Vandana
Singh (The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet)
Were there any particular writers or stories that influenced the
writing of the story that will be appearing in Trampoline?
If so, how exactly did they influence the writing of your story?
I read a beautiful short story by Walter Tevis in some ancient anthology
and loved it, although I have forgotten its name. But I also wanted
to pull its leg. Hence my story.
What's your favorite cocktail?
The juice of fresh mangoes.
Which of the seven deadly sins
is your favorite these days?
Gluttony, especially as applied to mangoes. Real mangoes, that is.
Not the ones you get in the Western Hemisphere.
What's your favorite rule of thumb?
Faraday's Right Hand Rule. (If your thumb points in the direction
of a current in a wire, the magnetic field lines due to the current
will wrap around the wire in the same sense as your fingers).
Do you have any pets? How many? And if so, how do they affect
your writing (if at all)?
I have a venerable 14-year-old Corgi dog who is a constant companion,
without whom I would not be able to write a word. He lies under the
table and sighs while I type. I discuss character development and
plot lines with him, and he gives me this extraordinarily wise, patient,
Buddha-like look in return.
What is the writer's role
in inhabiting the commercial spaces of publishing?
To subvert the dominant paradigm.
Who's been eating my porridge?
Certainly not me, since that is not my idea of breakfast.
Who cleft the Devil's foot?
I don't know, but you could ask Dubya and his cohorts since they
seem to be intimately acquainted with the aforementioned gentleman.
Does she or doesn't she?
You are assuming she is a binary system.
Where is the horse and the
rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the dyspeptic camel? Where is the green grass growing?
What immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The unskilled fingers, the blind eye of a god called Evolution, perhaps?
What has it got in its pocketses?
Several new stories. Interested?
What has it got in its 'pocalypse?
Ask Dubya.
How far is it to Babylon?
Not far aboard a B-52, I'm sure. Ask Dubya.
Can I get there by candlelight?
No.
"Where is last year's snow?"
All melted and gone, sir, melted into spring. Seek it in the bursting
bud, the lift of the songbird's wing.
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
At the level of the Quark, all is the same --- raven and writing
desk, airplane and dormouse. This is Quantum Transcendence.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Do so at your peril.
Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?
A Space-time warp would do the trick.
Can you call spirits from
the vasty deep? Will they come when you do call for them?
Do hallucinations count?
What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?
Pickled him in brine with a brace of onions and an extravagance of
ginger.
Best trampoline story you
know (or, in lieu of story, rules for best trampoline game you've
played).
Never saw a trampoline before I came to the US so I'm sorry I have
no trampoline stories for you. But I do have a story about a man and
a monkey.
What are your favorite kids' books? What was your favorite when
you were a kid (say, 10)?
Lurid Hindi pocketbooks of wild fantasy stories, books by the British
author Enid Blyton. When I was eleven I read my first SF book ---
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 --- and a whole universe dropped
at my feet.
What's the most favorable
sort of weather for your creative process?
Cloudy, cool wind, hint of monsoon in the air just after a terrible
summer. To get this I have to travel 8000 miles to India so I settle
for writing about the monsoons instead.
Tell me a little about when you left home to live on your own.
I took a giant step from my parents' house in New Delhi to the US
of A as a graduate student of physics. Although I had read Thoreau
and Longfellow, Frost and Twain, as well as mystery stories set in
America, although I remembered from middle school geography all kinds
of details about the Mississippi delta and the wheat fields of the
Midwest, not to mention big chunks of American history, nothing prepared
me for the experience of being here. Everything was different ---
grass, birds, light switches, driving side of the road, restaurant
servings. Everything was the same --- human nature, the need to eat,
the need to find friends. It was a difficult and exhilarating time.
When's the last time you changed your mind about something? I
think I mean a radical shift of personal values -- regarding art ("Suddenly,
I'm not crazy about Billie Holiday, in fact, I'm not even sure I'm
spelling her name right"), regarding anything ("Actually, you can
go home again").
Actually I can write in cafes.
What book or books do you
press upon friends?
This would be a very long list but in the interests of brevity I'll
confine myself to six totally random picks from that list.
From Western Literature:
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Canto General by Pablo Neruda
From Indian Literature:
Translations of anything by the great Hindi writer Premchand Eknath
Easwaran's translation of The Upanishads
A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri
What can we, as a group,
do to increase the popularity of multi-stage bicycle racing as a spectator
sport in America?
Haven't the faintest idea.
I once had a creative writing teacher tell me that he didn't understand
why authors used science fiction or magical realism to tell a story
or impart a theme. Why do you think we do, when good old realism might
do the trick?
Realism can't always do the trick, simply because Reality is often
too big for mere Realism to contain. That is why we need Imaginative
Literature.
Can you say something, particularly in light of these grave times,
about the writer's role or responsibility in the creation of work
that is purely literary, that is the work of the imagination, as opposed
to work that serves more overtly and diras a voice of conscience?
I
think there are two things: art and social responsibility, and often
they overlap. But art has got to exist for its own sake, else it isn't
art. A writer can write impassioned essays on current issues, but
when that writer creates art its got to be driven by nothing more
than the creative fire of the author. It is inevitable that the convictions
of the writer will find their way into the story, but they can only
be added on as ingredients --- what they end up becoming in the final
product is between the writer's unconscious and the Muse. And it is
often true that stories led by the imagination rather than ideology
are the ones that are the most passionate, the most revealing and
the most critical of the current state of things. Think about Yevgeny
Zamyatin's We, or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. When
the writer's imagination is free (even of her most precious beliefs
and convictions) that is when she is at her most dangerous, and her
most necessary.
Gertrude Stein said: "I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and
literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense, to get to the
very core of this problem of communication of intuition." The relationship
of form to content. Form as it facilitates communication, particularly
communication of the remote, of the mysterious. Form as it permits
the dramatization of states of mind. As it serves to make comprehensible
the incomprehensible. What are your views on this subject?
To put it briefly and save space: I'm with Gertrude on this. It is
even more challenging if you add on the complication of communicating
intuition across the barrier of culture/language/religion as well
as everything else.
O
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-- Rosalind Palermo Stevenson