THE ANTHOLOGIST SINCE 1927 THE LITERARY AND FINE ARTS JOURNAL OF RUTGERS COLLEGE I N T E R V I E W S Reprinted from The Anthologist Spring 1999 Natash Signh received her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently publishing her first novel, In The Palm of My Hand. She is an adjunct lecturer in the English Department where she teaches creative writing courses. How did you get into writing? Well I've always written since I was about twelve years old. I kept a journal - invoked a lot of angst - kinds of poetry, I suppose, when I was in my early teens. But I think for me, writing in my journal was always my lifeline. It was something I needed to do to get my emotions out, or to process things that were going on around me at the time within my family or within the town that I grew up in. I relied a lot on writing, and in regard to taking it much more seriously - I didn't do that. I had written short stories when I was an undergraduate student and gotten a few things published here and there, but I didn't take it seriously. Until I had applied for something and had received a grant, and that was really important because that was public acclamation of my writing and my writing process and at that point I started taking much more seriously. How did your education and background influence your writing? I would say that certainly my MFA influenced my writing. [Maybe] no so much my writing, but my identity as a writer. Before, I did my MFA there was a real reluctance on my part to identify as a writer. I used to think before that it was somehow an elitist position to take. I admired different artists who would define themselves by their process rather than what they were so that people would say, I love to write," rather than, "I am a writer." And I think for me, that changed somewhat when I went to Sarah Lawrence because for the first time in my life I was surrounded by a while community of people who were taking their writing very seriously and that's all they did. They wrote and we talked about writing all the time. All my free time was spent engaging in discussions about writing-about the creative process-about character-and it was incredible. It was a gift to have the time period in my life for which to focus exclusively on my writing. It made me take my writing very seriously-it shaped my identity much more than anything had before in terms of being a writer. What are your influences? A lot of writers might reference other writers in response to that question. But everything has influenced me. A lot of theater actually influences me. The arts in general-I'm very interested in performance at-in visual art-and of course writing and looking at other writers is highly influential as well. I'm very drawn to anything or anyone that is very expressive or that uses a particular art medium to express themselves, and I think that I can always get something from a variety of medium. So I look to, say, performance art, and I get something very different than I might get from reading a book. And in terms of authors, I'm very immersed in South Asian writing and South Asian writers-I'll read anything I can get my hands on. How did you come to teach at Rutgers? Do you teach anywhere else? Not currently, no. I did teach a course-it was a pilot project course-while I was at Sarah Lawrence. It was a course on "Reading and writing to Race"-that was the title of it. It was a fabulous exercise because it was very successful and the course has now become part of the intitutional framework and part of the curriculum offered at Sarah Lawrence. I did that and I've also worked a lot with younger students as well. In terms of Rutgers, I simply applied to an ad in the New York Times and I ended up here. What do you think of the literary community here? It's funny you ask that, because I honestly don't have much sense of the literary community. I think that in terms of people who are teaching writing-there is no clear established writing program like there is, for example, at Sarah Lawrence, which has probably the largest writing program in the country. The whole approach at a school like that is the writing community, but here are people are very much in and out. You have instructors who come in and they teach and they leave, and teach somewhere else. It's very difficult to get people who are here to here at the same time along with other people, and also to have events where other writers come out. They are isolated events, but I don't sense as if there is a real community-a cohesion-here, and I hope that that would change in the future. I think it's actually very easy to create community-organizing so I always find these things simple to do. I just wish that students would take that on here. It's not a difficult thing-you can organize a series of events and bring people out because it's those kinds of things that bring people together and as a writer you need community - that's really important because writing is a solitary process. You writer alone and you need that sense of community. That also is what me education gave me-that sense of community, which was very vital. How do you teach fiction and creative writing in general? I always tell my students at the beginning of each semester that I don't believe that creative writing-fiction, poetry-can be taught in the sense that I don't believe that I can teach somebody how to write. What I can do is encourage students to write, essentially, because it is only through writing that you get better. What I can do is encourage students to write, essentially, because it is only through writing that you get better. It is also through reading that you get better, that you hone in on particular skills that you have and develop them. You develop your craft, you make it better. That's what I can do, is help students learn particular skills, but in terms of teaching them how to write-people have their own inner voices and it's a matter of being encouraged. A lot of writing can be encouraged. A lot of it is that students don't believe that they can write. They don't believe they are any good-or they simply haven't been exposed to a different ways of approaching they ways in which one can tell a story. There are a lot of different ways to write a story. So I think that exposure is key and exposure to a diversity of voices and aesthetics in storytelling, in addition to being encouraged to write a great deal. In your own work, do you feel that you have a particular style or theme that you tend towards? I write in first person-I feel that it's much more immediate. I'm able to access a lot more through first person than in third person, for some reason. Other writers obviously feel different about that. With regard to dealing with issues of sexuality-issues of violence-and a lot of issues regarding memory and what the body remembers. That's something I'm very interested in. Memory, I think, is very key to what I'm working on no and how there are a lot of things that we experience that we forget, and a lot of that forgetting is deliberate. I'm curious about the journey that one takes to go back to that particular experience that we're trying to run away from in the first place. I'm also very interested of course, in South Asian context. I think that there are a lot of things that are taboo-that aren't talked about in the larger community realm. And I'm drawn to breaking a lot of those taboos, and dealing with themes that I personally feel are missing from a lot of South Asian narratives right now. With the basic one of sexuality-I think that there are lot of things that young women go through, with regard to sexual orientation, with regard to body image, with regard to how they experience the physical world around them-what they experience in the home, how their gender is constructed. All of that, I'm very interested in exploring. Do you have a particular approach ? How does your approach differ between short and long fiction? Toni Morrison was talking about the difference between writing a short story and a novel. She said that writing a short story is like going on a date, and writing a novel is like being in a marriage. I think to some extent I would agree with that, but I also find that-for me-short stories are much more like poetry. Poetry contains the kernel, and a novel is about writing towards that kernel. To me, a poem is just that kernel-it's that small explosion. I think short stories are more like poems than novels in the sense that they draw out the same thing-I tend to find that in my short stories, the kernel is right there, while in a novel there are a lot of long, winding paths to get to that kernel. With a short story, obviously, you have to be a lot more conscious about what you take in and what you take out. And with a novel you can get away with a lot more things. With a short story you have to be extremely precise with what's in and what isn't. And it's very challenging. It requires something different than a novel. With a novel, you need a lot of staying power-you need a lot of discipline and focus because it takes a long time-at least, its been taking me a while to write my novel compared to a short story. I can write a short story in a night and revise it, but it's there in the evening-it'll be done in few hours if I get really focused, whereas a novel takes a lot longer. How do you approach public readings? What do you like and dislike about the interaction? I love public readings. I'm very interested in seeing how writing can fit into different genres. I'm very curious about how one can put or place writing in a different dimension. Obviously when you're reading a piece of work, it's a very particular kind of experience. Reading can become a different experience if you hear it, because it takes on a totally different life when you are actually able to speak the words aloud and let that voice take up an entire space. And I've seen a lot of amazing transformations in terms of writing. For example, I know when I've gone to read something by a particular writer that will be a certain kind of experience and when I hear them read their work it can totally take on a different life and it can compel me in a way that reading it on the page doesn't. And I just think it's a real challenge for people who are writing to also be able to read well. Some might say that's unfortunate, but it's part of what it means to be a writer in this current context where you have to go out and you do have to give readings. That generates a certain kind of interest, I think, in people's work. I love it, I think it's a wonderful opportunity to challenge myself, with regard to also how I hear voice. Because I think when we're writing, we can always hear a particular voice in our heads--t has a certain sound, and when I read it, I try to stay as honest as I can to that internal rhythm that is with me during the writing process. I try to stay as true to that as possible, and that's a challenge. If there was one thing you wish someone had told you when you were getting started, what would it have been? That's an interesting quesiton. There are several things. A lot of the time, you can hear advice with regard to writing, but you don't really take it in until you're a writer-until you're very deeply entrenched and involved in the process of writing. If there's anything that I would like to caution students-or anybody about, for that matter-comes from when I moved from Canada to the United State. The first thing I noticed when I moved to New York was this huge emphasis-a tremendous amount of pressure on writers. Even students that I have now get so anxious-and they're so focused on "making it." They're so focused on that and I know when I first moved here I found that whole emphasis on "making it" quite repugnant. It seemed so antithetical to what writing was about for me. Because writing for me was not simply about this desire to be this incredible success, although I'm not sure a lot of people would like their work to be read-that's why you're writing. I think that it's very important to be grounded in why you're doing what you're doing. And sometimes we lose sight of that. Sometimes we really lose sight of that. I don't think that there's a lot of affirmation for the writing, process in and of itself. There's a lot focus on product-you must do this, you must do that, you must get this out. And there's enough support for process and there's not a lot of emphasis on how important it is to be very conscious of your motivation - of the integrity of your motivations. And I think that this whole notion of "making it" can be not only seductive, but it can be so full of pressure that it doesn't help you in your writing process and it can actually work adversely, it can work against you. I think that also the messages we give ourselves as writings are very important as well. You're never going to succeed if you tell yourself that your writing sucks. If this voice says to you, "you're not good enough," then you're not going to make it. I often have students in here who totally zone out when I'm giving them complimentary feedback. They only want to hear what's negative and what's critical. I think that it's very important to recognize that we need to support, we need affirmation of our work-that's really important. We don't need to be our own worst enemies in our creative process. We don't need to sit back and tell ourselves that we're not good enough. We need to believe in ourselves. I think that's very important. It's like a child - you're not going to go up to a child and stand over his or her back and say, "You're not doing well enough," or, "come on, you have to get it done." You're going to start feeling really anxious and nervous. But we do that to ourselves as creative people and I think that we need to be conscious that that's not going to be helpful. It's Not. One very basic thing, in terms of writing, is that you just have to write. A lot of times, we can sit and we can talk about writing. We can talk about how much we want to be writing. We can bemoan the fact that we're not writing enough. But essentially, you just have to write. There's no magic secret in terms of writing a novel, or writing a short story, or poetry, creative non-fiction or whatever it is that you're doing. You just have to write and you have to practice. You're not going to get from A to B just by sitting there thinking about it. It's not going to work. And I would also tell students to put themselves in environments where they get support-where they can talk to other people about writing. Because, again, you need things to support that part of who you are. Because I have a lot of students who come in here and they'll tell me, "you know what? Writing is my passion, but I'm going into sciences." "writing is my passion, but I'm going to become a psychologist. Maybe I can do writing on the side." I think that there's not a lot of support in general for the arts-it's not taken very seriously so a lots of students feel that it's not a viable option. But I always tell the students that I always hear from doctors, or teachers-whatever profession-that "Oh, I wish I were a writer." I never hear a writer saying, "I wish I was something else." It's really important to honor your passion. To feel passionate about something is an incredible gift-it's such a feeling. It's an amazing feeling, and I feel so thankful that there's something in my life that gives me meaning. That makes my life worth living in a very profound and deep way. And I take that very seriously, and I make sure that I put myself in environments that remind me of who I am. Teaching creative writing reminds me that I'm a writer. I have a friend who is doing something totally different and she's really struggling, because the environment that she's in doesn't affirm that part of herself. It doesn't affirm that part of her that loves to write. She has to play some other role. So I think that it's important to always remember that we need to go out and see people reading. We need to surround ourselves with other creative people, or we need to immerse ourselves in creative contexts. Because it feeds us, and you can't grow by starving that part-that part's not going to develop if you starve it. It doesn't work like that. It's important to pay attention to all of those different things, because they're all interconnected. And Again, of course, to read. It's such a simple thing and I think a lot of students feel that they can write without reading. Reading is an incredible source of inspiration-it can give you tremendous ideas in terms of how to write, in how to writer differently. I think that a lot of students aren't exposed to a lot of younger writers who are coming out nowadays with really fascinating kinds of storytelling, or fascinating ways to tell stories. A lot of younger writers are exploring voice in incredible ways. And that's the key. If you can find something that you love read, surely you can also find a way to express something similar. It gives you hope, and the important thing is to find things that feed your way of telling things. Or perhaps things that challenge your way of telling things so that you will be introduced to whole different aesthetic. But exposure is the key.