Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter, especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for July is Thrillers, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders.

In this episode Alexis Schaitkin and I discuss:

• Writing a story with mystery as a central premise without focusing on solving that mystery.
• Creating a fable-like feeling through the intentional use of tropes.
• The nature of community and isolation and how it relates to writing.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Alexis Schaitkin

Alexis Schaitkin is the author of Saint X and her short stories and essays have appeared in Ecotone, Southwest Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two children.

You can find her on her website or follow her on Twitter.

Elsewhere

Richly emotive and darkly captivating, with elements of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and the imaginative depth of Margaret Atwood, Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin conjures a community in which girls become wives, wives become mothers and some of them, quite simply, disappear.  

Vera grows up in a small town, removed and isolated, pressed up against the mountains, cloud-covered and damp year-round. This town, fiercely protective, brutal and unforgiving in its adherence to tradition, faces a singular affliction: some mothers vanish, disappearing into the clouds. It is the exquisite pain and intrinsic beauty of their lives; it sets them apart from people elsewhere and gives them meaning.

Vera, a young girl when her own mother went, is on the cusp of adulthood herself. As her peers begin to marry and become mothers, they speculate about who might be the first to go, each wondering about her own fate. Reveling in their gossip, they witness each other in motherhood, waiting for signs: this one devotes herself to her child too much, this one not enough—that must surely draw the affliction’s gaze. When motherhood comes for Vera, she is faced with the question: will she be able to stay and mother her beloved child, or will she disappear?

Provocative and hypnotic, Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere is at once a spellbinding revelation and a rumination on the mysterious task of motherhood and all the ways in which a woman can lose herself to it; the self-monitoring and judgment, the doubts and unknowns, and the legacy she leaves behind.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link where, if you choose to purchase via the link, DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 417

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 417: Setting the Tone for Your Novel Through Voice, Mood, and Point of View – Interview with Alexis Schaitkin appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Shanthi Sekaran, author of the new novel Lucky Boy (affiliate link), a book that has been getting a lot of pre-publication buzz and is an Indie Next Great Read pick for January 2017.

Lucky Boy is a moving story about two unforgettable women in California: an undocumented Mexican woman and an Indian-American wife, who both love the same child but can’t have him. The novel beautifully weaves together the themes of motherhood, immigration, infertility, adoption and minority life in America. More personally, as the first-generation American child of Brazilian immigrants, this story hit home and had me riveted from page one.

In this episode Shanthi and I discuss:

• The importance of fiction in humanizing different groups of people by bringing them and their experiences to life on the page.
• Using both research and imagination to create a vivid experience for your readers, and in particular how she crafted the dramatic immigration scenes in her book.
• Connection to the point of view of the characters and how to capture their experiences and emotions with authenticity.
• Crafting her book around the theme of motherhood, and how “mother” can mean very different things to different people.
• The universality of the “immigrant experience” in America, and how there are many common threads between immigrants from wildly different experiences.
• How there are also stark differences between immigrants with different levels of privilege, and how it’s important for us to understand these varied experiences.
• Why it’s important that writers live their lives and be present in the world.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About the Author

Shanthi Sekaran teaches creative writing at California College of the Arts, and is a member of the Portuguese Artists’ Colony and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Her work has appeared in Best New American Voices and Canteen, and online at Zyzzyva and Mutha Magazine. A California native, she lives in Berkeley with her husband and two children.

Her latest book, Lucky Boy, has been generating a great deal of pre-publication buzz and is an Indie Next Great Read pick for January 2017. More recently, Sekaran wrote an excellent, thought-provoking opinion piece for the NY Times, “The Privileged Immigrant,” about privileged vs. unprivileged immigrants:

Lucky Boy

Is love alone enough to raise a child or does someone need the means to give that child a better life? Lucky Boy is a moving story about two unforgettable women in Northern California: an undocumented Mexican woman and an Indian-American wife. Both are bound together by their love for the same boy.

Solimar Castro Valdez has always been a dreamer, wishing for a better life away from her small town of Popocalco. Drunk on optimism and full of faith, Soli embarks on a perilous journey across the Mexican border. Weeks later she arrives on her cousin’s doorstep in Berkeley, California, dazed by first love found then lost – pregnant, undocumented, and unmoored. When her beloved son Ignacio finally arrives, Soli discovers that motherhood can be her identity in a world where she is otherwise invisible.

Despite enormous pressure from her parents to conform to their idea of the proper Indian-American lifestyle, Kavya Reddy has created a life she adores. Her marriage to her husband, Rishi, is mostly happy and she loves her job as a chef, but at thirty-five her life starts to seem empty, a gaping hole at its center that can only be filled by a child. When she can’t get pregnant, this desperate desire strains her marriage and tests her sanity, setting her on a path leading to Soli’s infant son Ignacio, sent into foster care when Soli is placed in immigrant detention. As Kayva learns to be a mother to this boy she builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else’s child.

The novel beautifully weaves together the themes of motherhood, immigration, infertility, adoption and minority life in America.  It’s also a story about California and a larger portrait of what the state looks like now – who does the work and who has the power. A native of California, Shanthi Sekaran was inspired by her own upbringing as a child of immigrants, by the news stories she was hearing about undocumented mothers losing their children when they were put into detention centers, and by living in Berkeley, a place that for all of its progressiveness is also incredibly privileged. She applied these real life inspirations to fiction and the result is revelatory. At once heartbreaking and uplifting, Lucky Boy will leave readers thinking and feeling and debating long after turning the last page.

As with many books recommended on this site, these are Amazon affiliate links, which means if you choose to purchase this book via this link, DIY MFA will get a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 132

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, leave a review, and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available. Also, if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please share!

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 132: Capturing Diverse Experiences on the Page — Interview with Shanthi Sekaran appeared first on DIY MFA.