5 Questions with Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Author of White Dancing Elephants
Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician and writer whose work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, Jellyfish review, Aaduna and elsewhere, with poetry forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Quiddity, Apt Magazine, Hobart and more. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. She received the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Henfield Award for her writing. Her work received four Pushcart Prize anthology nominations in 2017. She is celebrating the release of her new book White Dancing Elephants with an event at City Lights on Thursday, December 6th, 2018.
City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?
Chaya Bhuvaneswar: Early on during med school in the Bay Area, I fell in love with someone but was unsure whether I could manage it. Studying, being in love; forcing myself to do something, letting myself do what I wanted. My partner took me to City Lights, discovered during the late, roaming San Francisco wherever-you-park-you'll-get-a-ticket nights more typical of PhD than MD students. Me, giddy from no sleep, reading Bukowski's poem mocking the woman who calls his poems "beautiful"––yet allowed back into the store, many times after over several years. Then I wandered over to the Mission to resume the studying again at Cafe Macondo with some books I bought at City Lights.
CL: What’s the first book you read & what are you reading right now?
CB: Little Women, mainly because of how few books were in my house and how that was the only one I didn't have to hide, versus the Judy Blume’s and racier stuff I'd bring from the library. What I'm reading now: Forever . . . by Judy Blume.
CL: What are 3 books you would you never part with?
CB: Clay Sanskrit Library versions of the Ramayana and Kālidāsa’s poetry, White Dancing Elephants (my book, which I swear I literally see in dreams), and A.S. Byatt's The Matisse Stories, which I so strongly recommend.
CL: What writers/artists/people do you find the most influential to the writing of this book and/or your writing in general?
CB: Louise Erdrich, both in her artistic persona as a kind of ribald, practical, enduring free spirit; Brian Koppelman, because I found Billions so oddly soothing, in its incredible venality and reassurance that no matter how guilty I feel about anything on a given day, I'm nothing like those characters; and Toni Morrison, because I reread Beloved during my MacDowell residency when I was finishing writing my book––I had read her work right before I began the first story in the collection, “Jagatishwaran,” several years ago––and I will never stop aspiring, in my language, to do some of the conjuring and consoling that she does. On many occasions I've felt that Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, and Sandra Cisneros are "patrons" of what I hope to write. Writers closer to my age like Lauren Groff, Amelia Gray, Laura van den Berg, Esmé Waijun Wang, Jamie Ford, Peter Rock, and others who blurbed my book, are so generous about their process as writers, and their lives in general, that they have made "being a writer" seem somewhat possible or at least not impossible. Maureen Howard, Ved Mehta, Don Faulkner, and Skip Horack are teachers who've meant a great deal to me.
CL: If you opened a bookstore tomorrow, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
CB: It would be called WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS (truly, that is what came to mind and stuck), it would be located on some sprawling green estate in Mountain View, and it would have to be funded by one of my dotcom acquaintances. So that means that probably the non-fiction bestseller would be Ellen Pao's Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, but I believe the fiction bestseller would be Jane Eyre, just because I probably reread that every few months, like eating at a favorite restaurant, each time needing to buy a new copy. The poetry bestseller would be Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey and there would be a huge, glittering broadside I'd have made and hung over the register, and it would have her line, possibly my favorite recent line of poetry from the past few years: "O how I'll miss you when we're dead."
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