Padma Viswanathan is the author of two acclaimed novels and a teacher of creative writing in Arkansas. She presented a Workshop on 'People, Places & Things - Creating Characters From Real-World Observations' at the Fairway Galle Literary Festival, in the Heritage Villa in Galle.
Q1. This was your first GLF, wasn't it? And I believe that you were one of the authors who went to the affiliated events in Kandy and Jaffna as well? How did it compare with other Literary Festivals you have attended?
Padma V:
I didn’t attend Kandy, only Galle and Jaffna. I found the festival experience rewardingly intimate, considering its size and range. I was surprised to learn how many authors attended, because it felt small, in a good way: all the events were very well-attended, and the organizers provided lots of opportunities for the writers to meet and mix. The lit cafe at the Galle site was also a great place for informal encounters with the attendees. The Jaffna events were very touching, as you can imagine, because Jaffna was out of bounds for so long. We were presenting in the rebuilt Jaffna Public Library, and it all felt very momentous. We all felt very privileged to take part in a small way in the revitalization of this area’s cultural life.
Q2. Can you tell us some of the circumstances in your familial and social context which made it possible for you to become a full-time writer?
Padma V:
I don’t know that I’ve ever been full-time, exactly, though I have, from the time I understood that wanted to be a writer, maintained a fairly strict routine of writing in the mornings. But my kids were born around the time I was finishing my first book, so they needed more time than my writing for some years. And now that they are bigger, I have taken on a teaching job. I have been lucky to stay reasonably productive through all this, mainly because of my generous and supremely competent husband and parents. My parents retired when our kids were born, specifically to give us help with the children. The sale of my first book allowed us to build them an apartment on our property—an extended family compound, with all the mutual patience it demands and the comedy it generates.
Q3. What is your opinion of the celebrity cults of personality that develop around writers? Many writers are quite private people, and need a lot of time to themselves in order to ponder and process experiences and observations. It seems to be difficult to find this time and space in the glare of the spotlight, so to speak?
Padma V:
Well, every writer understands that if a book meets with a measure of success—as we all hope—it takes a great deal of will or cantankerousness to reject the publisher’s requests to go out and meet readers. And most of us enjoy encountering the reading public, even while it can be anxiety-making or fatiguing: it may take time away from our writing, but it is also very rewarding to learn, first-hand, how people are being touched by our books.
Q4. Many writers are praised for being 'professional thinkers', as pretentious as that sounds when applied to oneself! You are consulted about your favourite books, your opinions are turned into soundbites and quotable quotes, and in many ways you are seen as role models. What qualities in yourself as a writer and as a human being do you find most noteworthy? And how has the process of writing helped you discover and develop these qualities?
Padma V:
I enjoy thinking, so it’s nice to be paid for it! I feel this more directly when I’m teaching, in that I try to model for my students the process of working toward one’s own, particular truths. I never insist that they share my opinions, only that they have excavated the full meaning of their own. Which is much of what writing is as well: I write on what interests me, and the process of creating fiction is often the process of articulating the textures of these interests, my positions, the very specific directions of my thoughts. The personal qualities I suspect I draw on most for my writing are my curiosity and my attendant desire to see the world as others see it, based on their experiences.
Q5. Is there any writer whose work you read almost cyclically or even seasonally, once a year, without even realising that you do so? If so, could you comment on who, and why?
Padma V:
There are books I used to reread on my own that now I often assign in classes for the purpose of getting to reread them with others. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, various stories by Jorge Luis Borges. I reread them because each is guaranteed to give me an experience of quite pure fictional joy and to remind me of the many things I love best in fiction: linguistic agility; light, complex treatment of heavy subjects; suspense that is not coy; unexpected plot turns that are absolutely plausible within the world of the story. A recent pleasure has been reading with my children some of the novels I reread obsessively as a child, and finding out they’re every bit as good as I thought: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Henry Reed, Inc., Harriet The Spy. I’m not sure I even read them much differently than I did as a child, and I know I love them for the same reasons I mention above.
Q6. 'People, Places, Things' are very concrete components of fiction and real life. Developing one's unique voice as a writer means developing one's individual way of seeing the world around you. How has growing up in different countries and living and working in different cities impacted your perspectives?
Padma V:
I think I gave up very early on the idea of ever properly fitting in anywhere, even while I continued to experiment with what fitting in would mean, what it would demand of a person. Many writers have an experience of ‘outsiderness;’ many writers write best away from familiar places, so in a way it’s a boon constantly to be a little unstable with regards to the society that surrounds me. Also, I had the great good fortune to have traveled quite a bit as a child: not only going to India whenever my parents could afford it, only every 4 or 5 years, but taking road trips around North America with them when we couldn’t afford anything grander. It gave me a strong early love of looking, seeing what I could see and gossiping about it with people close to me, people I could entertain. Not too different from novel-writing.
Q7. You said in the Workshop that you gave that you enjoy great professional relationships with your Editors. Can you comment on the positive lifelong encouragement relationships such as this can give to writers?
Padma V:
It was only one editor I was referring to, I think—Anne Collins, of Random House Canada—who has published both my novels and given me excellent editorial advice on both. I also had two earlier mentors who invested a great deal in me: my grad school thesis director, Elizabeth Evans, who read my then-900 page novel twice, a karmic debt I will likely never repay, and D. D. Kugler, who commissioned and directed my first play, basically turning me into a writer. These are lifelong relationships that obviously have benefited my work, and my self-image, enormously (not sure what they have gotten out of it…). But there are many writers throughout history who didn’t have the benefit of such ‘professional champions’ and still thrived. I think it’s important to have some close people who believe in your work and whose opinions you trust, but it’s not as important that those people be professionals in the writing biz. Ultimately, it is these same qualities—the intimacy and trust, and their strong intelligences—that made these editors and mentors of mine such good readers for me. There are such people to be found in many quarters.
Q.8 Do you think that the process of writing is a reconciliatory one? I mean, in saying this, to deliberately evoke the idea that writing, the act of putting one's thoughts into words, and refining them and re-evaluating them, can be a process of personal integration as well as enabling people in a society riven by trauma to achieve greater societal cohesion?
Padma V:
I can only think it must be, although it as soon as I wrote that, I imagined cases that might contradict it. You put it well when you say writing ‘can be a process of personal integration,’ though there can be painful stages en route. I think too many people believe that writing a traumatic issue can bring ‘closure.’ I’m skeptical of that, while ‘reconciliation’ seems a much better term: the externalization of traumatic facts, on to paper, can be a way to offer them less confrontationally, and also make them more available, in this way, to compassionate responses.
Q9. How important is the practice of reading in the development of a writer? History? Philosophy? Geology? Geography? Astronomy? Astrology? To reflect human life in your writing, we need to read! What disciplines or fields of human knowledge do you research and draw inspiration from?
Padma V:
As you’ve said, to read widely is necessary for a writer, though to read deeply is better. I have read in various fields—psychology, physics, certainly history—to inform my novels. And often there are unexpected literary discoveries to be made in the works of writers who didn’t particularly intend to create literature. Sigmund Freud was equally considered for the Nobel for literature, after all, as for medicine, and one might debate where his contributions were greater.
Q10. Is there any advice you would offer the emerging writers of Sri Lanka? Keeping in mind that 'emerging' refers not only to chronologically young people but also to those who start writing later in life?
Padma V:
Persevere!
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