| Summary: | Krista Bremer grew up all around the world, in New Jersey, Vienna, and New Mexico. Discussed in her interview are: her arrival in North Carolina to attend journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; first meeting with Sy Safransky; work with Jane Brown in the Mass Communications department; description of the work involved in putting together the Sy Safransky’s Notebook section of The Sun; her decision upon finding out she was pregnant to reject the Charles Kuralt Fellowship in D.C. and abroad in order to stay in Carrboro (N.C.) and raise a family with her husband; her first job at The Sun; Bremer’s memoir, My Accidental Jihad, about her marriage to a Muslim from Libya; how receiving the Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers launched her career; how publishing an essay called “Cover Girl” in O Magazine about her daughter's relationship to the headscarf resulted in a book contract with Algonquin; international subscribers to The Sun and her concern about its global language; her experience of the South and how it doesn't match popular narratives about the region; The Sun’s relationships to local writers and to UNC; her relationships with local “literary aristocracy”; Sy Safransky’s evolving and maturing relationship to the magazine; the relationship of The Sun to literary worlds and academic worlds; the intentional lack of easy categorization of the magazine; the magazine's relationship to race; what it's like navigating between a Muslim world and a secular, middle-class American world in Carrboro; hosting dhikr [or zhikr] in their home; her wedding potluck; her awareness of Chapel Hill-Carrboro as a place unlike much of the rest of North Carolina; her thoughts on the work of Jesmyn Ward; details of the story she told in her essay “Blues for Allah” about her family's experience seeing the Tuareg band Tinariwen at the Cat's Cradle; her parents’ work with the United Nations and how that influenced her worldview; how the physical landscape of Carrboro has changed and gentrified since the late 1990s, mentioning the Open Eye café and Neal’s Deli.
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