Jonathan Safran Foer
Interview with Aishwarya Mishra
Note: Aishwarya Mishra was selected as the winner of Washington Square Review’s New Voices Award Contest in Fiction by guest judge, Jonathan Safran Foer. As part of the contest, the winner had an opportunity to be interviewed by Foer. The following is their email conversation.
Aishwarya Mishra is a writer, editor, and dancer from Jharkhand, India. Their work has previously been selected for Best Small Fictions.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: To begin, I’d love to hear the story of your storytelling. How did you come to write? How has your understanding of yourself as a writer changed since then? Do you anticipate it will change further?
AISHWARYA MISHRA: I have grown up in a family of storytellers. None of them are storytellers by profession, but not a single day goes by when they don’t use stories—especially myths—to make their points, elicit humor, or engage in friendly banter with each other. My Ma is probably one of the most compelling storytellers I have ever known. You cannot spend ten minutes with her without hearing a story, and you can never tell if she has made up a story from scratch, or if she has heard it from somewhere and added her own twist to it. I bet she can’t tell you that either, nor does she think it matters in any real way.
In that sense, I think my first interest in storytelling came from the storytellers and narrators around me. As a child listening to stories told by my elders, it was the power they wielded that made me want to be a writer. In fact, most of my earlier stories were about the narrator as an all-powerful creator, and I think I was projecting a fair bit. Over time, I have come to see stories as being more powerful than storytellers, as having the power to challenge and change storytellers and their worldviews even as these stories come into existence through them. Once you admit that a storyteller is never outside or greater than the story, you become open to any and all changes you experience as a writer.
JSF: “Kalpavriksha” not only makes numerous religious references, it has, itself, a religious quality—in its lyrical register, as well as its obsessions with time, scale, and unanswerable questions. How, if at all, do you think about the intersection of your writing and spirituality?
AM: This is such an interesting question because, to me, writing and spirituality cannot exist without each other. I keep making this distinction between religion and spirituality because my understanding of religion is that it presupposes faith, whereas spirituality makes space for and anticipates doubt every step of the way. I don’t think a truly spiritual practice can exist without questions that constantly challenge both the practice and the practitioner.
In the previous question, you’ve asked me how my understanding of myself as a writer has changed since I first started writing, and I think the biggest turning point for me was when I began to see writing as a spiritual path for myself. In writing, as in spirituality, nothing is taken for granted and nothing is a given. I hope, of course, to reach that place as a writer where I achieve “union” with something greater than myself, but mostly I hope that I embrace and dance with chaos even as I try to coax some sense out of it.
JSF: What would you say is the story’s central concern? Put differently, is there anything you were wrestling with when you wrote the story?
AM: To say that I was in a strange space while writing this story would be an understatement. I have this habit of reading or even watching things from vastly different genres and sensibilities at the same time, and it somehow engenders a weirdly perfect environment for me to create in. At the time, I remember I was reading a UN report about the surreal conditions under which women are admitted and then kept in asylums all over India—about their lack of agency before and during their admission to these places, and of this word “cruelty” that often plays a huge role in determining whether these women “deserve” to stay in conditions that can best be described as inhumane.
At the same time, I was reading various stories from different writers who wrote about the trees of India and the myths associated with them. I started with the Kalpavriksha but then went on to various other trees that have rich, and often conflicting, stories related to them. When you read about trees that deeply, it becomes almost impossible to not see them as creatures with agency, which brought me back to the lack of agency I saw everywhere else. I kept coming back to these words—“agency,” “surreal,” and “cruel”—and because I am positively obsessed with etymologies, I decided to look up the origin of the word “cruel.” That is when I came across the term crudus—which meant raw, bloody, or un- refined. This sort of brought everything together for me—sometimes, to exist as you are, as your raw and bloody self, can seem like the highest form of cruelty you inflict on others. So that was something I was wrestling with at the time (and maybe always)—existence as infliction of cruelty.
JSF: Gabriel Garcia Márquez said: “For a writer, intuition is essential. Basically, it’s contrary to intellectualism, which is probably the thing that I detest most in the world—in the sense that the real world is turned into a kind of immovable theory.” Perhaps this is an echo of my question about religiosity, but you seem to write intuitively, following instinct rather than intention. Is that so?
AM: I love this quote so much, and I agree with it quite a bit! I am also a dancer, though I don’t “perform” in the traditional sense, which means a lot of my dancing happens in front of the mirror or in very intimate settings with people I can trust with my eyes closed. What that has done over time is that it has made me very unselfconscious about my dancing, which is interesting considering I am a very shy person in general. Even if I find myself dancing in front of a larger crowd (which is rare but does happen), I dance in the same way as I would in a room where no one’s watching.
Over time, I have started seeing writing as a way of “unselfconscious” dancing, as a way of inhabiting space without worrying about who’s watching and what that means for me, and of getting out of my head and staying in my body. I have this rather lofty ambition of wanting my bones to forget the difference between writing and dancing, which is about as intuitive as it gets.
You gave me this amazing quote by Márquez, so I have to share with you a quote by Annie Dillard which informs a lot of my writing: “One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”
JSF: Do you see yourself as writing in any tradition?
AM: Some of my favorite writers are Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst, Jorge Luis Borges, Maria Gabriela Llansol, and Norah Lange—who belong to theavant-garde tradition in Brazil, Portugal, and Argentina. I’m not sure if I write in that tradition or not, but as a reader, these are the writers I keep going back to when I want to feel like I’m reading for the first time. If there is a common thread in their writing, I think it’s their preoccupation with mysticism, death, eroticism, language, storytelling, and the idea of a narrator who is both powerful and powerless at the same time—a narrator who is obsessed not only with their creations but also with themselves as a creator. I also think that most (if not all) of these writers are very comfortable writing into the void. In fact, the “life force” of their writing is derived from it. This is something I aspire to in my writing as well.
JSF: While this story is complete unto itself, I could also quite easily imagine it expanding into a novel. Is that something you have given thought to? Do you ever “write long”?
AM: Thank you for saying that! I actually struggled a lot while ending this story because I wasn’t sure if I had said everything I had to say about these women and their lives in this place. Like you pointed out, it can easily expand into a novel, and I’m still thinking about whether or not to write that novel. What I am doing right now is working on my first novel—with very different characters and setting but with similar preoccupations. It’s a very different challenge from writing flash fiction (which has my heart) and short fiction pieces, but it feels good to be able to share space with my characters for a longer period of time. Interestingly, this novel also started out as a short story, but I realized after some time that the characters weren’t really leaving me alone, and that I needed to explore them further.
JSF: What is your writing practice? Do you have habits, rituals, rules?
AM: I wish I could say I have developed a consistent writing practice, but the truth is, I have a very intense and erratic way of dealing with the stories within me. I go through these periods where one intense activity becomes the perfect foil for my writing practice. One of my earliest such activities was swimming twice every day and working through my stories as I tried to hold my breath underwater. I am not sure if this helped my writing in any way, but even today I associate writing epiphanies with the feeling of coming up for air after having held my breath for a minute too long. Two things that I do almost all the time, but especially when my stories are making me restless, are going for long walks and dancing whenever I can.
Apart from this, I desperately want to become the kind of writer who gets up at four in the morning to get three to four hours of uninterrupted writing time before the day becomes too demanding for them, but I’m much more likely to get up in the middle of the night and start scribbling because an idea has grabbed me by the throat.
JSF: You’ll forgive me, but a final question on the theme of religiousness. Your story ends with “nothing to nothing,” resonant with the Biblical “ashes to ashes.” What note do you want to leave the reader with?
AM: That’s such an intriguing parallel you’ve drawn, because it brings to mind the significance of ashes in Hindu mythology as well. I have always been intrigued by the significance of “nothingness” in spirituality, of the void—not as an absence of meaning but perhaps as an overabundance of it. When we talk about coming from nothing and returning to nothing, this nothing is, in a sense, everything. Death, then, becomes the only way to return to what is abundant, ecstatic, and true.
In this story, “nothing to nothing” takes the idea that the lives (and perhaps the deaths) of these women amount to nothing and then turns it on its head. In this asylum, where the women are almost always left for dead, and which becomes a void for them to inhabit, these women explore not only the truth of their lives but also the truth of themselves. In a place where truth itself is malleable, they have—maybe for the first time—the opportunity to imagine and will into being their true selves. The path from nothing to nothing is truly theirs, and it is anything but empty and meaningless.