never going to be the artist-in-residence somewhere or do an MFA. When I thought that was the only way to be part of a writing community it depressed me.

4.     What mistakes have you made?

Probably taking so long to get started. I have a bad habit of overthinking things, which leads me to shut down and do nothing. If I can't do it perfectly, I just don't do it at all. So for years I watched other people write, do well, and reach wider and wider audiences. I felt jealous and kept NOT writing. 

In terms of the platform, I'm not sure there are that many mistakes to make. Maybe the technical mistake of changing my domain name to my old newsletter title (Prone to Hyperbole), and then panicking that I couldn't change it back once I had rebranded to Letters from a Muslim Woman. Substack support was awesome and let me revert without breaking all my links. Hot tip: you can change your newsletter title as many times as you want. But your URL is pretty much set in stone and you can only change it once! Use your name for your URL - no matter how many times you rebrand your newsletter, that URL will still work.

5.     To pay or not to pay?

Definitely to pay, because I think good writing deserves to be compensated. I think the real question is whether or not to paywall. I turned on paid subs from the very beginning even though I never paywalled. The thing I wanted most was to be read widely, and if people wanted to support me in a patronage model, who was I to stop them? 

A few months in, I started paywalling some of my archive and putting out bonuses here and there for my paid subscribers. Now I'm more comfortable with paywalling up-front on a consistent basis. There are topics I've started to explore that are quite personal. I started writing about Islamophobia more explicitly, but that's not something I'm comfortable exposing to the big, wide world. That's a heavy example but it could be smaller. I'm currently paywalling every other post. Two freebies a month and two that go deeper for those who really, really want them.

6.     What artistic and technical choices have you made

Getting rid of my section and merging everything under one umbrella was both an artistic and a technical choice. When I first decided to start "Letters from a Muslim Woman", I wanted a way to write about my Muslim identity, or elements of my faith that are misunderstood. But I was so afraid of scaring people away that I considered creating a whole separate newsletter for "Muslim Noha". I asked Sarah Fay Writers at Work for advice and she proposed creating a Section, which would allow users to subscribe or unsubscribe from that particular series, and that's what I did. 

Immediately, it was clear that my fears were unfounded. My introductory post for the section was actually my most popular post up to that point in the newsletter's short life. The funny thing was how nervous I was about it. I'm going to lose subscribers. People are going to think I'm preaching at them. Islamophobia is rampant, and religion in general is sneered at as provincial and naive. I was so used to flattening that part of my identity while overemphasizing anything that made me white-adjacent, that even when I made the choice to share it, I thought it would blow up in my face. Then the exact opposite happened. I got a flood of engagement and a flood of subscriptions. 

I wrote a few more posts under the Letters from a Muslim Woman section before I realized I may as well merge them. People who wanted to hear from me were reading my work whether it was about the five daily prayers or not understanding pop culture references as a child of immigrants. 

So I deleted the section and rebranded the entire newsletter to Letters from a Muslim Woman. It's all me. I contain multitudes 😂.

7.     What’s been the effect on your writing?

In a word: Freedom. I have a few different balls in the air at any given point, and when I sit down to write I advance whichever topic is speaking to my heart the most. It allows me to explore everything that interests me, from the serious and the tragic to the absurd and the silly. I have posts about Gaza, and I have posts about my rabbit, Bilbo. And they're both completely true to who I am.

It's also led to a level of inspiration I haven't known in a long time. For the years (decades?) of my dry spell, I jokingly called myself a "writer who doesn't write". Keeping a weekly publishing schedule has made me a writer who writes, and strengthening that muscle has been so gratifying. 

8.     In it for the long haul?

Definitely. I struggled with writing and searched for a way to fit writing into my life for so long, and then this fell from the sky. I'll keep doing it for as long as I can. Maybe it's the beginning of something. Maybe it's the way my writing looks for the rest of my life. Either way, I'm so happy to be here and I get so much out of it.  I'm not leaving Substack unless Elon Musk buys it and sets it on fire.

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