Geography of Attraction

How did a coming-of-age story about a boy in Tehran turn into a collection of erotic short stories? In his new book, Geography of Attraction, author and broadcaster Ali May explores how a sense of place informs identity, shapes memory and lends itself to the overall impact of human interaction.

Ali May’s journey from the ordinary confines of a religious upbringing in Azerbaijan province in northwestern Iran to the cafés and bars of central London is perhaps evident in his work, giving it a unique immediacy, an astute humor and a sharp eye for cynicism.

After leaving Azerbaijan, he moved to Tehran in 1999, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in English literature, and later pursued a variety of business initiatives, including teaching English, importing lorries from Japan and working on a port construction project.

In 2006, he moved to London, did a Master’s degree in creative writing and started a career in journalism, working for Bloomberg and Euronews. Currently, he works as a television presenter and international editor of Erotic Review magazine, as well as  overseeing his own content production company.

Geography of Attraction, published in May 2015, is his first book. He is currently working on his next novel.

IranWire spoke to Ali May about chance encounters, disrupting literary conventions, and setting the scene to write about something that unites us all: sex. 

 

How did you conceive of writing a collection of erotic stories? What was the process? Did you see yourself as an author of erotic fiction?

The first story in the collection, When it gets hot in Tehran, was the start of a novel that I was writing around 2009-2010, just after the election in Iran. It was not an erotic novel. It was basically a coming-of-age story of a young guy in Iran who basically kept losing: his father in the war, his friend in the uprising following the election, and then his girlfriend to cancer. But — long story short — that novel didn’t work, and I didn’t really have the nerve to go back to it and rewrite the whole thing. So I put it aside. One day, I came across a friend of mine on Twitter who runs a very esteemed website about Westminster — and then I realized he’s also the political editor of the Erotic Review magazine. I said, “Hey, I have a story that you might want to have a look at.” And I took this first story to them, and they just loved it. After they published that, they kept asking me for more. And then I thought: “Well, I like writing, I like sex, I like the combination. I like traveling. So why don’t I try to write more of this kind of fiction and see where it goes? I tried intentionally in most of the stories to stay away from the everyday, routine genre of erotica. I wanted these to be literary stories with a strong sex or erotica element to them.

 

Were there particular themes you were trying to address in the book?

For me, loss has always been a big theme. The novel was about loss. When I was writing the stories and putting them together for the book, well — the title is a bit telling. I am very interested in the whole idea of human attraction, human intimacy, and the way we get sort of close to each other as beings — not just sexual beings but as beings.

When it comes to identity, I have my own slightly radical ideas, in that I really do not believe in borders or countries or nationalism at all. I am not tribal, I don’t believe in tribalism of any sort, be it religion or nationalism. And for me, when I say the “geography of attraction,” I mean exactly that — people can be anywhere around the world, with any kinds of persuasions, living any kinds of lives. But at the end of the day, this one thing — sex — brings us together in really strange and weird and wonderful ways. You can be an American in Copenhagen, or you can be a musician in the Pyrenees or you can be a gay Iranian being arrested by the authorities. But at the end of the day, the power of sex, of human attraction, is such that it really can consume everything else.

 

What is the importance of the settings in your stories?

In pretty much all of the stories, the place becomes as important as the characters. I hope I achieved this. I have tried to portray the places as vividly as possible, in different forms and shapes. In some of them it’s very visual. In the third story [Concerto], with [the character] Amandine, you get a good feeling of the Pyrenees, and how charming and beautiful it is. And when you go to Iran, in the story when the guy gets in trouble [The Interview], you kind of get that suffocation of a place, which can be dry and hot and your freedoms don’t really come to much.

I’m hoping that all these little elements have contributed to bring that to life. You want it to tell a good story, and at the same time, you want to create some kind of emotional response. It can be joy, it can be sadness, it can be whatever really. It can be feeling that you were lucky to never have been exposed to repression. But that’s the beauty of literature. Now I’m not thinking of my own stories, I’m thinking about 1984. When you read good literature, your emotional response can make you feel as if you’re there. And I think that’s why I really care about my locations. I spend a lot of time trying to bring them to life because I think that it essentially really helps you build up a stronger, deeper relationship with the story.

I suppose it’s partly to do with my fucked up childhood in Iran. I grew up in a tiny, ugly, insignificant shithole of a town, a small town in Azerbaijan. The school next to mine was bombed [during the Iran-Iraq war, 1980-1988] when I was seven; several teenage girls were killed.

The town is called Mianeh, which literally translates as “middle”. There’s two explanations for it officially, and I have a third one myself. It is between two mountain ranges, in the valley. And it’s also between Zanjan and Tabriz, which are the two sort of big cities in two different provinces.

My definition is that it’s the middle of hell. I was born in 1980, so I grew up during the war. It’s all about losing, you just keep losing people around you. One day the nice young guy who would say hello to you and let you hold his AK-47 because he was a guard outside the Revolutionary Guards [building], and you’re a four year old, well, he goes to war and doesn’t come back again. These things, they contribute to your philosophical underpinnings. Although you try to live with them, they do.

 

What are your favorite stories in the collection?

I like Concerto [about a cellist in the Pyrenees], and the last one, Once upon Piscinas [about a man who follows an art dealer in London and then to Sardinia]. It’s very filmic, I would love to turn it into a feature film. I think those two stories are the best written, in terms of language and description and storytelling. However, I know that the first story [When it gets hot in Tehran] has been very popular and it's a good start for the book. And it’s a bit unpredictable; there’s a surprise. But I felt more gratification seeing those two stories when they were finished.

However, if we’re talking about gratification while writing, I rather enjoyed writing the second story, New Year’s Eve. If there’s one story that fits the real erotica genre — or is slightly pornographic — that’s the only one really. There’s not much beyond fucking and the threesome...which is good, I celebrate that. 

 

Read The Interview, one of the stories in the collection

Geography of Attraction is available as an e-book internationally on Amazon and in paperback here

Follow Ali May on Facebook and Twitter: @AliMayTV

 

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