Writing life

As a child, Yumna Kassab read Choose Your Own Adventure books sitting in the library at Parramatta High School, eagerly following different ​​pathways to raucous conclusions. She can’t tell me the exact volume of these books she read ‒ ‘it’s embarrassing’ ‒ but she does remember the feeling they invoked. In high school, she became a stand-in ‘book dealer’— lending out her own books to her friends.

‘Stories that had a magical sort of element are the ones that probably meant the most to me growing up and still do now,’ she tells me. We’re chatting on the phone, two months after we first met via Zoom, and her voice carries the same wry warmth. The sound of a train conductor looms in the background and I smile when she mentions how ‘boring’ middle class realist fiction is. She’s drawn to another type of stories, ones with alternate endings, mythical elements and different viewpoints.

‘They are a lot more fun compared to people writing about their marriages and their divorces. That kind of thing really does not interest me at all as a writer.’

Yumna’s own writing mirrors playful, non-linear storytelling. The author of The House of Youssef (Giramondo, 2019), Australiana (Ultimo Press, 2022), The Lovers (Ultimo Press, 2023), and Politica (Ultimo Press, 2024) is unparalleled among contemporary Australian authors when it comes to inventiveness; the kind of writer whose fragmented ‘constellation novels’ are centred not on a single narrative, but the story of a community.

‘What’s important to me is that in each of the books, there are individuals or individual stories, but it's always very much grounded in a community,’ she says. ‘Traditionally when we think of a novel, we think of an individual going through a series of conflicts and then you arrive at the end of the story. But I suppose what I'm usually writing is the story of a community. There are many viewpoints. Maybe it does arrive somewhere, but maybe it doesn't.’

In many ways, the notion of polyphony is at the heart of Yumna’s life and work. As a science teacher, writer and the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature, she holds different communities in Western Sydney close to her heart. Some of her earliest memories of Parramatta are drawn, she says, from a place where these communities intersect: the mall. Yumna would go with her friends to Parramatta Westfield: to Franklins to buy groceries, next to the Best and Less; to the food court; to escape the heat in summer in the absence of air conditioning at home.

​​​‘This was back in the days when the Westfield was two storeys. And then obviously, the centre grew a lot bigger,’ she says. ‘There's a really interesting essay in the Sydney Review of Books by May Ngo, called ‘Shopping Night’, about a family at a local food court. You don’t want the mall to be such an important part of people's experience, ​​but it is.’

As an adult, Yumna would return to the mall. Inspired by Stephen King’s On Writing, which explores the routines of various writers, she turned to cafes.

‘Fifteen years ago, when I was starting to write, the first cafes I would write in were in the Westfield. There was one called Blackforest, and it was roughly where the Daiso is right now … writing in cafes is something that I still love to do.’

Parramatta features in Yumna’s writing to varying degrees of opacity. While most of The Lovers is set overseas, Yumna says there is one section towards the end of that novel that was inspired by a unit block in Westmead.

‘I've walked past it quite a few times, and there's a section in The Lovers, where Jamila is sitting somewhere and she can hear piano music, and I've always imagined that as a little park near this unit block, where she can also hear what's coming from the apartments nearby.’

Her debut collection of short stories, The House of Youssef, centres around a Lebanese family in Western Sydney: their nostalgic tendencies, hopes and regrets. The cover derived from a photo Yumna took of a fibro house in the area.

‘I had taken this photo of this house now long gone … bulldozed. And a new two storey house built in its place.’

When picturing the physical house the fictional Youssef family might live in, Yumna would return in her mind to this photo.

‘This is the house that I imagined … this little old fibro house. And then Ivor [Giramondo editor Ivor Indyk] is like, “Oh, well, you know, it really reminds me of like the paintings of Noel McKenna”, which is how the cover came about. So there was this mental image of these houses which are kind of disappearing from the area that are quite important to that particular book.’

The fear of disappearing communities has now become a focal point for Yumna’s own advocacy at a local level. Recently, she’s become concerned about automatic rezoning laws alongside the expansion of the Sydney Metro. At the core of her concern, she says, is relationships to people and place.

‘I didn't know this up until recently, but if a Metro station is put into an area, they will automatically rezone the area within 1.2 km of that station as high density. We're talking massive buildings. There are a few community groups who are trying to have input into what this scale of building is going to look like. Where are the schools, where are the parks, where are the communal areas?

‘My neighbours live at the top of the street, they're both in their 70s, and they've lived in the area almost all of their life. There's another guy I spoke to when we were running the petition, he's been here for 50 years. Where exactly are these people going to go?’

For Yumna, it all comes down to community. As a supporter of the Western Sydney Wanderers, she’s been seeing the same faces in the stands for the past 12 years. Running alongside her advocacy, and writing, is her connection to others in her area.

‘Parramatta is probably the centre of my universe,’ she says. ‘When I say that, what I'm actually really referring to is that the people who are most important to me live in this area. The buildings do matter. The trees do matter. But I'm talking really about the people I have the strongest relationships within 5 km of Parramatta. Well, maybe 10 km ... I think I just excluded an uncle a little bit, you know?’

Despite her success, Yumna says she still sees herself as a struggling unpublished writer. In reality, her work has won multiple awards — and Australiana was recently translated into Greek, another milestone. As the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature, Yumna hopes to celebrate Western Sydney writers by creating a ‘dictionary’ of important things including local writers she loves.

‘There are all these amazing people who have connections to Parramatta or Western Sydney, but to actually have a complete-as-possible list of who they are and what they're writing is exciting,’ she says.

Yumna’s vision for her own writing is expanding too — as she begins to choose her own adventures in her career.

‘To say I'd like my books translated into Arabic and Spanish 10 years ago, that would not have been something really feasible. Well, now it's sort of like, okay, maybe that is something I could look at. It might not happen, but it's something that interests me.’

Farz Edraki is an Iranian-Australian writer, editor and broadcaster based on Gadigal land. Her work has been published in Growing Up In Country Australia (Black Inc. Books, 2022), The Guardian, and The Sydney Morning Herald. She is the host of ABC podcast Days Like These. She completed a Master of Research ‒ Literature and Creative Writing from Western Sydney University in 2023.

Parramatta Profiles is a writing and photographic series that profiles individuals across Parramatta communities. Drawing on art, music, religion, activism and sport, each snapshot captures life in this dynamic city. A collaboration between Powerhouse and the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University, this project supports the development of student writers by providing an opportunity to work with professional editors and be published by Powerhouse online.