PRESS RELEASE: Searching New Horizons of Meaning Through Love and our Environment

Passing Guest honours the plurality of our world’s voices as we create new hopes for the future

:::::FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:::::

In this collection of fictional stories, Passing Guest, Iris Mir imagines what the futures of random bystanders on the streets would look like if they had the chance to experience love in a new way; one of compassion and kindness toward others.

With this in mind, Mir writes their dreamed stories honouring their lives, their voices and the reason their hypothetical love-experience would matter to our social fabric. Their imaginary stories become a reminder of the importance of many small human acts of kindness that are integral to our survival and are being eroded as a result of our increasingly fragmented and polarised societies.

“Our human aspirations may be universal but the experiences in which they are manifested is essentially unique to us all. With Passing Guest, I wanted to use love as a way to honour the remarkable importance of the plurality of our voices as we create new hopes for the future”, Mir explains.

Passing Guest starts with a first-person introduction by an imaginary character. A woman who asks herself some questions about love. Like the best magic tricks, we might have an act of love and kindness in front of our eyes, but we might fail to see it. Complex human beings that we are, we tend to make love complicated. So this is how this imaginary character takes on a journey of her own in which she incarnates eight different possibilities of love and life.

The narrator’s quest takes her to Hong Kong, South Korea, North Korea and neighbouring mainland China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Uganda, Senegal, and the cities of London and Barcelona. As she tries to find her answers, she transports herself to different universes, possibilities of being and seeing, and ultimately of finding love. Soon she discovers that who she is (and who we are) can only be answered by the magic of love, which is as beautifully unique as every single one of us who makes up our diverse humanity.

With the constraints of the pandemic and the inevitable social distance, Mir focuses on the things and the people that are familiar to us in our day-to-day environment to understand our relationship with the world and the narratives we create.

“How we relate to our day-to-day environment is linked to how our unique life experiences give answers to humanity’s universal questions such as love, fear, kindness, solitude, our creativity, our hopes for the future, our dreams… We all think about them, we all want them, but they come with no one universal answer, but many”, Mir points out.

Taking love as the foundation of this creative writing experiment, Mir wants to stress the importance of stopping giving mainstream solutions to our societies’ problems and ambitions. The author believes in the importance of embracing a form of micro-storytelling by which we are always learning and unlearning from each other. So that we can create space for other world views to emerge and participate in the building of more inclusive futures.

“I wanted to spark curiosity in people and encourage them to imagine that everything that is familiar to us has the potential to take us somewhere else, to connect us to world views that are beyond what we see as the norm. Elements from our daily lives such as our cities, our parks, a bench, our house plants, our friends, our neighbours, our books, music, schooling, the people on the streets, our families, the sea, the rain, the moon, the water, a rooftop and ultimately storytelling - which is inherent in humankind and one of the best ways to immortalise experiences and give voice to others - can potentially connect us to others in a way that enables us to explore life’s possibilities beyond what is close to our known realities”, Mir says.

Love as much as life can take many shapes and forms and there should be space for all of them to manifest with grace. Even when this curiosity comes in the shape of our endless search for love, friendship, community and the fear of heartache and loss. Love is freedom!

Passing Guest is available on Amazon worldwide.