ARYA'S WRITING & READING BLOG

We are all filled with opinions, as plentiful as soot, which are often the byproduct, or garbage, of our obsessions, the result of long-held habits like watching cop shows, and what we have gleaned from that, consciously and unconsciously. What do opinions matter? Not at all, except when we recognize how people kill for them. Wage war for them. Sacrifice their own lives for a belief. A belief. An opinion. Mind bubbles. What if, in chatting with a fellow activist, for example, I discover that she supports Israel, is sympathetic to its cause. While I am deeply opposed to the genocide in Palestine, my companion sees it as a necessary exclamation of history and nature, mere necessity. Do we argue until our faces redden and one or both of us walks away, or do we set aside the dagger of our differences, doubling down instead on the more important imperative--treating the other as a human being regardless, inquiring about them as if their lives matter, listening sincerely, offering no judgmen...

Here's my favorite section of a recent four-star review of my novel, Punk Disco Bohemian, which appears in both Goodreads and Amazon and is written by Iranian-born writer Neda Aria.  "A coming-of-age story steeped in the hedonism and upheaval of the 1970s, Punk Disco Bohemian plunges the reader into an era of shifting social norms, disco-lit dance floors, and radical self-invention. Ali is at the center of it all, navigating a world that offers both exhilarating freedom and unexpected dangers. She parties, she experiments, she stumbles. Through Jenkins’ unembellished prose, we follow Ali’s journey without romanticism or nostalgia—just the raw, unfiltered reality of youth in search of meaning. "Jenkins is not interested in the usual sentimental beats of the genre. Instead, she offers a protagonist whose self-destructive tendencies are as compelling as her yearning for connection. Ali’s encounters—with lovers, friends, and strangers—are transactional in nature, fueled by a ...