Author Interview: Neela Vaswani |
Author Interview: Neela Vaswani
Sarabane Books
2010-07-19
The lovely Neela Vaswani takes a moment to chat with us about her new book, You Have Given Me a Country, out August 15 [2010].
Your previous book, Where the Long Grass Bends, was a collection of short stories with a strongly mythic cast, and your memoir is told in meticulously rendered vignettes. How did you move from fashioning fiction out of the tales of your childhood, to turning your childhood and young adulthood into a (nonfiction) tale?
When I write in any genre, the raw materials and techniques are the same—it’s just the approach that differs. Early in the book I say, “I pledge allegiance to story,” and that’s what I always aim to do, to honor the simplest and most valuable truth at the heart of any story…
Your background is Indian- and Irish-American—two intensively chronicled, often romanticized, identities. When the personal has so much overlap with the familiar, how did you confront the challenge of making your experiences read as yours?
The simplest thing I did was to focus on the particular way I see the world—as me, Neela, rather than as someone who is “half Indian, half Irish.” Still, I had some negotiating to do.
At first, it was difficult for me to explore my Indian-American identity without falling into the same story-patterns and language as other Indian-American writers. I felt that same caution when writing about biracial identity; there has been so much written, especially recently, about our identity and experience. I wanted to try to speak from those traditions and shared experiences while also telling my story in a fresh way…
Read the entire review here.
Tags: Neela Vaswani, Sarabane Books