I’m popping in with another book. It’ll be a short blurb, so you don’t have to click through to read the whole thing.

Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, compiled and edited by Cate Malek and Mateo Hoke, was my first nonfiction read about Palestine. The book is part of a series called Voice of Witness, a nonprofit organization that “uses oral history to illuminate contemporary human rights crises in the U.S. and around the world.” It was published in 2014.

The book interviews sixteen people: fourteen Palestinians, an Israeli settler, and an Israeli activist. Each person’s account is told in narrative form, based on interviews with the subject. The people interviewed are all different ages and backgrounds, and include a fisherman, an NGO worker, and a physics professor, just to name a few.

I enjoyed reading firsthand accounts of each person’s experience. In addition, though, I found it interesting and telling how similar these real life accounts were to the fiction books I’ve read on the subject. While those stories came from the imaginations of the authors, they are grounded in reality.

I often don’t read the appendices of books, I read this appendix all the way to the end because the information included (from the history of Hamas’ tunnels to poetry) provided fascinating context for the personal accounts in the book.

Storytelling has always been a part of my life. It’s why I majored in English, it’s why I became a nurse, and it’s why I write. Hearing the stories of real Palestinians – and knowing these stories cut off ten years ago, with no way to find out “the rest of the story,” was a powerful reminder of the ongoing nature of the narrative.