{"id":10964,"date":"2010-12-21T20:49:46","date_gmt":"2010-12-21T20:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10964"},"modified":"2015-02-18T19:03:18","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T19:03:18","slug":"10964","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10964","title":{"rendered":"Author Interview: Neela Vaswani"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author Interview: Neela Vaswani<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sarabane Books
\n<\/a>2010-07-19<\/p>\n

The lovely Neela Vaswani<\/a> takes a moment to chat with us about her new book, You Have Given Me a Country<\/a>, out August 15 [2010].<\/em><\/p>\n

Your previous book, Where the Long Grass Bends<\/a><\/em>, 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I write in any genre, the raw materials and techniques are the same\u2014it\u2019s just the approach that differs. Early in the book I say, \u201cI pledge allegiance to story,\u201d and that\u2019s what I always aim to do, to honor the simplest and most valuable truth at the heart of any story…<\/p>\n

Your background is Indian- and Irish-American\u2014two 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The simplest thing I did was to focus on the particular way I see the world\u2014as me, Neela, rather than as someone who is \u201chalf Indian, half Irish.\u201d\u00a0 Still, I had some negotiating to do.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,25],"tags":[3216,4783],"class_list":["post-10964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-neela-vaswani","tag-sarabane-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}