Dr Asha Sen and her mother.
Krisany Blount
When you tell people you’re a writer, one of the first questions you get asked is “What do you write?” Fiction? Poetry? Scholarly work? Blog posts? If you write within multiple styles but don’t have time to explain in depth, you might just pick one. Inevitably, the genre you claim will be a lens through which people view you. If you’re a creative writer, you will be seen very differently than a scholarly writer. This divide is caused by a perceived skill distinction based on genre. Though each form of writing has certain techniques that are unique to each genre, there are also plenty of similarities that defy containment to a single form. Each piece of writing has a point to make, a purpose. There is significant overlap in the ideas being tackled and discussed. There is so much craft involved. And they all have a writer who, at least once, stares at a single word, dissatisfied, wondering what would be better.
“The divide between creative and academic writers can often serve as a barrier, preventing people from experimenting and branching out. Feeling as though you don’t have the skills to write in a different form can be intimidating, until you realize two things. First, we’re all writers. Second, the goal of all writers is the same: to say what we came here to say.”
The divide between creative and academic writers can often serve as a barrier, preventing people from experimenting and branching out. Feeling as though you don’t have the skills to write in a different form can be intimidating, until you realize two things. First, we’re all writers. Second, the goal of all writers is the same: to say what we came here to say. After that, it’s really only a matter of practice before anyone can successfully cross the divide.
Prior to last summer, UWEC English professor Dr. Asha Sen had primarily been an academic writer, publishing articles and even a book, titled Postcolonial Yearning: Reshaping Spiritual and Secular Discourses in Contemporary Literature (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2013). But in August, she published her first creative work in Volume One. The piece, “Dearest Ma,” is a series of letters written by an immigrant daughter for her mother back home. Somewhat based on her own experiences as an immigrant, the piece offers a glimpse into life as an immigrant and the myriad, complex emotions that come along with that experience.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with her about what it’s like to be an academic entering the realm of creative writing, the challenges associated with that shift, the connective power of writing, and the role of current events in writing.
Krisany Blount: “Dearest Ma” is described as “letters from an immigrant daughter to her mother back home” on Volume One. Why did you choose a series of letters as the form for this story?
Asha Sen: There’s this couple, Joyce and David Anderson, who work with JONAH, and they work a lot with immigrants, particularly Mexican immigrants in town, and they had thought to come up with this idea of doing readers theatre, where one could tell their stories. They were looking for writers who might help tell the stories of some of these immigrants, so that sort of got me thinking about my own immigrant story and so I sat down and I started writing. A lot of this is based on my own life; so part of it is when I came out as a student, my mother used to write to me three times a week and I really looked forward to those letters, so in a way this felt like a natural trajectory. And then I started thinking it would be interesting to have a stage with maybe six different women reading all their letters to their mothers.
“And I guess I’m at an age where my mother’s no longer with me and I think as a woman, sometimes we have that kind of need to say, “This is my life and this is what I’ve made of my life.” ”
And I guess I’m at an age where my mother’s no longer with me and I think as a woman, sometimes we have that kind of need to say, “This is my life and this is what I’ve made of my life.” And I was thinking it would be really interesting to have six professional women immigrants of color talking about their stories, talking to their mothers, because they’ve come across, they no longer live there, their mothers are in a different country, and they had to leave home. So that was what I was thinking about. And when I came to the States, we didn’t have social media, phone calls were really, really expensive, and letters were really the only way to communicate, so those letters were really important. I mean, we didn’t have anything other than that. And I thought this also connected back to the idea of immigrants in the U.S. and letters, which was all that they had, so it felt like there was a continuum and a way of connecting to our country’s immigrant past.
Asha Sen
KB: There was a lot that seemed very personal and like it came out of someone’s actual life that I was thinking about when I read it, so I definitely see where that’s coming from. And that contributes to the level of emotion, too. Each letter is relatively short, but there is so much emotion packed into each one. The large expanse of time covered also contributes to how powerful the piece is. How did you decide on the order for the letters? Was it a natural progression through time, or based more on the emotional trajectory, or something else entirely?
AS: It’s nice to know that you could tell that this was someone’s personal story, that that came through. There’s a kind of politics of vulnerability, of exposing yourself, and I think it’s difficult, because people know me, and they know me in a certain context. But because until my mother’s accident, she really was writing me these letters, it was like a natural progression, thinking in terms of mapping out my own life with her: through a job interview, moving to Eau Claire, the letters here until her accident. So it was a natural progression through time and I think I was also thinking of letters as a useful way to map a whole life, in little snippets of a whole life that basically told a story, because I felt like little bits of letters could cover a large span of time. I think it’d be fun to play with the trajectory, in a different context, in a different time, and to think of it in a more crafted way. This felt more – I don’t know, natural, I guess. But to think of it, to step back now and play with it again. . .
The other thing was the Nilesh and Aisha characters were fictional, but, though it was my story, I also wanted it to resonate with other immigrant stories, and that was why I brought them in. Nilesh was sort of loosely modeled on my husband, who was Ecuadorian-American but who passed away from cancer. When we decided to get married, I had already started the immigration process and we were thinking, “Would it be easier if we just got married?” but the university was already sponsoring me, so there was a little bit of biographical stuff there. But with Aisha, this daughter. . . Especially now, I’ve been thinking about what would it mean to have a child, to have a daughter, like that continuum from mother to daughter to daughter, that passing through in terms of ancestry. And really because what would it mean to have a child at this time and to be consciously a child of color, a partner of color. My husband was, like I said, a brown man, and it’s such an unsafe climate, so I’ve really been thinking about what it would mean to bring a child into this world, which feels very different than the world in the eighties, when I came here. But I also think I wanted to bring her in as a symbol of hope. I didn’t want to end with my mother dying, I wanted to feel there’s a future, and I wanted to try to talk about what it’s like, so it felt like the letters to Ma then became, even after she passed, a convenient way of talking about the climate and how difficult it is. So I guess I used that as a sneaky technical device also.
KB: Every piece of writing presents a different challenge. Was there one thing in particular that you found harder to work with?
AS: In terms of my own life, just on a realistic level, you have to have an employer who will sponsor your green card and employers are often not willing to do that because it’s so much paperwork, so much bureaucracy, it’s so difficult, it’s time consuming, it’s also expensive, but unless you have a spouse who is an American citizen and can sponsor you, your option is you have to leave the country. There’s no other way. You’ve finished being a student, you cannot stay on. You have to find an employer in a little bit of time. It’s becoming worse and harder and harder.
“For me, trying to find the job and the employer and then the green card took so long to come, and I think in terms of pain, that was the painful part of it, because you get tenure six years after being here, and I actually got tenure before I got my green card and I couldn’t leave the country.”
For me, trying to find the job and the employer and then the green card took so long to come, and I think in terms of pain, that was the painful part of it, because you get tenure six years after being here, and I actually got tenure before I got my green card and I couldn’t leave the country. So in my case, I was fortunate my parents did manage a couple of visits, but I couldn’t go back to India for over six years and that was very hard. Not being able to see family, not being able to see friends was hard.
So that was on the real life level, but I think the challenge then for me was, until my mother passed, it was very much my own life, so then thinking of creatively, how did I want to end it, and then bringing in the fictionalizing. It’s interesting – I’ve gotten flak from friends who’ve said, “Why? What is this about?” It’s a fictional piece! You know? And I guess creating that did bring back memories of my partner in real life, who did pass from cancer, and there was a sadness that I obviously didn’t want to bring into this narrative, because that’s a different narrative of itself. So writing the end without making it too didactic, trying to make it make a point, but also trying to open up my experience to other people’s experiences – certainly the racism was very true to what I’ve experienced and my real-life partner experienced – trying to move from that personal to slightly more general, slightly more political, but keeping the personal, was challenging. That required work. I didn’t want to lose the audience after my mother died, I wanted to keep that somehow going.
KB: As someone who has done more academic writing than creative writing, could you comment on the differences in your writing process between the two styles?
AS: In my writing, in my teaching, I always write and do scholarship about issues that are personal to me, like immigration, like racism, like colonialism, like cultural identity, all these things, so I’ve never really been able to have that personal or political scholarship divide. My scholarship in many ways feels deeply personal because I’m writing about stuff that means a lot and has affected my life. In some ways it’s a way of my thinking through my own life, but it’s certainly still scholarship, right? It’s detached, it’s almost like there’s a veil, and I’m writing as an academic, so I’m not vulnerable or exposed in the way in which I felt like with this piece I was. And at some point I’d love to, when I have the time, take a class or two to start to try to write more creatively. We have such amazing writers here. So far the creative writing I’ve been doing has been very personal to my own life experiences, but at some point I think I’m going to move beyond that and write about other things. But writing a piece like this, it felt like I was coming out from behind the veil, like I couldn’t be detached in the same way that I could in an academic tone. So it was risky. It felt like I was exposing myself. I don’t know enough about this, but people have been talking about a politics of vulnerability, so I’m trying to think about that in terms of scholarship. I need to learn more about that. Living in Eau Claire, which is fairly small and I feel like I have a professional identity, and suddenly people are finding out about my personal identity, so that makes me feel a little vulnerable.
“But I was thinking about how could I use vulnerability to make my points”
But I was thinking about how could I use vulnerability to make my points. I’ve been influenced by writers I teach and that helped. But I think one of the big differences has been when I was in grad school, I had an amazing professor called Ann Astell, who told me, about academic writing, “You should write like you teach.” That was really interesting and guiding and a good way of thinking about it. So if I’m writing like I’m teaching, I’m trying to explain and I’m trying to repeat a point over again and again in a different way. Writing like I teach is almost over-determined, in a way, and I guess in creative writing it’s almost underdetermined. One’s working with the nuance, with what was unsaid, rather than what was said. So I did have an agenda and I was just so happy that Volume One picked this up. Really, it meant a lot to me. Eau Claire is the place I’ve lived in the longest all my life.
But I was also writing for an audience. There’s so much anti-immigration rhetoric, that I kind of wanted to educate people about what it’s like to be an immigrant of color and I feel like stories like mine don’t really get told very much. And yet I was very touched by the way in which a lot of people responded. A lot of friends or people who I knew, other immigrants like myself, said, “This is my story.” They so identified with it and made me realize even more so how this wasn’t just my story, this was a story that needed to be told. Variations of this story keep needing to be told so people understand. So I guess I was using pathos a little in my vulnerability and my nuance to try to also educate people about a bigger point, about what it’s like to be an immigrant.
KB: I think there’s an artificial divide between academic and creative writing, when they use all the same skills and like you’re saying, you’re talking about the same things and using a lot of the same techniques to get your point across. It’s just that difference between, in academic writing, you’re doing the explicitly what is said, and with creative writing it’s a lot more of what’s unsaid. That’s a really interesting way of putting it.
AS: I’m glad that you think of it also as being an artificial divide. That makes a lot of sense. Because when we read Fanon for instance, in class, I think he’s a good example of someone who’s doing both in his writing. It’s very interesting. “Write like you teach” is very embedded in my head. . . A lot of the struggle in academic writing is still finding the right word. The craft is so important and I don’t think people realize that, always. Craft is really, really important – how you say what you’re saying.
KB: The events of the last six months have been a source of inspiration and a call to action for many other creatives. How would you say these events have influenced your writing?
AS: I do think so. It’s a feeling like the world we live in – and it’s not just the U.S., it is the world we live in – is very frightening. This goes back to my thinking of what it would be like to have a child and bring her into this world. And I guess as one gets older, one also learns things, gets wiser, but it feels very ugly, it feels like a lot of hate. As a woman of color, I’ve always taught about difficult things in the classroom, but it’s not just in the classroom. It’s on the street, everywhere. I feel hyper-visible and I feel like I’m constantly navigating and I don’t always feel that safe, and I feel that affecting my behavior and interactions in ways that it didn’t earlier.
“I wanted to do this about immigration because it was my experience and there is so much misrepresentation about immigration, so much anti-immigration rhetoric, so I felt like I need to take the skills that I have and try to use them to say something that is meaningful and I am really so grateful it seemed to have worked.”
I wanted to do this about immigration because it was my experience and there is so much misrepresentation about immigration, so much anti-immigration rhetoric, so I felt like I need to take the skills that I have and try to use them to say something that is meaningful and I am really so grateful it seemed to have worked. People really responded. I had a couple of people who wrote back saying “Thank you for laying this out like this, I had never really thought about it.” So it was to educate people about the process and how it wasn’t just easy.
I feel like we’ve got to be safe. Above all, we’ve got to be safe. But we’ve also got to speak out, because I am, like a lot of people, seriously worried about where we’re at at this point in time and so I think that call to action is very well put. I think a lot of us are feeling it; I’m certainly feeling it. I think as people of color, as immigrants of color, we need to speak out. And it’s interesting, because the Indian-American community has been traditionally quite conservative in its approach and you know the whole thing about the model minority and not wanting to push back, but I think even they are beginning to realize that they’re not that safe. So I don’t know, hopefully there will be more solidarity building. Some of the responses I got not from Indians, but from people from Mexico, other immigrants, other European immigrants, Americans – I was very touched by how so many people responded in different ways. It felt like that solidarity was happening.
The other thing is I am getting older and I’m feeling like I can take more risks. I’m not a young professor starting off a career and I have, in some ways, less to lose by taking those risks. I still have to be careful, but there is something about women, as we get older, we’re like “Okay, I’m not going to take this, this is my voice, I’m going to speak up now, I’ve put up with enough” kind of thing. There is something about that that is happening to me too, I find. I will say things and do things that I wouldn’t have even maybe ten years ago.
KB: You were saying how now there’s so much anti-immigration sentiment right now which is definitely true, and you touched on that in that author’s note you included with the piece as well. That, and the piece as a whole, was a really eye-opening experience for me. But it’s been forty years since the eighties, and with immigration there’s still so many similarities in those experiences, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it also signals that we haven’t progressed very far in our treatment of immigrants in this country, which is unfortunate.
AS: Yeah, I actually think it’s gotten much worse, just the waiting time. . . In the eighties, there was anti-immigrant sentiment – there always has been towards people of color – but when I talk to people, it feels very, very rabid now. But also I think that immigrants are seen as threatening on so many levels, not just economically but on every level. They’re seen as a drain on the system, they’re seen as physically threatening, but people don’t really know what it’s like to be an immigrant or what the process is. So it’s not getting better. It should be getting better, but it’s not.
KB: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
AS: I’m really touched by Volume One, because I didn’t know that they would agree to publish this, you know? It’s different, in terms of what we hear about, not just in Volume One, but in Eau Claire. I don’t think that stories like mine in the Chippewa County are told that often and I think that’s why I was very touched that it spoke to the editors and very touched by the feedback I’ve gotten. It’s felt very life affirming and reaffirming because Eau Claire is actually the place I’ve lived in the longest all my life, so it feels very good, sort of like coming home, to have it here. And also the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild doing this interview is, again, very touching, because I am such an academic and a scholarly writer, and I’m just branching out. And like you said, it’s an artificial divide, but I still carry anxiety and baggage about the idea of being a writer as opposed to a scholarly writer, because I haven’t had formal training. So it’s felt reaffirming on lots of levels. It’s just felt really good and I’m so thankful. It’s so good to feel that people are willing to listen to these stories and are receptive because I think it could be a platform for as the Chippewa Valley is changing and there are more and more people of color coming in, we could have these multiple stories being told, and a balance of stories and everyone belonging, almost like what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about in Danger of a Single Story. That would be good.
Be sure to check out “Dearest Ma” in Volume One.