Give us your elevator
pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
This Is One Way to Dance is my debut essay
collection about language, culture, family, and place. My book explores race and
belonging; growing up South Asian American; the invisibility, ambiguity, and
hyper-visibility of Asian Americans; and the too-common phenomenon of having
one's racialized experiences dismissed. I chronicle friendships and weddings; silence
and speech; mapping one's personal geography; living with depression; and how we
keep moving in the face of loss.
Which essay did you
most enjoy writing? Why?
I enjoyed writing "Things People Said: An Essay in
Seven Steps," because I stopped censoring myself. I was so mad—and I wrote
it and sent it out the same day, which never happens! I had been stewing about stupid
things people said to me about being South Asian (demonstrating the absence of
basic world history and geography in American general education) for a long
time and finally my husband said, You're talking your book. Write it down. And
he was right. Brevity published this list essay and it led, indirectly,
to my book.
And, which essay gave
you the most trouble, and why?
"Saris and Sorrows" gave me the most trouble,
because it felt difficult to write honestly about how I felt about my wedding.
Marriage is often seen as an accomplishment, one step closer to the American
Dream, and privileges what activist Mia Birdsong calls "toxic
individualism, but in family-unit form"—a narrative that excludes other
kinds of relationships and community. Weddings can also bring out the crazy in
people. Some extended family and friends shocked me—how much they made it about
themselves. I didn't write about them directly in the essay, but I found it challenging
to wade back into that time of my life even though an outside reviewer had specifically
requested more about my actual wedding, which I originally omitted from the manuscript.
Ultimately, I took the request as an opportunity to complete another essay. An
early essay in the book, "Matrimonials," begins with my brother's
wedding; whether or not I chose to write about mine, weddings already populated
the landscape of the book.
What boundaries did
you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come
from?
I fashioned a mosaic memoir in essays written over twenty
years. The struggle was to create a cohesive manuscript that showed how the
essays moved, mostly chronologically, but also back and forth in time—my
intention was to show a narrative arc, movement over time: coming home, finding
home, and making space for when life goes off the rails. I wrote about
ambition, failure, and adjusting to Plan B.
Tell us a bit about
the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
High: having an editor at UGA Press's Crux Series in
Literary Nonfiction (one of my favorite presses/series and a place I wanted to
send my manuscript) reach out to me after reading "Things People
Said" in Brevity. Valerie Boyd saw that I had a manuscript that had
been a finalist at a few contests and emailed me to ask if it was still
available.
Low: the time it took for my manuscript to be read by
editors and peer reviewed, revised, and make its way through production. Between
when I first handed in a manuscript and publishing the book, my work went
through two rounds of peer review, two revisions, and I survived my
grandmother's passing, moving, PTSD, my father's cancer and chemo, and the
steep learning curve in publishing that is one's first book. It was a lengthy
and emotional process requiring more perseverance than I could have imagined.
What’s your favorite
piece of writing advice?
Keep writing. (And reading and walking!)
My favorite writing
advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the
writing of this book?
It surprised me that the book has so little about New York
City in it, even though I lived there for several years. Writing creative
nonfiction, a memoir or an essay collection, means leaving large swaths of time
and life out. When you write, when you revise, a lot is left out. During those
years I taught four classes most semesters in a tenure track job with a heavy
committee workload. I didn't have the mental space to write much except during my
leave. Then, I wrote a draft of a few of the most important essays in the book,
including "Street Scene." However, "Street Scene" is about
walking in Paris and my friend, LeeAnne. Though I finished the essay while
living in New York City, the essay is not about New York. In 2011, the year I published
"Street Scene," my friend, poet Philip White, called it a lyric
essay. I realized other essays I'd
written also fit the definition of lyric essay ("Skin,"
"Bird," "Curriculum") Before that, I had not known that what
I had been calling "prose pieces" actually belonged to a subgenre of
the essay.
How did you find the
title of your book?
My friend, Jess Fenn, found my title. Originally, my book was
called Things People Say (suggested by my friend, Ravi Mangla) and I
loved that title, but one of my outside reviewers cautioned against it,
suggesting that emphasizing other people's voices instead of my own in the
title would be a misstep. I have always felt confident in finding titles for my
short stories and essays, often in a phrase within the work itself, but with a
manuscript, a collection of essays, it felt more fraught—harder to see which title
could do the work of drawing the pieces together, creating a unified sense. Jess
identified the eventual title from an earlier version of "Matrimonials,"
which is one of the essays in the book. It was a line I'd written long ago and
lived with and it felt right; I could feel it in the body. Also, I love titles
that are also sentences. My MFA thesis was called Ithaca Is Never Far.
I don't go into great detail with regards to my dance background
and my history of studying dance is not explicitly addressed in the book, but
dance has always been important to me as an art form and as a means of
expression. The title and through line of dance worked on more than one level
as metaphor, inspiration, and analogy.
Inquiring foodies and
hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any
recipes I might share?)
Aloo chole: Chickpeas, potatoes, cumin, onions, turmeric,
garam masala or red pepper sometimes; garlic and spinach often; tomatoes. Chop
onions and garlic. Fry cumin seeds in oil until they start to crackle, then add
onions, sauté until translucent (add a dried red pepper if you like). Then add
chickpeas; if the potatoes (cut into small pieces) aren't already cooked, you
can microwave them and then add. Then, garlic, spinach, and tomatoes. A tiny
bit of asafoetida (hing). Salt and fresh lemon to taste.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS
AUTHOR: www.sejal-shah.com
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READ AN ESSAY, “Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps”:
https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/things-people-said/
