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.