MEDIA KIT

PASSING GUEST

Stories on Love, Kindness and Hope

By Iris Mir

MEDIA MATERIALS

Further reading -Not to be published without prior consent from the author-:

quotes from the author

“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”.

“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”.

“With Passing Guest, 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”.

“One of the side effects of progress is that it is contributing to the dehumanization of our societies and the loss of basic human values ​​such as intuition, consciousness, the ability to be in the moment and the importance of our personal and collective identity. The volatile expectations of achieving certain symbols of progress as guarantors of happiness have alienated human beings from the pillars of humanity”.

“Making the invisible, visible is a necessary pre condition to give voice to others”.

“I dream of a future where we use our own voice to give voice to others. And together create alternative narratives that are inclusive and render communities visible”.

“What we choose to notice and what we choose to ignore is the result of the assumptions and bias that influence our individual and collective thinking. A shift in patterns and mindsets creates the awareness that we need to choose what information to notice in order to make visible the communities that remain invisible due to pre-stablished narratives”.

“Respecting diversity and plurality of points of view means to grant everyone the freedom to dream their desired futures and make them possible, and to give invisible communities the means to use their voice to make their dreams come true”.

WHY PASSING GUEST:

Why ‘Passing Guest’

‘Passing Guest’ is the English translation of the Chinese expression 过客 (Guò Kè). It is used to describe the friends that life forces us to leave behind and how they influenced us on our journey.

Inspired by the wisdom behind these words, I integrated the concept of ‘Passing Guest’ into my creative process. I imagined these love stories as being interconnected under the idea of life as a circle (not linear); with the stories creating a circle themselves. Altogether, they form a journey where love becomes a passing guest, and the narrator becomes a passing guest herself.

On top of that, as part of my creative experiment on love described in the prologue, I also played around with the idea of imagining the life of bystanders and becoming a guest in their imaginary lives and love stories, while they became temporary guests of my imagination and creativity.

(過客: traditional Chinese characters of the simplified version above)

WRITING PASSING GUEST: A CREATIVE EXERCISE ON LOVE

This book is an experiment. And it wasn’t really planned. For quite some time, I had been wanting to write about love. I wasn’t sure how to do it. I found it an extremely complex topic to approach in the shape of a fictional story. Yet, I was fascinated by it. I often wondered, if love is so full of life, so essentially human, why was I finding love so difficult to grasp as the subject matter of a new book?

Love has the ability to drive us crazy. But because it emanates from our hearts, it can also give us direction. But only if we want to learn how to listen to it. Love is ever-changing. It doesn’t know how to stand still because it is the result of the seemingly impossible: Two strangers finding a way to be in sync. To rise and fall together. To create a bond from the unknown. A connection that makes it very hard to run away from each other. If people are dynamic and unpredictable, love must be too… Perhaps this is why it is so attractive and scary at the same time, and the reason I was finding it so hard to write about.

Truth is, I was stuck because I was focusing on putting into words things that can’t be explained, or even suggested. I was creatively approaching love the wrong way. If love can only be experienced, I must pay attention to the uniqueness of that experience. The kindness and the compassion that emanate from love and which make human relationships possible, beyond romantic love.

During the Covid-19 pandemic and the long lockdowns that we experienced in the United Kingdom, I was able to make time to do something that I love: to take to the streets and let random strangers surprise me. I sat down in parks, and I spent hours walking, letting bystanders fill the gap left by the isolation that came with the imposed social distance. Certainly, my past as a journalist influenced my new lockdown ritual.

When we rush, we don’t have time to experience the environment, the people we share our surroundings with. We are fully disconnected from everyone and everything that is not part of our routine. However, during the slow-paced life of the pandemic, my daily walks gave me the opportunity to go back to the beautiful feeling of paying attention to details. To how we do things, and how we deal with the most insignificant moments of our lives. These moments that we take for granted but are such an integral part of our daily lives. Small actions such as crossing the street, picking up our groceries at the shop, the way we walk, smile, cry, exercise, arrange our clothes, clean the house, read a book, wave our hand, write a note, say thank you, get mad, the way we take care of each other… the way we love! These apparently insignificant moments that we easily forget why they matter are the big storytellers of how we live life.

With these ideas in mind, I got out my old notes on love and I came up with a creative writing exercise. For eight weekends in a row - no excuses! - I would draft one fully fictional love story. I created some rules for myself on how to do it. I would imagine how some of the random people I saw on the streets would experience love. What would they tell me if we had the chance to have a conversation about love? Would they have any regrets? Would they be in love? Heartbroken, maybe? Were they missing someone? Would they even believe in love? What do they think about friendship? Were they feeling lonely? How do they see others?

I wondered what they would think if I told them I was dreaming a different life for them. A new future that was triggered by a new possibility of love, of compassion and kindness toward others…With this in mind, I wrote their dreamed stories almost as if it was some sort of a journalistic reportage or news column retold in the first person. Honouring their experience, their voice and the reason their hypothetical love-experience would matter to our social fabric. Their imaginary stories became a reminder of the importance of many small human acts of kindness that, for many people, were no longer available during the pandemic.

During the lockdowns, these nameless random strangers kept me company. They set my imagination free and they let me transport myself to the possibility of new and unique ways of living. They brought me closer to the life of others. Almost as if I was able to travel in time and space through their imaginary experiences. Unknowingly, they gave me hope in the midst of the pandemic and I am thankful to them.

For the same reason that this book would not be possible without the unconditional support of my good friend, Anna-Marie Savio. She selflessly offered to spend many hours of her time reading and re-reading my work, giving me valuable honest feedback. And this is how the fictional love stories motivated by those random strangers took on a dimension of their own. They deepened our friendship during the pandemic. These imaginary stories gave us both hope. They kept us going!