The Author: Zahid Rafiq
The Book: The World With Its Mouth Open (Tin House, 2024)
The Elevator Pitch: These eleven stories weave in themes of violence, longing, and injustice using threads of everyday realities that confront Kashmiri characters’ lives in profound ways.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Zahid Rafiq: I am not sure there was an idea: there were feelings, images, voices, silences, and there is life, the experience of living. It came from that.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Rafiq: Almost five years.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Rafiq: It is the first.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Rafiq: A few, but they vanished the moment Tin House happened.
Rumpus: Which authors or writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Rafiq: Kafka, for giving hope; Coetzee, for the clarity and the courage; Naipaul, for holding together the road at times; Szymborska, for making poetry out of everyday life; and Dostoevsky, for reminding again and again that literature is about people, and that people are mad.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Rafiq: More than changing, it slowly came into being. One sentence calling another, one story bringing another. Slowly gathering mass, gathering people.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Rafiq: I was a journalist for a while, so there is a lot of nonfiction I wrote over the years. But the fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Epoch, American Short Fiction, there is a story forthcoming in Zyzzvya.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Rafiq: That writing is more important than publishing and that it will happen when it has to. I think I might have given it to myself.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Rafiq: For this book, it is, I guess, a friend who knows almost everything, and a stranger who knows almost nothing, and a young boy who, leaning over a page, wonders.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Rafiq: That it actually got published.
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Author photograph by Muzamil Mattoo
