Shima Oliaee spent two years reporting around the world to try to find the answer to the question: What is Dolly Parton’s America? She had the chance to interview Parton 11 times across two continents, and this week after Parton passed away Aug. 25 at age 80, Oliaee wrote a remembrance for Time, just as she was starting graduate school at Rice University.
Oliaee created the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America,” which began as a four-hour interview with the superstar in her music recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee. Oliaee’s Time remembrance traces Parton’s childhood from an unheated cabin outside Knoxville, Tennessee, to her prolific catalog of more than 3,000 songs, lingering on the subject matter that got less attention than the rhinestones: the loss of a child, domestic abuse, sex work and suicide. Oliaee wrote that Parton was a voice for women at a time when most were erased.
“She survived her own story long enough to tell it,” Oliaee said.
Oliaee comes to Rice as part of the inaugural cohort of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. The three-year program launches through the School of Humanities and Arts and the Department of English and Creative Writing. Rice’s program will support writers in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, translation and hybrid forms with small cohorts and close faculty mentorship. Community writing residencies will pair students with Houston nonprofits, schools and cultural institutions.
“I want to make original, creative work that reflects new ways of thinking about the world and explore more deeply how I can help it while I am in Houston,” Oliaee said. “I hope to have the time of my life, and meanwhile, I plan to use my pen in the pursuit of justice.”
Oliaee began to make plans for her own production company Shirazad Productions as she was working on the Parton series. The name “Shirazad” is a play on Scheherazade, the protagonist of “One Thousand and One Nights,” who must tell stories each night to a king in order to not be beheaded. (Ultimately her tales reform the violent ruler.) Throughout her podcast career, Oliaee created several award-winning documentary series, reporting on topics ranging from conversion therapy in America, the fall of the Mississippi flag following George Floyd’s murder and Iranian women who disguised themselves as men to enter soccer stadiums.
Before working in journalism, Oliaee received a graduate degree in psychology.
“I had years of training and practice learning how to really listen and give people the space and time to share things they didn’t even know they wanted to say,” Oliaee said.
She began drafting a book after she completed her podcast series about the lives of American teen girls. She used those pages to apply to eight competitive MFA programs across the country and was admitted to all eight. She said a campus visit settled it.
“When I came to Rice and met the faculty and spent, I think, 36 hours on campus, I just fell in love,” Oliaee said. “The day I left, I remember standing outside Fondren Library thinking, ‘I am not yet the person that would write the book I would write if I had gone through the program at Rice.’”
The residencies will send Oliaee and her cohort out into Houston to support the diverse and international communities that surround the university. While in her program, she plans to keep working on two books, a documentary series and a film.
“I am excited to keep growing in Texas,” Oliaee said. “Dolly believed she had a mission to be useful to people, and I believe we all share this mission — as scientists, writers, artists, dreamers and thinkers — how can we create a world where those who have suffered the most become the happiest people on the planet? I want to find answers to that question.”