V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan is
a fiction writer and journalist. Her debut novel, Love Marriage (Random House,
2008), was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post
Book World’s Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic
Monthly, the Columbia Journalism Review, and The Washington Post, among others.
She is the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of
Michigan, and a proud alum of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland,
where she studied creative writing and journalism with Dr. Jan Bowman (Go,
Vikings!).
Jan: Thank you for taking time for this
interview, Sugi. I have long admired your work. Your first novel, Love Marriage, was named by the
Washington Post Book World as one of the Best Books of 2008. It’s a powerful novel that explores the
interaction of a family and culture, shaped by love, and the war in Sri Lanka
between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.
Can you talk a bit about your own family and experiences that led you to
explore this topic?
Sugi: I’ve long admired your work—I was lucky to have such great
teachers in MCPS and elsewhere. Thanks for the kind words! My parents were born
in Sri Lanka, so I had always been interested in the conflict, and in
complicating my own understanding of it. The war, strictly speaking, was
between the Tamil Tigers and Sinhalese-dominated government forces—but there
were other actors and others affected, too, of course. Western coverage of it
has been pretty reductive, and it’s an unusually complex history. There’s longstanding
debate in Sri Lanka about how minority communities are treated. Of course,
minorities face a hard time around the world, even in democracies—even under
the best circumstances. I’m very interested in that, and I’m interested in
exploring the effect of politics on everyday lives. I tend to write about
blurry morality. Sri Lanka obviously provides a wealth of material in that
regard. And because of my family and also my various alma maters, I’ve had
excellent access to research what I don’t know, and to check what I do.
Jan: The structure of this novel is unusual
in that you written it in fragmented vignettes. You have said “the currency of
family stories is the anecdote…” Could you say more about how this choice came
to you as an effective structural device for this novel?
Sugi: Oh, I wish I understood that! But I think it
was mostly subconscious. Jamaica Kincaid, who supervised me in an early draft
of the novel, strongly encouraged it, too. (Actually, she may have even
suggested it. It was over a decade ago, and I don’t remember!) And then once
I’d started doing it, it just seemed natural and the right way to tell the
story.
Jan: I understand that you travelled to
Canada and Sri Lanka to research your book. Can you tell us about the insights
you gained from doing this?
Sugi: I was fairly relaxed in
doing this; for example, I didn’t know my Canadian research was research when I
was doing it. I went to Toronto with my family nearly every year as a kid, so I
had a sense of what it was like to be an insider/outsider there, and to be
stunned, as the protagonist Yalini is, at being in a place where there are so
many people like you. The insiderdom you have dreamed of your whole life! So
many Sri Lankans in Toronto! And yet they’re outsiders of a sort still:
minorities, despite the numbers. And you—me?— as an American, are an outsider
even among them. That remains a powerful experience for me, every time I go to
Toronto, because I didn’t grow up with that sizable community around me, and
never lived there, but inevitably feel a sense of crazy strength and closeness
and love and debate there, and then there I am, just beyond its borders. Wishing
I could have it, and also quite glad to be myself, to have been born in
America. And so Yalini having been born in America really shapes her different
sense of what it means to be a Sri Lankan Tamil hyphen-something. She travels
to Toronto; she is in Toronto, but she is not of Toronto.
Jan: And could you say a bit more about the power of place
in fiction, based upon your own writing and travel experiences?
Sugi: I’ve been lucky to meet Sri
Lankan emigrants and their children in so many different countries. It’s not
lost on me that this is the result of what were often very sad political and
historical circumstances. So this is not only a different kind of traveling,
but also a way of always and never being home. I find hotels really strange,
and this is because so many friends and relatives have been generous about my staying
with them. They’ve helped me to figure out how to belong to many different
places, but we also frequently find ourselves discussing a place we are not in.
Perhaps for this reason—and
I’m speculating—place is actually somewhat diffuse in Love Marriage. Yalini has
a terrible sense of direction; she is guided by other people.
Jan: What do you love about being a
professor and what are some of the downsides to it?
Sugi: The students are
fantastic, as are my colleagues on the MFA faculty. I could go on about them
forever. It was challenging at first to balance teaching and writing, but I’m
getting better at it as time goes on—and it’s hard to balance teaching and
life, and writing and health insurance, so this is a very good life and way to
do things. I feel lucky to be here. I really like teaching, and the structure
it provides. Best of all, I’m guaranteed to have tons of thought-provoking and
useful conversation about writing every week. That goes back to my desk, too,
of course; it’s a rich exchange. I also appreciate the subtle sense of support
and pressure you get from being part of a writing community. Everyone else is
writing—they understand if you are, too, and in fact, expect you to do so.
Jan: So - what are you working on now? What
is the focus and status of your current writing projects?
Sugi: I’m working on a second
novel, a portion of which appeared in Granta a couple of years ago. I’m working
on essays and short stories on the side.
Jan: What writer – living or dead – would
you like to meet and what question(s) would you want to ask?
Sugi: I’d like to ask Junot
Diaz how he’d write about Trujillo, if Trujillo were alive and in power. I bet
he has an awesome answer. Señor, if you see this…
Jan: What’s the best movie made from a book
that you’ve seen lately?
Sugi: I'm going to invent my
own version of this question so I can talk about Cloud Atlas, which I haven’t
seen, but which is coming out any second now and looks terrific. Ditto Life of
Pi. I haven’t read that book yet, but the trailer is lovely.
Jan: Do you have any favorite online blogs
on writing that you regularly read?
Sugi: My friend Danielle
Evans has a really good one! I also like my pal Alex Chee’s, and the one run by
my former teacher, James Hynes. Former classmates of mine run The Millions and
also Barrelhouse; and of course, who doesn’t love Paris Review Conversations?
Jan: What book “stopped time” for you, which
is to say you couldn’t put it down?
Sugi: The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao!
Jan: What are you reading now?
Sugi: This is How You Lose
Her, by Junot Diaz; Breaking and Entering, by my colleague Eileen Pollack; The
Green Shore, by my friend Natalie Bakopolous; and an enormous amount of
nonfiction.
Jan: What writing advice do you most often give
to MFA students in your program?
Sugi: Writing is not a
democracy. It is a benevolent dictatorship. It’s probably the only scenario in
which I would endorse dictatorship of any kind!
Jan: What is the most useful writing advice
you remember having received and what advice have you wisely chosen to ignore.
Sugi: You introduced me to
the work of Elizabeth McCracken when I was a high school student, and she was
later my teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The most useful writing advice
I remember having received is… everything she said. For example, she used to
say that each book taught you how to read it. I just love that and find it so
useful.
And what have I ignored? Funny story: a pal of mine from journalism
read a draft of Love Marriage and advocated ending it with an act of sexual
violence. For a brief period of time, he proselytized for this quite seriously.
And (spoiler alert!): I didn’t do that.
Jan: Has gender
discrimination been a part of your own experience in education and has that
adversely affected your career opportunities?
And if so how?
Jan: I appreciate your taking time from your busy schedule to do this interview and I hope you'll send me an email when your next book is published.
Photo Credits: Preston Merchant
V.V. Ganeshananthan is a Sri Lankan
American fiction writer, essayist, and journalist. Ganeshananthan is the
author of Love Marriage, a novel set in Sri Lanka and North America,
which was published by Random House in April 2008. Wikipedia
Education: Harvard University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
http://vasugi.com/news/
http://vasugi.com/news/
Jan Bowman’s work has
appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy,
Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato
Eyes, and others. She won the 2011
Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her
stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories
and a story was a finalist in the “So To
Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two
collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a
completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring
2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of
“Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and
publishers. Learn more at:
Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com
Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com
Hi Sugi,
ReplyDeleteI have NEWS. Glimmer Train named my story, "Flight" to an Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Award for New Writers. Thought you'd like to know this. How are you doing? Best Regards, Dr. B.