Sejal Shah’s debut collection of short stories, How To Make Your Mother Cry continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction. Jeremy Wang-Iverson and Justin Hargett asked Sejal a few questions about her work.

 The book is dedicated to the memory of five important people in your life – can you tell us a little bit about them and why you want to honor them with this book?

While working on How to Make Your Mother Cry, I mourned the passing of my uncle, Kirit N. Shah, a writer and poet who also loved to dance, and who died of COVID-19 on February 12, 2021. My uncle inspired me and always supported my interest in and love of writing. I am indebted to him for that. Exactly one year later, on February 12, 2022, my friend and former editor (she edited my first book, This Is One Way to Dance: Essays), Valerie Boyd died. As I wrote about in an essay for Literary Hub, she was the mentor I had been looking for. I interviewed Valerie for Creative Nonfiction magazine: reading this interview, “Tracing Literary Lineage,” is an excellent way to learn more about her life, work, and influences.

In one of the essays in This Is One Way to Dance, I noted, “To say their names–this is the way to keep the people you love alive.” Themes in my book include love and friendship, memory and memorials. James Wright Foley, my friend Jim, was a talented fiction writer and my graduate school classmate during the years of 1999-2002. His presence and friendship made any classroom or party better and an unsafe workshop situation more tolerable. I thought about Jim a lot while working on this book and included two of his workshop letters to me in the book itself. Jim died too soon, the first American hostage murdered by ISIS in Syria. Urvashi Vaid, the fourth person to whom I dedicated my book, was a civil rights and gay and lesbian rights activist whose life and work affected my generation and beyond. She also died at a relatively young age, in 2022. I met her many years ago and was inspired by her activism, outspokenness, and advocacy.

And finally, I was moved by the life story of Rana Zoe Mungin, a Black Afro-Latina writer and fellow alumna of Wellesley College and the MFA program at UMass Amherst. Zoe died at age thirty of COVID-19 in 2020 after having been turned away from hospitals and refused treatment twice. She is the youngest of all those to whom I dedicated my book. I was especially angered to learn that Zoe had also found our MFA program to be a toxic environment for writers of color–to know that it had continued to be this way well after my time there. Zoe was a talented fiction writer and I included her in my book, because I wanted, as with the other people to whom I dedicated the book–I wanted their names to be out there once more, for others to know their names, to say their names and to learn their stories. I hope that Zoe’s story continues to be known and that more of her words and fiction writing will eventually be published posthumously.

In your first book, the essay collection This Is One Way to Dance, your writing was described as having “a style that rejects the notion of fixed genres.” Now you have followed that up with short fiction that also defies traditional conventions. What is it that excites you about pushing the boundaries of story and genre?

I think walking alongside boundaries in liminal spaces is where I feel most comfortable. I wrote about this in This Is One Way to Dance–about boundaries and sparks: “At heart, I’m interested in self-definition and invention. I worry the boundaries and borders to see where sparks arise: they look like fireflies. We occupy space. I spin and twirl. I dwell and revel in the spaces between.” I think I’ve always been fascinated by sparks–by the edges of where one can go within a genre.

Genre lines don’t feel fixed to me and there’s something about seeing just how far one can go within a genre…I learned in Kazim Ali’s essay, “Genre-Queer,” the relationship between gender and genre–that they come from the same Latin root. In the last several years, there’s been more general unpacking of and understanding of gender as complex, nonbinary, queer, and gender as a performance. Georgia Wall, an artist friend who attended my New York City book launch, said to me after the reading that she understood my work in How to Make Your Mother Cry to be a kind of performance art. I hadn’t realized this until Georgia said it, but it immediately resonated.

Finally, I should say as someone who grew up between cultures, it feels natural and normal to me to be situated at borders and boundary lines, even when it comes to genre.

Many of the stories are incredibly evocative of a particular time and place, perhaps none more so than “The Half King,” the longest story in the collection. What was the process of revisiting these memories to turn them into fiction? What connection do you have now to these past selves?

I started writing “The Half King” at the end of the year I lived in Decorah, Iowa. I was getting ready to move back to New York City and found myself nostalgic for my time in Iowa, nostalgic for what it feels like when you finally have found your people in a place, but then are readying yourself to leave. So I began writing about leaving New York when I was about to move back there, but I was also simultaneously revisiting what it was like when I had moved out of New York the first time, two years before that. This was all during a time in my thirties when it seemed I was physically moving every year or two for a fellowship or a job.

It took me a long time to figure out the form of “The Half King,” because of all the moving back and forth in time within the story. More than revisiting memories, I found that I had to become a better and different writer to deal with the movement of time in the story. It took me about seven years to finish “The Half King.” I would work on it and work on it and then set it aside. But the characters kept haunting me, insisting I finish the story. There were some scenes, particularly the final scene, that I could tell were working and I just had to figure out how to write the story that would earn me or get me to that final scene.

The past is a kind of fiction, I think, and these past selves are fictional characters and distant islands. Here I was working with fictional characters and in particular, a protagonist who is reflecting back on her life. In “The Half King” she says, “I was thirty-nine then…trying to remember who I was from those other countries of twenty-two and thirty.”

Sometimes I find the past to be entirely bewildering. Perhaps that is what “The Half King”’s narrator and I share most completely.

The book opens with a suggested soundtrack—and in my mind’s eye, I can see the handwritten mixtape tracklist inside the clamshell of an old cassette tape. So how do Prince, Kate Bush, and Tracy Chapman figure into the fiction that follows?

 I love this phrase–”the clamshell of an old cassette tape!” I can see that, too. The soundtrack consists of songs I listened to a lot while writing the book and figuring out the order of stories, letters, photographs, and other ephemera. I think it’s not unusual that writers listen to music that relates to a particular project and I wanted to make some of those influences, usually invisible, visible in the text itself. I am as enamored of the process (or more really) as I am of the product of the finished book itself. Prince (“When Doves Cry”) and Kate Bush (“Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)”) are stalwarts of the music I listened to in the 1980s, when some of the earlier stories in How to Make Your Mother Cry are set. The Tracy Chapman song, “First Try,” is taken from her 2000 album, Telling Stories. She is such a phenomenal singer/songwriter. I listened to this album a lot when I was writing some of the stories as well. During the pandemic, I rediscovered my CD collection and began listening to albums again instead of just favorite tracks here and there.

The title track, “Telling Stories,” is one I also thought about including in the soundtrack, because of the lyrics, which are about storytelling, fiction, and memories. I’ll share a little with you here:

There is fiction in the space between

The lines on your page of memories

Write it down but it doesn’t mean

You’re not just telling stories

I can imagine those lines (if song lyrics were not so expensive!) as an epigraph for a past or future book.

 Can you talk about publishing and producing the book with West Virginia University Press, particularly your encounter and work with the ALT text that accompanied the images in the electronic version of the book?  Why was it important to get this part of the bookmaking process right?

I had an incredible experience working with West Virginia University Press. It felt collaborative in the best way. I had a lot of input on the cover, which was so important to me. Than Saffel, the press’s Interim Director and Art Director, asked if I would like to weigh in on ALT text for the images. First, it felt slightly overwhelming to me as a new task. There are twenty images in the book and I realized that, especially as these images don’t have captions, and because of the kind of book it is, the way the reader encounters the images is really important.

But as a writer with disabilities myself, I wanted the book to be as accessible as possible. After reading the proposed ALT text (some of which sounded as if it had been composed with the help of AI), I realized I needed to rewrite all but one of the image descriptions. I had a particular desire for the ALT text to describe the images in ways that gave the shape of what appeared without explaining the image or who is in the image (i.e. without giving information that a sighted reader would not have access to–I hoped to replicate the experience of seeing the image by describing the images in language that I think only I could do, as the writer of the book). Other information comes later in the book, in the “ephemera archive,” where there are notes and where images are credited, but the reader encounters the images without this information.

I’m grateful that Than offered me the opportunity to be so intimately involved with the ALT text. The original ALT text did not do the images justice and I would not have even known what the ALT text said or was going to say if the press didn’t include me in the process.

What books are you reading now?

 I recently read American Mother, a book written by Colum McCann with Diane Foley, about Diane’s son and my friend, the journalist Jim Foley (one of the people to whom How to Make Your Mother Cry is dedicated). It’s a very powerful book and essential reading for anyone who would like to learn more about Jim’s story, forgiveness, and about how the US deals with journalist safety and the return of American hostages.

Currently, I’m reading Alice Wong’s incredible anthology, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire. I’m honored to have an essay, “Letters I Never Sent,” in this collection. The anthology is absolutely groundbreaking and I can’t recommend it enough.

I also recently read Bushra Rehman’s stunning novel, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion. I also can’t recommend it enough.

Can you say what your next project will be?

 I have been working on a manuscript about mental health, mental illness, friendship, academia, and mentorship. I also have an idea for a YA book, but it’s very early in the process.