This is part of an ongoing author interview series, featuring writers whose work touches on religion, spirituality, and/or occultism.
It’s a weird time to have a book come out.
To be fair, that sentence could be slapped on any post-2016 year. But book releases feel especially fraught these days, with folks’ attention spans (and disposable income) at an all-time low.
I don’t take your trust in this newsletter for granted, and that’s why, when I do interview an author for this newsletter, it’s because I feel ten-toes-down confident that what they have to say — and what they’ve written — is worth your time.
And Deena ElGenaidi’s debut novel Dust Settles North — out today wherever books are sold! — is very, very worth your time. (And money. And library requests.)
This is what I wrote in my blurb:
Dust Settles North is an unsparing exhumation of the untruths that keep a family together, of the small sins and glaring hypocrisies that can quickly drive them apart. This gritty debut will have you thinking about inheritance and legacy, grief and loss, and perhaps most especially that central question: What does it mean to be truly honest and vulnerable with the people we allegedly love the most? A powerful meditation on family and belonging that will stay with readers long after turning the final page.
Deena ElGenaidi is a writer and editor whose work is deeply concerned with family, religion, and the fractures that can occur in relationships when institutional rules are at odds with individual integrity. Deena wrote, directed, and produced the award-winning comedy web series Codependent, and is a former TV News Writer for Primetimer and a former editor for Hyperallergic.
(She’s also a member of my long-running writers’ group.)
this interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length
Jeanna Kadlec: So to kick us off! Obviously I have known you for the eight years that we’ve been in writers’ group together. And I feel so emotionally attached to this novel because of having witnessed it through the years of revisions and edits.
But I wondered if here at the top, you could take a beat to introduce yourself to newsletter readers who may not be familiar with you or your work, and share a little bit about Dust Settles North.
Deena ElGenaidi: I’m Deena, and I write fiction. I also do some arts and culture journalism here and there. My book Dust Settles North follows two Egyptian-American siblings, Hannah and Zain, shortly after their mom dies, and they’re dealing with grief. Then family secrets come out, and the sister goes to Egypt, and the brother stays in America, [and] they’re navigating living between two cultures. Meanwhile, it takes place during the Arab Spring, [which] serves as a backdrop to the story.
JK: Can you share a little bit more about the choice to set a contemporary novel against the backdrop of Arab Spring?
DE: I started writing in the book in 2015, so the Arab Spring wasn’t that far out at that point. It was just what was going on in Egypt at the time. I was following it, and it was really interesting and compelling to me.
I also was in Egypt in 2012, which is when the book takes place. [I got] to see all the protests, which started in 2011, 2012. It was a very different time, and it was just interesting to see it in person.
JK: Can I ask how it’s been [to be working on this novel in our current moment]? Novels take so long — there’s the revision process and then getting an agent and then the publication. And you’ve also been really active in a lot of protests in New York over the last few years. I wanted to ask what unfortunately timely parallels you are seeing in our present cultural moment between the Arab Spring and what’s going on in the United States in 2025?
DE: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of similarities. I think any protest movement [is going to have some] similarities, but there’s definitely government suppression, the government trying to clamp down on protests. Things like freedom of speech are going away — if we ever had it in the first place. Authoritarianism increases at moments when there’s protests and political conflict going on.
JK: Religion also plays a big role in this.
DE: I know! Like everything I’m writing about the book [jeanna note: for book publicity] has been about religion. It wasn’t intentionally like that.
JK: I wanted to ask about what your own relationship to religion has been like, and where you’re at in this present moment.
DE: I grew up in America; my family is Muslim, and I was raised Muslim. We were never super conservative — like very rarely went to the mosque. We would go for holidays. But there were certain things that just kind of were instilled in me. Like, you’re not supposed to drink, you’re not supposed to have sex before marriage, and things like that. A lot of rules.
Around high school, I started fasting for Ramadan, but my parents only made me do it on weekends, because they were like, oh, you have school, and that’s more important. A lot of families are like, it doesn’t matter if you have school! But my mom was like, I don’t want you to be hungry, and I don’t want your grades to be affected.
JK: They were pragmatic.
DE: Yeah. And then college [was when] I started fasting every day in Ramadan. But as I got older, I started thinking for myself and not just listening to my parents. Like all of these rules that I had to follow — I wasn’t following them, and I had a lot of trouble reconciling that. It felt very all or nothing to me. Like, if you don’t follow these rules, then that’s it. I think it’s because that’s how religion was always presented to me. It’s all or nothing.
So right now I would say, I’m not really practicing, but it’s still a part of my identity. Sometimes Jewish people will be like, oh, I’m more culturally Jewish, but they’re not actually religious. I’ve never heard a Muslim person say that, but that is how I feel.
JK: Culturally Muslim, but not religiously devout.
DE: Yeah.
JK: That makes so much sense. And I know you’ve written a fair bit about different topics and news items that are related to Islam and your Muslim identity over the years. And I don’t want to do the thing that people so often do when interviewing novelists, especially women!, in assuming that your personal experience must inform the book.
At the same time, you personally have unpacked a lot of religious stuff over the years, and Hannah and Zain, both in different ways, unpack a lot of their internalized religious teachings in the wake of their mom dying. And so I wanted to ask if there were ways in which your own deconstruction, which would be my term for that, informed the characters, or if writing the book taught you things and challenged you in ways that you hadn’t anticipated. Does that make sense?
DE: Yeah. What I’ve been saying to everyone is like, all of the events in the book are fiction. But thematically, I’m very much taking from my own experience.
I think the characters are struggling to reconcile these two parts of themselves. You know, how they were brought up [with] their parents’ values versus who they are as adults and where they fit in culturally, because they’re not fully American and they’re not fully Egyptian. So in both places they’re seen as an outsider and other. And my experience and upbringing kind of informed those themes and struggles a little bit.
I think in writing about it, I obviously thought about those things more and thought about why it was important for me to tell this story or show this version of Egyptians or Muslims. I think it was just an experience that I hadn’t really seen [represented] in media before. The first time I saw something similar was in the show Ramy, but I’d never seen that type of representation before that.
JK: I think this book is special for many reasons, but I really love that it’s political and it is reckoning with faith and it’s reckoning with major family grief and it’s a sibling relationship at the core of that.
Without spoilers, how would you characterize the respective journeys that Zain and Hannah each go on in the book, and its relationship to kind of that multiplicity of themes that you’re working with?
DE: Their journeys are very different, but also in some ways similar. Hannah goes to Egypt, and this is a little bit of a spoiler, but it happens right at the beginning of the book. She was supposed to go to law school, and gives up her spot at Columbia, and decides to just go to Egypt and figure out what she wants to do from there. That’s when she gets involved in politics. Zain, meanwhile, stays in America and makes a lot of self-destructive decisions.
I would say they’re similar in that the course of their lives change and they both blow up everything, but Hannah is less self-destructive, and Zain just has to kind of hit rock bottom before he figures out how to pick himself back up again.
JK: Can you say more about how religion plays into that?
DE: With religion, one big theme in the book is secrets. Everyone is keeping secrets from everyone else. In Hannah and Zain’s case, they’re keeping secrets from their family and from each other, because they’re brought up Muslim and they’re told to follow these rules. Then, when they diverge from that, there’s this sense of like, well, I have to hide this whole life from my family because it doesn’t fit into their values.
So towards the beginning of the novel, Hannah and Zain finally start being honest with each other and realize that they are both keeping similar secrets, and they’re both very alike in that way. Zain grapples with religion in America, because he sees some of his dad’s religious hypocrisy, and wonders about his own place in it and what he believes and how religion can inform his life. In Egypt, Hannah grapples with it because she meets other Egyptians and treats them in the same way that she would her family, where she feels like she has to hide parts of herself because she projecting her family’s values onto them, and she thinks that they are like them, and therefore she has to keep the secrets again. But then when she meets other Americans, those secrets are open, like it’s not a big deal.
JK: In your writing over the years, you’ve consistently explored this idea of secrets and of suddenly needing to reconcile two things that are seemingly contradictory but true at the same time. What is it about exploring secrets that really draws you in as a writer?
DE: Some of that is informed by my own experiences in my own life. There are still a lot of things that I don’t tell my parents and that they just don’t know about my life because it’s easier that way. Like, I want to maintain my relationship with them, but I know that their religious values are different than my own. And in my family — I won’t get into it — but a lot of secrets that people have kept have come out, that have been scandals almost.
This is not just true to Muslims. I think a lot of religious communities have these rules and values and they want to project this image to the world that they’re following them while they have this whole secret life where they’re doing all of these things that don’t align with the religion. And that can come out in a lot of different ways.
JK: I mean, I think about like that fucking Charlie Kirk funeral-rally that just happened in Arizona. On TikTok, everyone was like, we’re waiting for the Grindr to app to blow up! because we all know that when this Republican, conservative, outwardly facing majority Christian group of men gathers, a lot of them are hooking up, which is very outside of the “values” of that particular group. So I don’t know, I think that’s definitely an assertion you can make about high control religions!
But to kind of switch tacks, I wanted to ask what your relationship to creativity is like in this moment? I know you’re pre-book launch right now, which is absolute madness, but like, how has Dust Settles North helped you grow as a writer?
DE: So it was originally part of my MFA thesis. The first 200 pages [were] part of my MFA, and those 200 pages are very different from how my book looks now. And that’s definitely a good thing! I wouldn’t want anyone to read that first draft.
My writing has improved a lot. And some of that is the feedback I’ve gotten. Our writing group has taught me a lot, and I’ve grown from just reading each other’s work and getting feedback from all of you.
JK: Same.
DE: Yeah. And then the process of publishing just being so long. I sent it to agents and then it went out on submission and feedback would come in. [With] all of the different drafts and revisions, my writing got stronger and grew over time.
JK: What you’re expressing is also a desire to get edits, a desire to get notes, and then a desire to, like, integrate those things. And I feel like that’s not… everybody.
DE: That’s true. I like getting edits. I want to get feedback. I think some people want to send you work and just hear that like, good job, it’s great.
Being in my MFA program gave me some resilience — just being in a workshop where you’re not allowed to talk and everybody is talking about your work for an hour. You learn to not take anything personally and just see it as useful. And I think I still have that attitude where I’m like, tell me all of the things that are wrong with my work so that I can fix it and it can get better.
JK: But also it’s coming out in the world now. So also please leave nice reviews.
DE: At this point, don’t tell me anything is wrong with it.
JK: It’s a closed case! There’s no change being made!
So you mentioned how the publication process started pitching agents and getting feedback. And I wonder if you could expand more on what your journey to publication was with this book, because it took a minute. And you’ve been so resilient throughout. And I think that there’s a lot of hope in your story for people who are trying to get their first book out.
DE: Yeah, it took a long time. It was definitely a long journey, and there were times where I did not feel hope.
Once I felt like I had a final draft [in 2019], I started querying agents, and in that first round, a lot of them asked for the full manuscript. Then I got some rejections after they read the manuscript and was like, okay, I’m not going to query anymore. I’m going to go back and do another round of revisions.
I started querying again in 2020. At that point, I did get an agent, but a few months into being she quit agenting. So then I panicked and thought I would have to start the process all over. But she gave my manuscript to one of her colleagues who really liked the book, and now she’s my agent. I think we work together really well, and she has just supported my book and believed in it the whole way.
We did a few rounds of revisions before going out on submission, and then my book was out on submission for over a year, because we did one round and got some feedback from editors who turned it down, and the feedback was consistent. So then we pulled it from the editors who still had it and said we would send a revised version. I worked on revisions for a couple of months and then went back out on submission, and then it was just a long period of waiting and feeling like it was never going to happen, and feeling hopeless until I finally got a call from my agent saying we had an offer.
JK: What are you working on right now that’s exciting you?
DE: What I’m working on now is another novel — I know you know already — that’s loosely based on my dad’s childhood. I changed the protagonist to a girl and set it in the ‘90s, just because I know that time period better. My dad immigrated to America when he was seven years old, and then his dad died when he was 12, which led to a series of events in his life. His mom forced him to move back to Egypt for college and go to medical school, which he did not want to do. So that’s the framework I’m using, and then have added storylines as I go.
JK: How has it been like working on a project that is so deeply, explicitly inspired by and tied in with family history?
DE: It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. My dad loves to talk about his childhood, and in my head, it always felt very much like those like ‘80s movies — Stand By Me and things like that. That’s what his stories have always felt like. And so I had been saying for years, like, this should be a movie or someone should write something about this. And then I was like, okay, let me do this now that I’m finished with this project.
JK: That’s something I really appreciate about you in general, is that you have a very “nobody else is doing it, so I will” attitude about the stuff that you write and the topics that you tackle in your journalism and criticism. I think that is also perhaps a through line that we see, however covertly, in Dust Settles North. Like, it may as well be me who does this.
DE: Yeah.
You can purchase Dust Settles North wherever books are sold, although I strongly suggest supporting your local independent bookshops or your local, in-person Barnes & Noble that employs people in your neighborhood.
You can follow Deena on Instagram, where she posts perfect pictures of her cat Sasha.