Interview with Balli Jaswal, 2007 David T.K. Wong Fellow

I met Balli Jaswal (T K Wong Fellow 2007) at the Arts House, Singapore for an interview. Balli, who is still at work on her first novel, tentatively titled, When Amrit Returns, is the youngest winner of the David T.K. Wong Fellowship.

For introduction's sake, Balli was born in Singapore and grew up in Japan, Russia and the Phillipines. She studied creative writing at Hollins University (where Kiran Desai also went) and George Mason University. She is currently based in Singapore and works as a journalist.

MFA-wallas

The question is so old one can even be called stupid to have asked it in the first place. And arguments range from approval to disapproval on both sides of the aisle.

A favourite quote here, for example, by James M. Cain, former editor of New Yorker and writer of classics such as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity (let's not get into the genre vs literary fiction debate): This bunkum and stinkum of college creative-writing courses! The creative writing teachers should know that the only thing that you can do to help someone write is to buy him a typewriter.

Well, make it a laptop for this day and age.

But why am I asking this question today?

Because it looks like the MFA brigade (I mean candidates from creative writing classes) is doing very well in the literary market (in this age of globalization, everything has become a market). But again, you can say as a counter argument that we hear only about success stories. What about the rest of the class?

Never mind that. That happens all the time.

Any way, it all started when I read this brilliant story (Sweetheart Sorrow) in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue by David Hoon Kim. Turns out the guy is from Iowa Writers’ Program. Not a crime. It’s impressive that the first story he ever published has come out in the New Yorker magazine.

And David is in great company. Look at some of the recent literary successes: Chimamda Ngozi (Orange Prize winner), Kiran Desai (Booker Prize winner), Jhumpa Lahiri (Pulitzer Prize winner), Mohsin Hamid (Betty Trask Award), Akhil Sharma (Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford, author of An Obedient Father), Tash Aw (Booker nominee), Rattawat Lapcharoensap (Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award), just to name a few familiar names. They have all come from some creative writing courses, either in US or UK.

Not just them. Such writers as Philip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Richard Ford, Lorrie Moore, Jane Smiley, Michael Chabon, Rick Russo, Mona Simpson and, more recently, Alice Sebold and Aimee Bender all did time in writing programs and credit their teachers for much of their success.

Related to creative writing courses is also this amazing essay by Peter Carey here (thanks Prof Amitava Kumar) where he questions the whole publishing set up of today:

And here is what seems most insane—young and not-so-young writers take out student loans to get M.F.A.’s in creative writing. This does not add up. I once taught in the M.F.A. program at Columbia, and so I know the extraordinary gifts that student debt can confer. But the Marshian in me says it’s impossible to start a life committed to literary fiction when you are $60,000 in debt. The very size of the loan assumes there is a market, a business to go into, a living to make. But the hard truth is that only a sucker writes literature with the intention of making money. This was so obvious in Australia in 1961, you never needed to say it. Today, when people seem to be breaking through all around you, it might be good to bear in mind that the only reward you can rely on is in the work itself. And, of course, they do know that. A while ago, I went down to Strand with my then 13-year-old son and we were, of course, selling books and we watched the buyer separating the sheep from the goats, without understanding which was which. When the judgment was made, he pushed back at us a pile of really good novels. These, it turned out, were the goats. I said, “But surely you can sell Rohinton Mistry.” And he said, “We don’t need fiction.” And I thought, Where am I?

Does it make a difference? What do you think?

Conversations

I came across this interesting bunch of interviews in one of my favourite Indian journals, Tehelka.

The interviews separately feature two writers, Amitava Kumar and Kiran Desai, and one lit agent, I'd say the most famous for Indian writers at least, David Godwin.

I'm just pulling some quotes here from their interviews, and if the quotes pique your interest please go and read the full texts.

Immigration is not a pretty thing: Kiran Desai

There was this realisation that what my generation was going through in America was the same as what my grandparents had gone through in the UK decades earlier. Nothing had changed. Both sides like to see it as different — the US doesn’t like thinking of itself as a colonial power and Indian immigrants try and emphasise how welcome they are, but there is a lot of hypocrisy in that pretence. Immigration is not a pretty thing. It’s often very cruel. It’s just self-preservation to ignore racism in these countries.

The Arundhati Roy effect: David Godwin


I never begrudge any writer money or platform. But a much more interesting consequence of Arundhati’s success has been its impact on writing in England. Take Monica Ali. Or even writers from Africa and the Caribbean. It may sound far-fetched, but we are hearing a wider range of voices. The publishing industry has become more open minded as a consequence of Arundhati.



Bihari writers, anyone?: Amitava Kumar

I like Siddharth’s writing because it is daringly original. And Tabish is the better kind of scholar-writer that India somehow seems very good at producing.

But I doubt they would identify with the Biharis who run the kind of website you’re referring to. I certainly don’t.

I don’t write to furnish a better image of a place or a person. Writing for me is a way of finding out what is hidden from the world. All declarations of superiority are also symptoms of real inferiority. I know what is inferior in myself. I want to be honest about it.