Diaspora Dialogues

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Rebecca Fisseha

Afterword: Pratap Reddy

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Even before Pratap Reddy migrated to Canada, he had dreams of becoming a writer. He had considered writing a comic novel about office life in India, but the only writing he did were a few newspaper articles (which were neither comical nor fictional). His real creative stimulus arrived in 2002, when the experience of transplantation to Canada became akin to getting a fresh set of eyes for Pratap. In reaction to completely new surroundings, experiences and challenges, he took up the pen and finally had a real go at creative fiction.

The coming-into-being of Pratap’s collection Weather Permitting can in itself qualify as a story of an immigrant trying to find his footing in Canada—an overarching theme in his work. The challenge of the new prompted Pratap to join writing groups, and later enroll in the Humber School for Writers. He began sending out his stories to magazines. Responses came in the form of rejections until Diaspora Dialogues picked up one of the stories in the collection—“Birthday Blues”—for TOK: Writing the New City, Book 4. A Mississauga Arts Council prize and a grant from Ontario Arts Council soon followed. Despite these initial triumphs, Pratap feels that the DD long-form mentorship program provided the crucial missing link: connecting writer to publisher.

A positive attitude and cultural familiarity with mentor-mentee relationships are the two things to which Pratap attributes the rewarding outcome of his work with mentor Cynthia Holz. Although his creative fiction is informed by the South Asian immigrant experience, Pratap wants as wide a readership as possible across cultures, so Cynthia’s eyes were a good gauge for that. As well, Cynthia’s big picture sensibility and sense of stories as traditionally narrated—rich in description and detail—was a perfect fit for Pratap. She allowed the stories to breathe, let them take up their space rather than constricting them into a style of overly economical writing that often acts as a puzzle for the reader to follow.

They developed a working pattern of Pratap sending Cynthia a couple of stories, receiving her feedback and, while rewriting those, sending her the next couple of stories to edit. One of the features of the long-form mentorship program is that mentors commit to reading no more than a pre-specified amount of words, Pratap kept in mind that a second reading of the same story would count towards the total. He and Cynthia concentrated on finessing his older stories from 2003/2004. His more recent stories, written after his training in creative fiction writing, were already in pretty good shape and not in need of as much attention.

Pratap likens the mentorship to the Indian tradition of the guru-shishya relationship, where the pupil seeks wisdom from the guru, the teacher. Having this common reference point made it easy for him to accept feedback from Cynthia. Certainly, one does not have to take a guru’s interpretation as final, he says, but thinking that one already knows how to do something perfectly does not preclude the possibility that one has been doing it perfectly wrong all along. Therefore, as much as writing is a subjective exercise, Pratap strongly advises to keep an open mind when receiving suggestions from mentors. Not only do mentors come with a lot of experience, but their reaction will be similar to that of publishers and future readers. Writing is a personal and solitary vocation; a mentor can point out what works and what doesn’t, and make suggestions to enhance the readability of a story.

At the end of his mentorship period, Pratap put rewrites of Weather Permittingon hold until he had received further feedback from DD’s own reader, DD president Helen Walsh, and the editor of Guernica Editions. Prior to submittingWeather Permitting to the DD mentorship program, Pratap had been sending it to publishers every three or four months, including—at a friend’s suggestion—to Guernica Editions. When Weather Permitting was accepted to the DD mentorship program, Pratap informed Guernica, and also told them that he would send them the edited manuscript when he finished the program. True to his premonition, the post-mentorship manuscript of Weather Permitting was picked up by Guernica Editions. Pratap has since signed a publishing contract with a projected publication date of 2016.

Next, Pratap plans to complete a novel, once again about the marginal life of a new immigrant, which is already in progress at 50K words. He also intends to write fiction set in New India, with all its glitz and glamour blinding one’s view of the dire circumstances millions live in. Pratap is often encouraged to expand some of his stories from Weather Permitting into a novel, but he is more interested in trying out new ideas rather than retreading the same ground.

As a writer whose work at times turns an unflattering eye on his community, Pratap understands that he might ruffle some feathers but he strongly believes that the background against which the stories are set must ring true. He maintains that the characters, however, are his own creation. A writer need not be a pamphleteer, forever in praise of his children themes, he says. Neither does one story represent all Indians. In fact, Pratap does not see new immigrants as the target audience for his stories. Rather, he thinks of the ideal readers as those who are interested in learning about others, who want to venture out of their circumscribed life and enter into unfamiliar worlds. He also believes that Indians in India will benefit from knowing what is happening in the lives of their fellows abroad.

The titular story of Weather Permitting deals with going home of a different kind. Regardless of origin country, most immigrants share the risk of losing face if they return home permanently, the implication being that they failed to “make it” in the adopted country. It is a decision that is never taken lightly, one that most will avoid unless on pain of death no matter how deep the disappointment of the new life. Similar to the main character Ravi, Pratap had to deal with many unsavory landlords, though fortunately never to the point of making him want to turn back. Another story, “For a Place in the Sun,” deals with the polar opposite: those who never go back. One sad occurrence amongst migrant families is that a husband, once arrived in the West, effectively abandons his wife. He severs all contact, often replacing her with a white woman. Such casualties are so common that when Pratap, in his early days as an immigrant, misplaced his cell phone and was out of communication with his family for almost a week, his wife joked that she had feared abandonment. Happily, that miscommunication was cleared up and Pratap’s son and wife joined him in Canada a year later.

Pratap’s penchant for the unexpected, twist endings may come from his early love of British detective novels. If you are what you eat, says Pratap, then maybe you are what you read as well. However, even that is a concession, his true preference being for open-ended conclusions.

In the world of diaspora literature, the work he admires most is The Nowhere Man by Kamala Markandaya. Written in the 70s, it resonates even today when immigration has become commonplace and there’s the comfort of having thousands of compatriots around you. For a window into contemporary South Asian diaspora life, Pratap recommends The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Storywallah, an anthology edited by Shyam Selvadurai.

Until Weather Permitting hits the bookstores, that is.

Afterword: Sanjay Talreja

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Ordinary people are subjects of fascination for Sanjay—how they make things happen, how things happen to them, how they manage with the reverberations of the world around them. In his stories, he traces the impact of sweeping events on everyday lives. His work looks at ordinary people in their everyday world—coping with a world not of their own making, sometimes as heroes, sometimes as victims but mostly doing almost mundane things that matter to their own lives, but always within contexts, circumstances and history.

Sanjay believes that the effects of history linger on, connecting everyone in small ways. This is also behind his passion for creating documentaries. Gifted with an ability to observe without interfering, Sanjay has interviewed and spent time with people from myriad walks of life. Sanjay quotes Studs Terkel in Working, saying people are open and willing to share details of their lives if they are approached with compassion. They want to tell their stories, and Sanjay is happy to facilitate. His fiction work in turn allows him to creatively interpret what he knows of taxi drivers, cooks, store clerks, business owners and bureaucrats.

The story behind the title of the collection—Homecoming—follows Mr. Dalal, an older Indian man who returns to India, where he had spent a majority of his life, after having lived a second life with his adult children in the US. As such, he is doubly bewildered—by life in America and New India. This sense of bewilderment, the almost childlike and solitary emotional space of being at the mercy of both randomness and causality where no explanation quite suffices, influences the stories Sanjay chooses to tell.

Sanjay had had no intention of applying to the DD long-form mentorship program. At the urging of his wife, he pulled out his story Homecoming, drafts of stories and ideas, and “cobbled together” a collection. When he was selected and therefore bound to completing the stories, he quickly explained to his mentor Moez Surani that many of his stories were in an early phase.

Having previously worked with mentors, Sanjay knew that it can at times be a token process, without real commitment from either side. At DD, however, there was serious commitment from all sides. The considerable age difference between himself and Moez had given Sanjay pause, but his apprehension was dispelled when the two met and hit it off. The real cause for alarm turned out to be Sanjay’s already full schedule. A freelance filmmaker, he was already deep into a feature film and a documentary and was also working on a dramatic feature length script. Time management became key; Sanjay “ping-ponged” between stories and, mediums, thanks to his flexible schedule and steady support from his wife’s full-time job, delivered story drafts on the dates that he and Moez had set. For current and future mentees, Sanjay advises sticking to your deadlines, no matter what. In addition, he recommends having a professional but open, respectful relationship with your mentor.

Since handing in the final drafts of the stories in Homecoming, Sanjay has met with DD president Helen Walsh to discuss the possibility of approaching to publishers. With the exception of a couple of the pieces, they both feel that, while each story is aesthetically unique, it is a cohesive collection. Once those have been revised, the manuscript will be ready to send out. Not that Sanjay is in any hurry to do so. Starting out, his only intent had been to see if he had the ability to do something other than filmmaking. Coming from a screenwriting background, Sanjay has found writing short stories to be far more pleasurable, not only for the creative control but also because the writer can delve into the interior space of a character.

As for readership, Sanjay has no specific one in mind, though he will say that he’s not interested in accommodating the reader by explaining every unfamiliar cultural reference –better to allow for multiple levels of enjoyment.

The last third of Homecoming was the most challenging for Sanjay to write, as he had to tread a fine line between wholly factual versus impressionistic descriptions of the Bombay riots, a turning point in the lives of all involved near and far, including Mr. Dalal and Sanjay himself.

Sanjay has set himself a writing challenge: as much as he wants to demonstrate that non-Western peoples have their ordinary lives too –“Getaway” is a simple tale of a guy who just wants to have a day by himself, “The Kick” was inspired by the story of a dentist rumored to be a lecherous creep—he also feels called to locate these lives within very particular circumstances. Often, this involves setting the record straight about the so-called “timeless” peoples of the East, who are often portrayed as fixed, outside history prior to their contact with the West. He cites Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa and Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History as insightful commentaries on this phenomenon. Sanjay feels that he will always be struggling to correct such a-historical attitudes, showing how events that happen in the distant past have an impact on the present, which in turn will have an impact on the distant future of all.

The opposite happens as well, says Sanjay; Indians who migrate, knowingly or not, cling to a fixed notion of India and Indian-ness, even while the country is changing very rapidly. Part of it is a survival tactic, common to all diasporas. Sanjay suggests that since Indians look different, they have no chance of disappearing into whiteness. Since becoming fully American or Canadian is not a real option, some become more Indian/Chinese/Jewish, taking comfort in the sense of superiority it affords.

In the case of India, as has been Sanjay’s own experience, there then comes the shock of going back home to discover that locals who were once eager to migrate now berate him for having done so—such is the abundance of opportunity. But the system has also changed beyond his or any returnees’ ability to fully decipher. What he can do, going forward with his screenplays and short stories, is remain true to his own sensibilities and values –Indian and Canadian—in his re-presentations of people in history.

Afterword: Becky Blake

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On the first of what would become her multiple trips to Barcelona, Becky Blake opted to live in the El Raval neighbourhood. She had heard that it was a rough, notorious area in the way of new-immigrant neighbourhoods, but figured it couldn’t be any different than similar neighbourhoods in Toronto where she’d previously lived. In a way, that turned out to be true. While she witnessed more crime, anger, danger and disease than she ever had, bad things refused to happen to her, even though she once sported a decoy purse hoping to attract a thief who she could then interview for research.

Over the next several years, the eight-page story that grew out of Becky’s initial trip to Barcelona would expand to become the novel Yours to Keep. She began the work of expanding the story during her time at the University of Guelph MFA Creative Writing program. With the guidance of mentor Pasha Malla, Becky worked on completing the first draft of the book, and with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer she wrote several additional drafts to fulfill the MFA thesis requirement. That accomplished, Becky still felt that the manuscript had more problems than she could identify working on it alone. In search of a new perspective, she submitted the fourth draft of Yours to Keep to the DD mentorship program, which is uniquely focused on a writer completing a full-length work. This was ideal for Becky, since that was exactly her aim.

Mentor Shyam Selvadurai, who believed that Yours to Keep was close to being finished, had set the goal that the draft that Becky ended the mentorship program would hopefully be her last. After all, she didn’t want to be writing the book forever! With that in mind, he asked her to clarify the remaining problems and how she would fix them. As per Shyam’s request, she wrote him a letter explaining the project’s history. Then, Shyam read the manuscript. After he sent Becky detailed comments, they had a Skype conversation during which he asked her some tough questions, among them, what makes her book different from others similar and what she is saying on a mythological level. Then, before beginning her edits, she had to write him a second letter about her intentions, especially regarding the structural problems in the story. A few more correspondences and an in-person meeting followed. As Becky says, it really helped that “Shyam was able to frame the novel for me in a way that I hadn’t thought about before: as a picaresque story with almost Dickensian characters, a classic Hero’s journey with a couple of twists.”

Since everyone’s writing process is different, Becky recommends talking to your mentor about what your needs and goals are before starting work to take maximum advantage of the flexible nature of the DD mentorship program. As a more established writer, a mentor can not only give you constructive feedback, but also the confidence to finish your project.

Throughout her work on Yours to Keep, Becky has focused on revealing more of the thoughts and memories of the protagonist Nicole, and complicating the nature of her relationships with other characters, a lot of whom come from backgrounds and lead lives that are vastly different from Nicole’s privileged status as a white Canadian with a passport, free to travel and stay in places without harassment. In part, Yours to Keep deals with the feeling of discomfort between using privilege and rejecting it, wanting things to be easy versus fitting in and living the life of a local. Nicole’s dilemma is also one of wholeness. Like the half-built or half-demolished structures that surround her in the story, Nicole inhabits an empty, vertigo-inducing internal space that is neither past nor future. In Becky’s chosen spare writing style punctuated by sharp imagery, Yours to Keepcharts Nicole’s movement towards living in the present moment and feeling whole again.

That’s not to say there’s an abundance of soft in Yours to Keep. Quite the opposite; Becky’s research—a year-and-a-half’s worth spread over a three-year period—included trips to a rehabilitation center for Barcelona’s retired thieves and prostitutes, and a squat on the site of a former leper colony where she labored for half a day in exchange for a tour. She also spent a whole night conversing with a street beer-seller about illegal Spanish visas. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to speak with a working thief until she was many drafts in, so she used his input for some backwards fact-checking instead. A lot of what she gathered from her research has gone towards details that give the mostly fictional characters inYours to Keep, and their environments, a quality of realness.

Tattoos and other markings, permanent and semi, feature strongly in Yours to Keep. Not being one for tattoos herself, Becky considers Yours to Keep as her mark on Barcelona, her favorite city and one to which she will always return for its natural and architectural beauty. A dream launch for Becky would be held in a cocktail bar-cum-library in her former Barcelona neighborhood, with her Spanish and Catalan friends and informers present to see the finished book. They would sit and chat for hours, staying up late, in that lifestyle which Becky says brings out the best version of her.

Currently, she is spending about four hours daily incorporating Shyam’s final comments and adding her own tweaks to the fifth draft of Yours to Keep, paying attention to the slightly neglected last two thirds of the book. She’s also considering changing the current title and the three section headers that each references a stage of grief from the Kubler-Ross model. Her recent success at winning the CBC Short Story Prize has garnered agent interest in her work and she plans to send the manuscript out by the end of the summer. It is Becky’s hope that readers, male and female, will be as interested as she, to read “an adventure story with a female protagonist who really got her hands dirty” by way of choosing to live on the streets of Barcelona, trying out pickpocketing, freeganism, and breaking into her former apartment through a window (one of the most challenging passages to write for Becky), to name a few.

The journey of writing Yours to Keep has been exhausting but rewarding, requiring as much patience as Becky once drew on during an elephant wrangling course in Thailand—an experience which she says is not too far removed from writing. There will probably be more of this as she tackles the many unfinished pieces she has in her virtual drawer, many of them non-fiction—a genre that she is still figuring out.

One round-the-world trip and repeat stays in Barcelona and Buenos Aires later, Toronto remains the only city where Becky has been robbed; dramatically so: on Roncesvalles Avenue by three men in balaclavas. But it still remains home, so as much as the new continues to inspire her and living abroad continues to provide jolts of inspiration, Becky will always be writing in some way about the place she knows best: Canada.

Afterword: Adam Elliot Segal

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Despite all the love he has for Montreal and its romantic vibe, Vancouver-raised Adam Elliot Segal has decided to be in Toronto, in the heart of Canada’s book and magazine world, for the long term. Writerly seclusion in a cabin in the woods is not out of the question but, for now, Adam enjoys being a part of a support system of artists from different disciplines, and the inspiration and fresh ideas that often come out of such a community. Having grown up in the pre-internet, pre-celebrity obsessed age, Adam has a relaxed, realistic attitude to his chosen career. His commitment to staying the course rather than rushing toward results is reflected in his writing process as well. The idea for Tether, a rumination on loss in Adam’s preferred style of poetic prose, came to him in the form of a name he instantly loved—that of the future protagonist of the story. This is often how his stories come to him: as characters first. Theme comes later, almost of its own accord, which he tweaks as necessary. He allowed the character that ensued from this name—Sagey Cooper—as well as the other characters in the story, to sit in his consciousness for a long time before beginning to write. As he says, you have to live with and like your characters to be able to write about them. Adam likens the process to magazine writing, where one spends months gathering information but not writing, then churns out several thousand words in a matter of hours.

The immediacy of non-fiction magazine writing, in terms of the different personalities and locations it puts one in contact with and the turnaround time, are for Adam a nice balance to the drawn-out and internal process of fiction writing. In 2007, a magazine job called Adam to Montreal. There, he began to write Tether. Full time work as a magazine editor meant that by the time he sat down for a couple of hours with his story, he had already put in eight hours at the office. Luckily, friends were not a distraction yet and Adam was able to complete a first draft by late fall/early winter 2008. This profile picture, snapped in a Montreal bar around the corner from Adam’s place by an employee who was also a photographer, actually shows Adam in that very act, nursing what looks to be a Moosehead and writing longhand, his method of choice.

After completing the first draft, Adam withdrew from Tether until the summer of 2009. When he began rewriting, he was armed with research and more knowledge about his characters. Diaspora Dialogues was an organization Adam had always remained aware of, so when the submissions call went out for the long-form mentorship program, Adam saw it as a perfect bridge to publishing for his second draft manuscript and submitted his work for consideration. He went into the program with one concern above all others: that his mentor, whomever he or she may turn out to be, connects with and understands the tone of Tether. Without that basic connection, Adam feared that the mentorship would be problematic. Luckily, his mentor Shyam Selvadurai understood the tone and, after the initial introduction in late August 2012, they were off to a productive six months.

At the end of September 2012, Adam sent Shyam his manuscript, feeling that it was ready for a complete read. The following month, he received Shyam’s notes and the two met to discuss next steps over lunch. It was agreed that Adam would aim to make the structure of the story more linear, start a timeline to keep the plot moving forward rather than jumping around, and focus his rewrites on the first third of the book. The latter, especially, was in order for Adam to not get bogged down trying to do too much within a limited time. In January 2013, Adam sent Shyam the first 50 re-written pages. In them, he had done a lot of story restructuring, collapsing/condensing of certain characters and timelines. Shyam then provided Adam final notes related to the rewrite, before Adam sent his final draft to DD in February 2013.

Adam describes Shyam’s mentoring style as a perfect, experienced, blend of teacher/writer and comrade-in-arms. There was never a time when Adam felt like they were on different pages. At the outset, Adam had created his own personal rule: acknowledging that there is a valid reason behind every writing note given, he would accept 75% of whatever notes his mentor gave him but allow himself the liberty to leave 25% of suggested changes as-is. For future and current mentees, Adam advises the same: being confident in your own voice while staying open-minded, listening and taking into consideration every note that your mentor gives you about your work. Criticism may be hard to take, but it’s worth digesting before coming to any decisions about rewrites. Don’t get in the way of your own writing and always remember, they’ve got your back!

In late spring 2013, Adam sent Tether to select publishers, as well as an agent who had liked Adam’s pitch and read a sample. In his post mentorship meeting with DD president Helen Walsh, they agreed that smaller independent publishing houses were the perfect place for Tether, a contemporary story of specific scope that would most appeal to the young urban demographic in the 25-40 age range. Timing-wise, it was ideal to get the ball rolling just ahead of when editors and publishers do their summer reading. Adam expects to hear back at the end of the summer or early fall.

For a lot of people, as for the characters in Tether, the city is a place of escape. The anonymity it offers can be as liberating, an opportunity for rebirth, as it can be alienating. This is not too far from how Adam himself felt upon first moving to Toronto from Vancouver. Being able to slip in almost incognito after spending the first part of his life in Vancouver offered him a new kind of freedom.

Although most of his travels have been within Canada, the idea of greater migration is not foreign to Adam, central as it is to Jewish history and identity in North America. In Tether, he ponders the question of how one reacts to a place if one does not really belong anywhere, through characters that have a complicated relationship with Montreal, a place they once loved, left and returned to with heavy hearts. Adam based most of his research on Montreal for Tether on books such as City Unique by William Weintraub, Montreal Confidential by Al Palmer and books that evoked the time of the Holocaust, such as Sala’s Gift. He also had some informal interviews with people who grew up or lived in Montreal in the early to mid 1990s.

Previous writers of the Jewish Diaspora who migrated to North America either viewed the new country as a blessing or hated being away from everything they once knew, and Adam continues this tradition of trying to reconcile notions of race, religion, emotion and dualities of identity, but with the added twist of coming at these issues with a personal belief that despite differences, people are basically the same.

Calling Space Cadets

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Intergalactic Travel, Blackhole Brew, Explorers, Dark Matter, Inner Space, Portal, Orbit, Outer Space. What do these words make you think of? Chances are, if you’ve had a close encounter of the literary kind with Story Planet while zooming around the “greater galactic area” known as Toronto, you know that they are buzzwords connected to this non-profit organization which “inspires young people to be creative and effective communicators.” Using the launch pad of visual arts, Story Planet’s programs—in-house and classroom workshops ranging in length from two hours to an entire year and targeted towards children ages 6 to 18—introduce youth to the idea that writing can be fun. Since most, though certainly not all, youth who participate struggle with writing, the resulting transformations can be profound.

Since founding in 2009, the collective efforts of Story Planet’s full-time staff of four women and 100 artists, writers and volunteers combined have generated workshops that have reached 1,500 children from Scarborough to Etobicoke and been featured in a National Post special. “Alien Chieftess” Liz Haines, a former children’s television producer, was inspired to start the organization after learning about 826 National, a network of writing and tutoring centers for youth across the United States founded by writer Dave Eggers.

Story Planet’s most basic workshop is Alpha, two hours of collective story creation for students in grades two to six; After School provides homework help, reading and writing support and creative workshops with a guest writer or artist for kids in grades one to eight; Evening Workshops offer youth help in producing written materials essential for transitioning from high school to post-secondary, in addition to creative workshops in spoken word and manga comic creation, to name a few; Beta pairs teachers with an artist to create a project around a theme that complements the school curriculum; and Zeta, their longest workshop series, guides youth through the creation of a complete story using different mediums. The final product is then presented in an exhibit, book launch or performance in a community.

From January 28 until March 24, Story Planet will be running the program Art Portfolio Workshop with artist Callen Schaub, who will lead workshops to help students who have a passion for art but have lacked exposure to art classes develop their portfolios which they can use to apply for admission into an arts high school. As well, on January 31st was the launch of an after-school program that focuses on creative writing for kids in grades six through eight.

So the next time you find yourself navigating west of Dufferin on Bloor, park your “space vehicle” and step into the portal known as Intergalactic Travel Authority, the alien-themed café and gift shop whose proceeds are partly responsible for keeping Story Planet in Orbit. Who knows, whilst sipping on your Blackhole Brew you might chance upon the Inner Space, the workshop and office zone where Explorers concoct fuel for the artistic and literary imaginations of Toronto youth.

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