Sejal Shah’s short story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry (West Virginia University Press), is an innovative, sometimes dizzying, array of linked stories that are told from the point of view of a single narrator. Readers of Shah’s debut essay collection, This is One Way to Dance, will recognize similar themes of identity, home, displacement, and what it means to be a South Asian American woman in a diasporic world. This collection, in particular, describes female friendship, in all of its iterations—in resonant, beautiful, and heartbreaking ways. Punctuated by artifacts that Shah describes as “poetic pauses” or “echoes,” the collection has a fluidity and hybridity that is characteristic of Shah’s writing. Readers of this book will find stories within the pages, but they will also find poetry and art. All of this combines to build a book that, though short in length, lingers in the mind for long after the reader has finished it.
Sejal Shah is the author of the debut short story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions and the award-winning debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, an NPR Best Book of 2020. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, and Literary Hub. In 2021, she was named an influential AAPI Leader by Good Morning America and ABC News. Sejal lives in Rochester, New York.
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The Rumpus: The book’s eleven linked short stories are told from the point of view of V., a Gujarati American. The experimental story structures vary and include artifacts in them. I imagine that these structures evolved somewhat over time (though maybe I’m wrong). Can you share why you chose the structures you did?
Shah: The structures grew out of my interest in form and fragmentation, poetry and sound. Some of the stories like “Climate, Man, Vegetation” and “Dicot, Monocot” sound as if they could also be prose poems. The story “Xylem” is an abecedarian– each section or sentence beginning with a consecutive letter of the alphabet, first starting with A. That was fun to do—to play with language in that way. It was a way of giving myself a set of rules and seeing where those constraints took me. The stories where structures mattered the most, if I understand your question right, are the two longest stories in the book: “The Half King” and “Skeleton, Rock, Shell.”
In “The Half King,” the story moves around a lot in time and I realized I needed a way for the reader (and myself!) to keep track of these movements—what my friend, the writer K.E. Semmel, called “time loops.” I landed on the structure of using subheadings in the story, which is not uncommon in nonfiction and lyric essays, specifically, but I haven’t seen that done very often in fiction. Many years ago, I read a story by Geeta Kothari called “I Break for the Moose” (the title story of her collection) and she uses subheadings in that story. Years later, when I was working on “The Half King” I hit upon subheadings as a possible solution to my jumping back and forth in time. I’m happy with how this structure allowed me to tell the story of the protagonist, V., reflecting on her life.
The other long story, “Skeleton, Rock, Shell,” is a kind of trauma narrative, so there was a lot of fragmentation. Formally, paragraphs break down to where there are sometimes just single sentences on the page. I didn’t know what to do with that story for a long time, because it looks different than a lot of traditional fiction/storytelling. I only sent it out to one journal, Conjunctions—and I was thrilled when the editor, Bradford Morrow, published it. Conjunctions is such an important home for innovative, risk-taking literature.
Rumpus: You share in the acknowledgments that many of these stories were previously published. Still, this collection reads as very deliberate and cohesive (none of the stories feel pigeonholed as sometimes happens in collections). What was your process for turning your individual pieces into a larger, linked collection?
Shah: Thank you so much! I’m glad that the collection reads as cohesive. I did have a sense of the stories and the voice as connected, but it took me some time to realize that the stories all had the same narrator. Once I figured that out, the rest of my time went into ordering the stories. This was a challenge for me, because I read story collections often like I listen to CDs—I find the one or two stories I love and read them again and again. So the author’s initial order doesn’t seem to matter much to me.
That said, with How to Make Your Mother Cry, I decided to work from girlhood to adulthood and later decided to divide the stories into three sections: I. a girl walks into the forest; II. a girl is lost in the woods, and III. a girl claws her way out. It was satisfying to divide the stories into these sections and to create an arc with the scaffolding of three named sections. There is another part of me, though, that could have seen the book starting with either “Ithaca Is Never Far,” a shorter, punchier story, as well as moving the longest story, “The Half King,” up closer to the beginning of the book. But that version would have meant the sections and section titles would have had to go.
Since I had to choose a structure I chose one that moved chronologically. Many people do listen to albums all the way through and this book ended up being more of an album/concept album, even though I do have my favorite singles.
Rumpus: The artifacts in this collection really work to weave the stories together. What would you say is the purpose of artifacts in a short story collection like this? Were you inspired by any other authors or are there other authors whose work uses artifacts in ways that inspire you?
Shah: The artifacts (I love that word)—the images and drawings and ephemera—all came into the process after I’d finished the stories and all of the text except adding the poems. My book is on the shorter side and my agent asked if I had any more stories. I knew the collection was done as far as stories, but what I had been thinking about was the addition of images. I had never worked with images before. Then it became a whole process of figuring out which photographs and drawings and other ephemera and where they went in relation to the stories.
Honestly, I chose ephemera and artifacts that felt as if they had some sort of resonance with the stories. It was almost like laying objects together and seeing where and how they magnetized.
I think of these artifacts as poetic pauses. The images work to weave their own narrative through the book. The images are often personal, but they are not illustrations or meant to be illustrative of any of the stories, but rather to create a juxtaposition/provide a kind of visual echo of some of the themes. I was inspired by Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Citizen, and her latest book, Just Us. I also thought of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller, which consists of prose, poems, and photographs. I looked at the novels of W.G. Sebald, whose work was new to me. I also just really liked these artifacts and wanted to carry them with me into the art of this book.
When How to Make Your Mother Cry went through peer review (since it’s a university press, even creative writing goes through peer review), one of my reviewers, the writer Jon Pineda, said he thought it would be an interesting book to market because no comp titles came easily to mind. I think this is true.
Rumpus: You use the second person throughout this collection in a way that creates a kind of intimacy with the reader. How did you envision the reader while you were writing this book? Or alternately, what did the reader represent to you while you were crafting this book?
Shah: One of the things I love about the second person point of view is the intimacy it creates with the reader. At the time I wrote the title story, I had read and was teaching stories like Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer” and was interested in the “How to” story as a form. Second person point of view is also a conversation with myself. I envisioned me/myself as the first or ideal reader of the book. The stories were conversations I was having with myself and with my characters. There’s a way, when you are really in it, or rather I should say when I am really in the world of writing where an outside reader drops away. Later in the process, the outside reader returns and that’s when revision comes in: thinking through a shitty first draft and messy later drafts.
I would say that I wrote this book for me and for other girls and women like me— brown girls, Gujarati girls, people who feel like outsiders. Like me doesn’t only mean people who have a similar background to me, but people who are readers. People who are a little serious. Nonfiction writers who read fiction. Poets who read prose. Prose writers who love poems. I was really writing for girls and women who found themselves floundering at the end of stories. So many stories are written for/about male heroes with a traditional, predictable plot. That’s not to say that I didn’t and don’t hope other people would read and be interested in these stories, but I wrote them first for myself. I think Toni Morrison said something similar—that she wrote for herself first, to please herself first. She was her first audience.
I see my reader as someone who would choose to watch indie films like Moonlight, You Can Count on Me, The Tango Lesson, and Strictly Ballroom over a mainstream or action movie.
Rumpus: In your acknowledgments, you note that you’re a disabled writer with ADHD and manic depression and that you were fortunate to have access to good healthcare and treatment options while writing this book. As a fellow neurodivergent writer who also has a lot of privilege when it comes to healthcare and support systems, this got me thinking of the ways that the writing world could be more inclusive. Perhaps this is an unanswerable question because it would require such radical changes in our country overall, but are there ways that you can envision a literary world that offers more support to disabled writers?
Shah: Oh, Kelly, this is a tough question! I wanted to acknowledge that writing and publishing a book takes a lot of work and concentration and that I could only do it because of various kinds of support. I thought it was important to be transparent about this—to make visible some of the care and treatments that allowed me to make the book. In this hyper capitalist society, it’s hard to imagine (but we must try) a literary world that offers more support to disabled writers. One place to start, in thinking about a better world for disabled writers, is to have more editors and other publishing professionals who are disabled. Then change in the culture begins from the inside out.
I recently had the privilege of being edited by Alice Wong, who is an amazing author and disability justice advocate. She edited an anthology, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, which was published by Vintage in April. I have an essay in this anthology called “Letters I Never Sent.” I recently did an online event with Alice and two other contributors to the anthology. In it, Alice asked me what it was like for me to have a disabled editor. I needed an extension twice, because of health issues, and I realized I felt more comfortable asking Alice for an extension, because of a common framework of crip time: a term that Ellen Samuels uses in her essay, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” “Crip time” is a term coined by Alison Kafer and she writes, “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and times.” (Samuels quotes Kafer in her essay.) It’s not that I haven’t needed nor asked for extensions in other situations, but I have realized how much internalized ableism I have.
It took a lot of time to prep for Alice’s panel—as it does for any good event—and she ensured that panelists were compensated financially for our time. Writers in this country are so often expected to work for free. Canada has more grants available to artists and writers—many European countries do, as well. Until there is more financial support for writers, I’m not sure how the situation will change. I was only able to write my book, because I am on my partner’s health insurance and work part-time. There is no way I personally would have been able, with my neurodivergence, to be a full-time professor teaching four classes a semester and also manage writing a book. I know people do it, but I could not. (I was once a full-time professor with a 4/4 teaching load, which along with service work felt already like a job and a half.) I wanted others who are like me, other disabled creatives, to know that if they are unable to produce a book under these conditions, it’s not them—what’s wrong are the conditions.
