Glory of the Seas
A couple of years ago I moved into a retirement village and had to do some serious downsizing. My shell collection went from five shelves to two, not counting the…
The Ungrateful Stranger: Whose Story Deserves Welcome?
On a spring evening in 2016, the day after Donald Trump won a series of primaries cementing his candidacy, I stepped into a hushed auditorium in midtown Manhattan and found…
Writers With Day Jobs: Earning a Living Outside of Literature
In 2018, as a younger writer in a different phase of life, I was thrilled to interview prolific author William Vollmann. A digital magazine employed me at the time, but…
Dismantling the Mother Shelf: Expanding Our Thinking About Women’s Stories of Parenthood
When it comes to the Mother Shelf, it’s tempting to shrug our collective shoulders and say, Well, that’s just how book marketing works. But the uncomfortable truth is that publishers,…
How the Light Gets In: The Nightlight
In being a parent and being a writer, there is no routine, no one way of doing things that is right; some things that we must do to get the…
How the Light Gets In: The Moon
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve lost access to much of the community I’ve relied on as a writer. My husband has profound long COVID—I don’t want to risk…
How the Light Gets In: The Lighthouse
This group brought me back to a writing practice. It taught me something I learned when I first fell in love with writing but had forgotten over time, bit by…
Decolonize the Novel: Writing Against Western Strictures of Realism
In 2022 my debut novel, Border Less, was published in North America (7.13 Books) and South Asia (HarperCollins India), two spaces of diasporic life and aesthetic legacies that my fiction…
Love and Other Pandemics
The thing about the apocalypse is that nobody said it would be so beautiful.