Philip Hensher at JU

On Monday 19 November Philip Hensher will be at JU in the AV Room at 10am sharp to conduct a workshop on the creation of character. Eleven people have signed up so far. There are nine places still vacant. Drop me a line if you would like to be part of the workshop. On the same day, Philip will be in conversation with Sandip Roy at Oxford Bookstore in the evening about his book Scenes from Early Life.

Philip Hensher is Professor of Creative Writing (that's a dream job description) at the University of Exeter, and he's also one of the UK's foremost LGBT figures (that's LesGayBiTransexual for all you great unwashed).

Be there.

Rajorshi Chakraborti Coming to JU

My good friend Rajorshi from Edinburgh is in town to launch his new book Mumbai Rollercoaster. He's going to be at Worldview on Friday 25 Nov at 3pm for a little interactive talk on the book. Please come down and meet him, all you Wripers.

Here's the official notice from Hachette

About the book:

Everything had been going swimmingly for Rahul and Zeenat. OK, so they had to hide their relationship from disapproving parents, and could only meet at specified times up in that abandoned building. But at least they saw each other regularly, which is saying a lot here in Mumbai, where privacy can be a priceless commodity.

Until Rahul went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like —I found a body. And adding, I think I know who did it, so let’s try and get him.

As events unfold with unstoppable momentum, Rahul and Zeenat grow to recognize the reach and power of their adversary, and understand that the only help they can call upon is from a poor twelve-year-old boy, who would himself be in desperate trouble if his connection to them was ever revealed.

Soon their families are in as much danger as they are. Under such pressure, it seems inevitable that they will also lose each other. Will Rahul and Zeenat be able to save anything they love? What is the true nature of the organization they have uncovered? And, just as importantly, what will they learn about themselves during the trials by fire that follow, as old loyalties shift, and there are as many temptations as threats.

About the author:

Rajorshi Chakraborti is an Indian novelist, essayist and short story writer. He was born in 1977 in Calcutta, and grew up there and in Mumbai. He has also lived and studied in Canada, England and Scotland, and worked, between 2007 and 2010, as a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. He currently lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

Rajorshi is the author of four novels so far, Or the Day Seizes You, Shadow Play, Balloonists and Mumbai Rollercoaster. Or the Day Seizes You was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2006, and was translated into Spanish as La Vida Que Nos Lleva. Shadow Play was originally published in 2008 under the title Derangements.

Rajorshi has also published reviews, short stories and essays in several periodicals and anthologies, including the Edinburgh Review, The Istanbul Review, Excess: The Tehelka Book of Stories, Why We Don't Talk, Too Asian, Not Asian Enough, The Edinburgh Introduction to Studying English Literature, and The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers.

Do join us for refreshments after the event. Look forward to seeing you there.

A Bit More on Akhil Sharma

One Indian Writer’s Experience

Akhil Sharma in the Jackson Heights section of Queens, New York, where there is a vibrant South Asian community.

By Akhil Sharma

Akhil Sharma’s first novel, An Obedient Father, won the 2000 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2001 Whiting Writers’ Award. He writes for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. He was named among the best of young American novelists (2007) by Granta magazine.

I can only speak from my own experiences, and so I should not be understood to represent all Indian-American writers.

I first started writing short stories in ninth grade. I did this because I was very unhappy and I wanted attention.

My family came to America in 1979. There was me, my brother, my mother, and my father. Two years after we arrived, my brother had an accident in a swimming pool that left him severely brain damaged. I was 10 then, and my brother, 14.

My brother is still alive and he cannot walk or talk. Anup, which is my brother’s name, cannot be fed through his mouth, and so he is fed through a gastrointestinal tube that enters his stomach from just below his right ribs. Anup does not roll over automatically in his sleep, and so someone has to be with him all night long and turn him from side to side every two hours and, in this way, keep him from getting bed sores.

For two years after the accident, my brother was kept in a hospital, and then my parents decided to take care of him themselves. They brought him to our house and hired nurses. Other than the direct worries of my brother’s condition, another pressing worry that I grew up with was concern about money. Because we had such little money and because we were dependent on insurance companies and nurses, we felt that we were always being betrayed, that people were not fulfilling their responsibilities. Many times we had nurses who said that they would come and start a shift on a particular day and time and they wouldn’t show up. Also, because there were strangers in our house, we were always afraid that people would steal things. We had one nurse who stole teddy bears that my mother had bought at a flea market.

Until ninth grade, when I was 15, the only time I wrote short stories was when they were assigned for a class. In ninth grade I had a teacher, Mrs. Green, who praised me for how well I understood our reading assignments and so, to get more attention from her, I began writing stories.

At first all the stories I wrote had white American characters. I think this was partially because all the fiction I read was about white people. Equally important though was that I felt the experience of being an Indian American was not important. Living as a minority, not sharing the experiences of the majority population, I felt that my experiences, because they were not the majority experience, were not as important as those of white people. Also, to some extent, I felt that my experiences, because they were not shared, were not even as real as those of white Americans.

Among the problems I had in writing about whites is that I didn’t know anything about whites. It was only in 10th grade that I first went into a white person’s house.

In 10th grade I read a biography of Ernest Hemingway. I remember starting reading it one morning at the kitchen table and the windows of the kitchen being dark. I read the biography of Hemingway so that I could lie to people and tell them that I had read Hemingway’s books. (I used to lie all the time and claim I had read books I had not.)

I read the book and was amazed. What amazed me was that Hemingway had gotten to live in France and Spain, that he had travelled to Cuba and appeared to have had a good time in his life. Till then I had thought that I would be a computer programmer or an engineer or a doctor. When I read the book, I suddenly thought that I could have a lifestyle like Ernest Hemingway’s and not lead a boring life.

After I read the biography, I began to read other books about Hemingway. I read biographies and collections of critical essays. I must have read 20 books about Hemingway before I read any actual work written by him. I read all this about Hemingway because I wanted to learn how to repeat what he had done and I didn’t want to leave any clue unexamined. At first, I was not actually interested in Hemingway’s own writing.

I think of Hemingway as the writer who has influenced me most. Hemingway, as you probably already know, wrote about characters whose experience was exotic to American readers. He wrote about gangsters and soldiers in Italy and journalists in Paris. Among the many things I learned from Hemingway, and I could say that almost everything I am as a writer began with Hemingway or as a response against Hemingway, one was how to write about exotic things without being bogged down by the exoticism. Scholars who analyzed Hemingway pointed out that his stories began in the middle of the action, that he wrote as if the reader already knew a great deal about the environment that he was writing about, that when he gave direct explanations, this breaking of the reality of fictional experience was a way of saying to the reader that the reason I am breaking this fictional convention is because I don’t want to lie.

For me, because I began my education as a writer with Hemingway and did not really read any nonwhite writers until I was in college, I have always thought that writing is just writing. Writing is just a string of words and a series of strategies that generate experiences within the reader. I have always felt that in the same way that the race of a surgeon does not matter because a heart and a gall bladder remain a heart and a gall bladder, no matter the race of the patient, the race of a writer also does not matter.

I came to America as part of a great wave of immigration. Because this wave of Asian immigrants has created curiosity within American society as to what exactly it is like to be in Asian families, I have been lucky to have had my books read. (I think of myself as a good writer, but I could imagine that if I had been writing 50 years earlier, my writing might have been too exotic and peripheral to be worth reading by ordinary readers.)

My first book won the PEN/ Hemingway prize. This is given to the best first novel published in any given year.

The person who gave me the prize was one of Hemingway’s sons. I believe it was Patrick Hemingway who gave me the prize. This white-haired gentleman and I sat and talked in a conference room for about 10 or 15 minutes. I did not tell him how much his father had mattered to me because I felt shy. Instead we talked about how his father had found titles for his books in The Book of Common Prayer.

Sometimes when I think of how lucky I have been, I want to cry.

Akhil Sharma Coming to JU

Following on from the Naqvi visit tomorrow (please come) we have Akhil Sharma coming to see us on Friday February 4 (that's next Friday). Sharma has written one novel, An Obedient Father, but it's won two awards and has generated a lot of controversy. It's about a corrupt government official who abuses his own daughter. His crimes come out many years later, and his daughter takes her revenge. See here to check out the controversy.
Sharma will be in the PG2 classroom, not the AV room, as there is another talk happening there at 3, and we don't want it to clash.

Husain M. Naqvi Visiting JU on Thursday

H.M. Naqvi is the author of Home Boy, a novel about Indian-origin boys in New York. It's bold, it's brash, it pulls no punches and it's just won the DSC South Asia literature Prize. Husain is coming to see us on Thursday 27 January at 4pm in the AV Room. Do please try to come and meet him.
Here's his Wikipedia page

Last Call for Valerie Miner Workshop

Please send me a mail on gmail (facebook not acceptable, it has to be gmail) if you want to participate in Valerie Miner's Creative Writing Workshop on December 16 in the AV Room. A few places are left. Please do this by 30 November AT THE LATEST.

Valerie Miner Workshop

Hi everyone. I am in Bangladesh at present, using a rather temperamental keyboard that belongs to the Mad Hatter. The reason that I'm writing is that the very wonderful Valerie Miner is coming to JU to conduct a creative writing workshop on December 16. I need ten or at the most twelve names and email ids of people who want to participate. The only requirement is that you be passionate about writing and very good with the English language. It will be first come first served other than that. Send me a mail if you want to be part of it. The first twelve good candidates to send their names to my gmail account will be in. All WrIPpers have my gmail address. Valerie will share some material with you before the workshop. We will most probably hold the event in the AV Room provided that DrIP isn't using it then.

Samit Basu Coming to JU

Samit Basu will be speaking informally at the AV Room on Monday at 2pm. Please come and bring your friends.

Telegraph on ASU visit

Here is Romila's article on Melissa Pritchard and the ASU students who visited JU a few months back.

Sampurna Chattarji and Sharmistha Mohanty

These two young writers read from their work here on Monday 19 March 2007 (yesterday). Audience was unfortunately thin since there were meetings re Nandigram and other issues going on at the same time. Nevertheless Sharmistha read from her new book New Life (Roli) and Sampurna from her book of poems, Sight May Strike You Blind (Sahitya Akademi). Both were very good, especially the latter.

In other news, we now have all the material for WIPLash. Our editors have been a bit distracted by recent events (as have we all) but things should be settled by the end of the week, so work will restart. As you know, we're not getting funding from the University, so any ideas you may have for sponsorship will be welcome. Please get in touch with the editors with them, or with me.

Christopher Merrill

We had a visit from Professor Christopher Merrill on Friday.

Chris Merrill runs America's coolest writing programme, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He writes poetry and non-fiction, and he's written on soccer, the Balkan wars, and secretive Eastern orthodox monasteries.

On Friday, he spoke about his life as a writer, including how it felt to be stuck in a basement in Croatia being blitzed by the Serbs, and what to do if you're targeted by a sniper while on the way to a film festival. He also told us that according to the Serbs, the only unbiased journalists in the country were Indians(!) He reminisced about his friend Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet who (among other things) introduced the proper ghazal to America.

Chris's talk was followed by a lively interactive session. At the end of the session, Gautam Datta, an engineer based in New Jersey, read a poem in Bangla and his translation of one of Chris's English pieces.

The ASU Meet on 11 January 2007

The meet with the ASU team went off well, thanks to our very own Pooja and Bishan of Kalam. Professor Pritchard and her students spent an interesting morning sharing their experiences with JU students, and a great time was had by all. If you were there, or even if you couldn't make it, here is a link to their place, the Virginia G. Piper Centre for Creative Writingat Arizona State University. You will find there a lot of resources and facts relating to their programmes.

Check out their online book club run by Aimee Baker.


Also check out Kalam and their work.

Arizona State University team

Here is a potted biography of Professor Melissa Pritchard of Arizona State University, courtesy Bishan Samaddar of Kalam.
Melissa Pritchard
Professor of English and Women's Studies at Arizona State University, Melissa Pritchard is the nationally acclaimed author of three short story collections: Spirit Seizures, The Instinct for Bliss, and Disappearing Ingenue; three novels: Phoenix, Selene of the Spirits, and Late Bloomer; and a biography: Devotedly Always, Virginia: The Life of Virginia Galvin Piper. A recipient of numerous prestigious literary awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, the James Phelan Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best fiction by an American woman and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Writers Voice YMCA, and Brown University's Howard Foundation, Pritchard's fiction has appeared widely in such literary journals as: The Southern Review, Boulevard, Open City, The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, and The Paris Review. Her stories are frequently cited and reprinted in anthologies such as: Pushcart Prize XX and XXVI; Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards; Best American Short Stories; The Prentice Hall Anthology of Women's Literature; Best of the West; Great Contemporary Ghost Stories; Mothers: Twenty Stories of Contemporary Motherhood; and American Gothic Tales, as well as college textbooks such as: Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers; Behind the Short Story: From First to Final Draft; and A Garden of Forking Paths: An Anthology for Creative Writers.
She has received the Claudia Ortese Memorial Lecture Prize in North American Literature from the University of Florence and her fiction has been translated into Spanish and Italian. Her novel Selene of the Spirits was selected for the Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” series and her short story collection, Disappearing Ingenue, featured in Doubleday's “Fiction for the Rest of Us” series, was chosen by Alan Cheuse for National Public Radio's 2002 Annual Summer Reading List. Her latest novel Late Bloomer, published by Doubleday in 2004, has been called “brilliant” by Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “ravishing” by Vanity Fair magazine, and was named a 2004 Best Book of the Year by the Chicago Tribune. She is at work on a new collection of stories, The Odditorium.
Nominated for the 2005 Outstanding Achievement and Contribution Award by Arizona State University's Commission on the Status of Women, Pritchard is Director of Creative Partnerships for the Daywalka Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending human trafficking and modern day slavery. Pritchard is currently working to establish outreach projects with the Phoenix Children's Hospital and Daywalka's Kalam project, for the MFA Program at ASU where she has taught since 1992. She is also serving as story consultant for a documentary about the Lost Boys of Sudan.
Her team comprises Michael Green, Max Doty, Tina Hammerton, Darcy Courteaux and Aimee Baker.

Kalam: Margins Write and University of Arizona meeting

On either Thursday Jan 11 or Friday Jan 12, 2007 (depending on when our American friends get in) there's going to be a meeting in the AV Room with some students and a professor of creative writing from Arizona State University. This comes to us courtesy Kalam: Margins Write (an NGO) . I'll need 5-10 people, preferably past and present WIPers but other creative people also welcome, to come sign up with me beforehand. When we meet in the new year is fine.