She was born in England to parents from India and Germany
and grew up mostly in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sujata holds a BA in Writing
Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and started her working life as a
features reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun. After leaving the
newspaper, she moved to Japan, where she studied Japanese, taught English and
began writing her first novel.
In an interview Sujata gives some very sage writing advise for aspiring writers, "Do not worry about getting published until you have completely written and revised your book, shown it to five friends that you trust, and taken their comments into consideration for your rewrite. I rewrote my first book more than 50 times before I showed it to an agent. There is something to be said for not proceeding until you are as polished as you can be."
She has been very busy with her book tour for her latest book that has been hailed as, "an ambitious story of suspense, love and identity."Yet she was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule to answer some questions for Suprose.
You were a journalist before you became a fiction writer.
Why?
How different is fiction writing as opposed to a non-fiction narrative?
How different is fiction writing as opposed to a non-fiction narrative?
I was a little more excited about journalism
than fiction during my college years. I thought writing fiction was something
that I'd be better able to afford when I was older--and in those days I thought
"50" was the magic age for being capable of writing a novel. After I
graduated with a BA from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, it seemed the obvious way
to earn a living writing was newspaper journalism. I was extraordinarily
lucky to be hired as a features reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun, a
daily city newspaper that was delivered t in the afternoon, during the times
that big cities still had enough readers and advertisers to support morning and
evening papers. I thrived on the camaraderie of working at a paper and
learning from older reporter. I also benefited from learning how to meet
deadlines each day. Reporting also grounded me in feeling I had to use accurate
details in whatever I would come to write in the future. The only hardest
part of transitioning from reporting city news to creating fiction was the
matter of emotion. As a newspaper writer, I was never supposed to insert
myself or my opinion or feelings into the writing. Our word to live by was
'objective.' Fiction, on the other hand, is supposed to make readers feel
things. Characters are supposed to offer you a window into their hearts. This
is why I've primarily written in the first-person voice. This reminds me that it's OK to sway the reader with a character's feelings.
Did you receive formal training to become a writer, in
journalism or fiction?
I earned an undergraduate degree in the Writing Seminars at
Johns Hopkins. At another university, the major probably would be called
"creative writing." But Hopkins had a specific scheme for their
program, wherein professional published writers teach very small
classes--typically 5 to 15 students--around one table, with group critique the
major method of instruction. For some this might have been traumatic, but I let
the competitive kids' comments roll of my back. I was intrigued by the
professors and guest lecturers, who during my day, included the crime novelist
Martha Grimes, and the literary authors Stephen Dixon, John Barth, and Francine
Prose. The same workshop format was used to teach journalism (classes from
several Washington Post writers) and poetry and science writing. I
don't believe that this pleasant experience improved to the point of
professionalism in writing. I think the reporting internship I did at the
Baltimore Evening Sun, while in the program, helped me. One of
the advantages of the Writing Seminars made me comfortable in critique groups
and also asking established writers for guidance.
Do you believe that it is important to be trained as a
fiction writer in order to write fiction? Why?
It's my opinion that in general, Masters Degrees programs in
fiction don't give any advantage. Yes, you have a block of months or years to
write, and some guidance from a writer-teacher who might actually pat you on
the back and forward your work to an agent. That would be the very best case
scenario--because if there are 30 gifted writers in a program, how many will
the writer-teacher decide whom to help? And how many of his students over the
years did his agent accept....and actually find a publisher to publish the
manuscript? I think your chances are just as good if you go ahead and have a
job which gives you some experience to write about. Take two to three hours a
day or night at home to do the writing--every day. Network through
professional writing organizations, conventions and contests. My guess is you
might reach your goal faster than the person in the master's
program--especially if you are writing commercial fiction.
Why did you choose the mystery genre? What about it appeals
to you?
I started out writing mystery when I had been a few
years out of university, where I'd done a lot of serous literary reading. I
found mysteries exciting and fun, such a great break from the assigned reading
of the school years. Also, mystery novels had fantastic plots...and most of the
literary novels being praised in the late 80s and early 90s were not
storyteller's books. I may not be the most profound writer in the world, but
I'm a passionate storyteller. I'm not a very complex plotter--I think the
people who can do this were good at geometry, and I was abysmal. Another
challenge in mystery writing is that it's very hard for me to write
violence, especially male violence against women, or anything happening to
children. I hate guns. and I made a conscious decision my sleuth Rei Shimura,
who figures in my Japanese mystery novels, would never use one. These
boundaries I've created have kept me on what's called the "cozy" side
of the mystery spectrum, but it turns out there are plenty of people who like
their mysteries served with a cup of tea with lemon.
Why did you decide to write Historical Fiction?
When I was a child, I wished I lived in the past. I
read hundreds of historical novels set in the US and abroad, from Frances
Hodgson Burnett to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was always hunting for antique dolls
and vintage clothing--really an oddball in my school! I was on hiatus from
historical fiction from about the time I was 12 to 42--but when I began reading
it again, I found it very satisfying. I became specifically fascinated
with the Asian historical novels of Lisa See and Amy Tan. I wanted to write the
same kind of sweeping books about women and their families...but set in India,
against the background of colonialism. But I'm interested in writing historicals
in other places, too. There is no shortage of ideas for a writer if she turns
to a historical setting. If only I could write three books a year!
Was the switch to historical fiction an easy one? What were
some challenges?
The best part about writing a historical is you can fully
concentrate on setting and events that may already have happened, so you don't
even have to make them up. You don't need to craft a puzzle about someone's
death and worry about clever evidence and crime-solving procedure. But for me,
the toughest thing about writing a historical--especially one set in
India during the fight for Independence, World War II, famine and Partition--is
there were so many deaths. It's impossible to write a historical without having
some very sad sections. I had to create a character who's not real--but real
enough--to play a role in the historical events. If she's a woman, she's got to
be strong--but operating within boundaries of the time. People may have had sex
out of wedlock then, but all within the framework of values of that society.
I was reading a historical account of Bengal which mentioned
this old nickname, employed by the European would-be colonists for the women
who taught them languages, manners, and lived with them. it's an erotic,
mysterious and literary term. It also works well because the heroine's favorite
book is the Oxford English Dictionary.
The role of women in Indian Independence is not one that is
talked about very much. Why did you chose to address this?
So many high school and college age women were active in the
freedom movement, playing roles varying from fundraiser to political
protestor to mover-of-weapons and assassin. Many Indian women, endured jail
alongside their male counterparts. I think that this shared hard work during
the freedom period made it easier for women to reach such heights in Indian
government early after independence. Many South Asians know how bravely
India's women worked for freedom: that Gandhiji's wife Kasturba died in prison and
that many young women enlisted as soldiers for Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian
National Army. These stories aren't well-known outside of South Asia, though.
It worked very well from a storyteller's viewpoint to give my heroine Pom (now
calling herself Kamala) a way to find herself within the freedom fighting
movement.
Tell me about Pom your fascinating protagonist. How did she
come to be?
I had been casting about trying to write a novel about
Indian-Americans for years, but everything felt flat and cliched. I thought
about what really counted, and one thing was my love of Calcutta, my father's
hometown. I didn't grow up in Calcutta, but I traveled there in childhood and
young adulthood. To my sorrow, it seemed that the old buildings and
streets I admired were transforming into sterile modernity as the years passed.
In an effort to preserve what I loved, I set the novel toward the end of
the British period. I decided to bring in a character to who was
something of an outsider. Pom is Bengali, but she's from deep countryside and
grew up without servants, books, and the other things that most of the
Calcuttans she meet have. As she grows up and moves from working at a girls'
boarding school to finally the city, she learns a lot about the British and how
they work. But she's not part of the bhadralok: the Bengali
intellectual bourgeoise. She doesn't live under the thumb of her parents.. She
can be a single working woman, living in an Indian Civil Service officer's
house. Pom can get away with the almost the same kinds of capers as a modern
heroine.
What did you find most challenging about writing this book?
Writing about village life was initially quite stumping for
someone whose time in India was mostly urban. I traveled out to the
Midnapore district and stayed with distant relatives. The gawking reactions I
got, from local residents made me wonder how many years it had been since
someone from outside Bengal had passed through! Another challenging section was
writing about prostitution during the Raj years, because I wanted to avoid
creating anything exploitative...and I freeze when things get too graphic.
Hopefully I hit an OK medium. I'm not going to say happy medium, because I was
not feeling happy during this section of the story.
How and where did the research happen?
Through surprising circumstances, I moved from my East Coast
base to Minnesota for six years. This meant I was living close to my parents.
My father was born in 1936 and has many memories of wartime Bengal. He was my
consultant during the whole process of writing this book. I researched by
talking with him and asking him to translate Bengali books for me on occasion.
I studied Hindi at the University of Minnesota and took advantage of rare
old books in their magnificent Ames Library of South Asia. I also traveled to
Calcutta, walking through old neighborhoods and reading old newspapers at the
National Library of India's archive in the Esplanade. To get a look at the
British police/intelligence reports on Bengal during this time, I went to
London and researched at the British Library, which holds the old India Office
archive. The best part about going to the British Library was reading recently
declassified papers from a secret spy unit that operated within the Indian
Civil Service from the 20s through 40s, with a lot of energy spent on its
archenemy, Subhas Chandra Bose.
Is it fair to say that ethnic writers face some challenges
when writing for a mainstream American audience? What are they?
My novelist friend AX Ahmad jokes that if a South Asian
author writes a book, there must be a sari border on the cover. Our books may
literally be branded in this way--but at least we aren't isolated in our own
section of the bookstore, like African-American authors often are. The biggest
challenge, if you have an Indian name, may be that agents and editors expect
you are only qualified to write about that ancestral place. No matter whether
you were born outside of India, or have spent years away. This stereotyping
made me crazy when I was young and is probably what drove me to write a
ten-book series set in Japan before looking toward India.
What are some of your favorite books?
I greatly admire the writing of Khaled Hosseini, who
explores the recent history of Afghanistan through families who've shifted from
one world to another. You will cry but always feel better for reading one of
these books. As I mentioned earlier, Lisa See and Amy Tan both write
brilliantly about Chinese women, teaching me so much with each novel. South
Asian writers I especially enjoy are Asra Nomani (nonfiction) Amitav Ghosh,
Sadat Hassan Manto and Santha Rama Rao. Rao is virtually unknown but she was a
successful internationally known Indian author in the 1950s. Her novels skip
you straight into the lives of educated women of that era. Keeper of the
House is a crazy cross between Germaine Greer's famous book The
Feminine Mystique, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.
What books do you have on your bedside that you want to get
to soon?
Really? There's quite a lot. Rumer Godden's 1953 novel
about an English family in Kashmir, Kingfishers Catch Fire, as well
as her earlier novel The River, set in 1940s Bengal. Susana MacNeal's
historical thriller, Mr. Churchill's Secretary is another
read-in-progress. As far as the nonfiction: Insightful Parenting by
Dr. Steve Kahn and The Seven Secrets of Prolific Writers by Hillary
Rettig, an e-book designed to help writers produce. I picked up a few good tips
there! Also on my e-reader is Jhumpa Lahiri's latest novel, The Lowlands. My
desi bookclub -- five fun women from the diaspora now living in Baltimore -- chose
it as our current read. I'm hosting the meeting next month and trying to figure
out the perfect menu to go with this tale.
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