Author: Christine Nessler

This week’s Author Q&A is with Marc Eichen. Eichen has a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University. From 2015 through 2022 he was a Visiting Faculty member at the State University of Zanzibar. His fiction focuses on life in Zanzibar and in red-state America. He has had stories published in Still Points Arts Quarterly, The Adirondack Review and West Trade Review and reprinted in Toyon. He is the winner of the Richard Cortez Day Prize in fiction. A book of short stories in Swahili and English will be published in Nairobi Kenya in 2023. He is represented by Kristen Carey at Blue Hen.

Eichen’s fiction short story, Who Takes the Bus in LA is featured in Issue #10 of The Good Life Review.

Tell me about yourself.

Many fiction writers are reluctant to talk about themselves – and I’m no exception. Where I stand out, where I hope to stand out, is on the page.

With that preface, ok, here goes. I grew up in New York and began life thinking I would be a musician. Life intrudes (and I wasn’t good enough) – so I spent much of my working life as an academic administrator, first in New York and then in Massachusetts, where I live with my wife, Deborah Drosnin, most of the year. 

When I’m not in Massachusetts, I live in East Africa, Zanzibar (Tanzania) to be specific where I’ve had the privilege to learn Swahili and teach natural resource management at the State University. 

Some of my fiction focuses on the intersection between the Swahili and foreign communities. This is particularly interesting and challenging for me. How do you make sense of that friction, or lack of friction because the communities don’t “see” each other? China Miéville’s novel, The City & The City is a good example.

I don’t think you need to come to Zanzibar to observe this. And some of my fiction, including Who Takes the Bus in LA?, is about the poor, the ragged, the old and otherwise marginalized and often unseen communities in the United States.

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I try to write four days a week and always in the morning. I tend not to write at home because the distractions are endless. So I’m lucky enough to have found The Writers’ Room of Boston and I work there. 

What inspired you to write Who Takes the Bus in LA?

Both Deborah and I grew up in New York City and we lean in toward public transportation. So when we were visiting LA before the pandemic, we took the bus. Taking the bus in LA is a meme. Many Angelinos would ask, who takes the bus in LA if they’re not crazy or unhoused?  

Riding the bus in L.A. is a parallel city. It is the purest expression of L.A.’s one-hundred-year dialogue of urban and antiurban, a bridge to the city’s streetcar past and an epitaph to its car-addled future. Riding enables another mode of looking, seeing, hearing, and smelling that “eludes the discipline” of automobility even as it reproduces it. (Hutchinson, Sikivu. “Waiting for the Bus.” Social Text, vol. 18 no. 2, 2000, p. 107-120. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/31869.)

For all these reasons, I find the stories of people taking the bus and driving the bus to be of interest.

Please tell me some unique details related to Who Takes the Bus in LA and what you learned from it.

I’m always interested in place. How does place influence what we see and who we are? How would the protagonists in this story live in Boyle Heights and yet have never been to Venice Beach? Why would they think Culver City was another world (because for them, it was)? Is it possible to transcend our individual world and tell a story which would resonate with someone from another place? 

What is your favorite book? Or who is your favorite author?

Wow, that’s a hard question. Ten authors in no particular order: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Donna Tartt, Richard Russo, George Saunders, George Eliot, Olga Tokarczuk, Russell Banks, Zadie Smith, Benjamin Lerner, David Foster Wallace. I could go on.

If there’s any common thread, with the exception of Olga Tokarczuk and David Foster Wallace, these writers embed you in the story. They are all wonderful writers, but they’re not self-conscious writers. Their work doesn’t say, “hey – look at this piece of genius.” 

What books did you enjoy reading as a child?

My mom read A Child’s Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson) to me and then, it was one of the things I wanted to read most, when I was able to read. As a teenager I would never leave the house without stuffing a book into the back pocket of my jeans. I went through jags, reading as much as I could of a particular writer before moving on to someone else: Thomas Wolfe, Henry James, Henry Roth, William Faulkner, Laurence Durrell. Even on the subway in New York, slamming through the tunnels with the windows open, their work would bring me somewhere else.

Do you have a specific genre you enjoy writing the most?

I write literary fiction. I love poetry, but I’m entirely in awe of people who are able to write it. There are wonderful science fiction writers (Samuel Delaney, Ursala K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, N. K. Jeminsin), but I find much of this genre formulaic and uninspiring. 

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why.

Interesting you ask this question. I’ve noticed that each individual in my wonderful writers’ group has a different strength. Mine happens to be drafting – getting an initial draft on paper. What I work on after that is the voice of the story, finding the voice which tells the story in the strongest, most authentic way. Re-drafting at the word level is the most difficult for me. But I try.

Do you have any fears as a writer?

Not having anything to say. Telling the same story over and over. My fabulous agent, Kristen Che at Blue Hen, who reads my first drafts, is able to say, “You’ve done this before – try it another way.”

What do you think of when you hear the phrase, “The Good Life?”

Walking in the mountains in New England or on the beach in Africa with my family, talking about a book or maybe just watching the sunset. Tuko pamoja milele. (We are together, always)

---

Thank you, Marc, for sharing your words with us and we appreciate the extra time and consideration you put into answering our questions. It was a pleasure working with you. We wish you the best in life and with all your writing endeavors!

This week’s Author Q&A is with Gargi Mehra. Mehra is a software professional by day, a writer by night and a mother at all times. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines online and in print, including Crannog, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Writer, and others. Her short stories have won prizes and placed in contests. She lives in Pune, India with her husband and two children. You can read more of Mehra’s work on her website or catch her on Twitter: @gargimehra.

Mehra’s collection of flash fiction stories, Mothers and Brothers is featured in Issue #10 of The Good Life Review.

Tell me about yourself.

I’m a software professional who writes in her spare time. My first love was programming but writing came a close second. I write fiction in the time between my work and life, and have been doing it for many years now. I have more than fifty stories (including flash and micro-fiction) and twenty essays published online and in print. I have written a novel or two as well, and hope to get them published in the future.

What is your writing process? How do you make it a part of your daily life?

I write most of my stories on weekends and holidays. I use the little time and energy left over after my day job to hunt down markets for my work or write down story ideas and snippets of sentences.

What inspired you to write Mothers and Brothers?

A writing prompt about domestic drama led me to write Blood Brother first, then I wanted to try different points-of-view and formats. This led to the other stories.

Please tell me some unique details related to Mothers and Brothers and what you learned from it.

Each has a distinct viewpoint and offers a different perspective even though the stories themselves vary. In “Things That Happened on Your Birthday” I intersperse historical moments with life moments. This proved fairly challenging and I felt it did not strike the right note until multiple revisions. I learned the art of writing a hermit crab flash fiction and eventually enjoyed the process.

What is your favorite book? Or who is your favorite author?

Writers are voracious readers and can rarely have one favourite book or author! My favourite remains PG Wodehouse, but I do keep up with the modern bestsellers, whether it’s Less by Andrew Sean Greer, The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins, or The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides.

What books did you enjoy reading as a child?

Like most readers I picked up the love of books from my parents. I read all the classics, like The Great Gatsby and the books of Jane Austen, especially Pride and Prejudice. I also enjoyed Enid Blyton and the mysteries like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.

Do you have a specific genre you enjoy writing the most?

At the moment I most prefer writing literary fiction, but I have dabbled in speculative and humorous fiction too. 

What part of the artistic process do you consider to be the most difficult, as well as most satisfying, and why.

Writing the first draft is the part I find most difficult, because the superb ideas in my head simply dissolve to mush on the paper. It takes a concerted effort to put one word after another and bring to life what you thought was a winning story.

On the other hand, I love revising my stories. The process of chiseling and imbuing life into the story, transforming it from plain words into something special and unique – that’s something I really enjoy! Even though it can be as challenging as drafting, at times!

Do you have any fears as a writer?

I do sometimes fear that some of my stories will forever remain unpublished. I fear that if I write and publish a novel it may sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench! But for the most part I remain optimistic about success.

What is your favorite thing about writing flash fiction?

That I can finish drafting a piece in a day, and multiple stories over a weekend! It’s another matter making them publication-worthy. It takes just as long or sometimes even longer than a short story!

What do you think of when you hear the phrase, “The Good Life?”

I think of family and friends, and feel complete gratitude.

---

Thank you, Gargi, for sharing your stories with us and for participating in this Q&A. We wish you the best in life and with all your writing endeavors!

Poet Moni Brar shares pieces of her own personal history as a reflection of a collective history in her poem, Migrant Wish. Through her poem she explores numerous challenges she has faced as a Punjabi immigrant who moved to Canada from India during her formative childhood years. The poem, along with much of her writing, has also helped her examine the themes of identity and belonging within the context of the immigrant experience.

Working through personal and collective intergenerational trauma, Brar’s poems can be challenging to write. However, poetry allows her to apply different lenses to those difficult occurrences in her own past and that of generations before her. Migrant Wish allows Brar to rewrite some of these experiences she and others have faced as immigrants, or at least question them.

“In Migrant Wish, I am trying to take the past and envision different futures with it,” said Brar. Although she grew up and lives in Canada, Brar often is asked ‘Where are you from?” an insensitive question based on the color of her skin but also deeply wounding for a woman who continues to struggle to find her place.

Moving between the first and second stanza of Migrant Wish, Brar tries to resolve the division she feels inside herself. 

“I have this desire to belong to an environment, culture and country that I feel like I will never truly belong to because I straddle two worlds,” said Brar. “So, it’s that living in the in-betweenness and this sense of having a splintered self that I try to reconcile.”  

Throughout her childhood and teenage years, Brar vividly remembers shouts of derogatory names and jeers of ‘Go Home!’ when out in the community, both alone and with her family.  In the first stanza, she explores that feeling. As a child she wondered, what is home?

“Is it a house that you go home to each night and sleep in,” asked Brar. “Or is it a place that you belong to, a place that accepts you and invites you to belong to it?” In Migrant Wish, Brar writes, “Don’t they know that such a place no longer exists? That you are firmly wedged between two worlds that continue to reject you? That the notion of home exists only in their minds?”

 The second stanza was inspired by the SS Komagata Maru, both a ship and an example of one of many incidents in the early 1900s where immigrants of Asian origin were denied entry into Canada and the United States. 

“Though that incident happened long ago, the ripple effect is still felt within my community and even within the embodied experience of being a Punjabi-Sikh person today.” said Brar. 

She shared her own experience of being denied entry recently when she was stuck in an airport in India for two days, meaning only to pass through on her travels. The airport officials wouldn’t allow her into the country, or to transit through, so yet again Brar had the sinking feeling she didn’t have a home despite being in the country of her birth.

“If Canada isn’t home and India isn’t home, then where do I belong?” asked Brar.

The third stanza calls out cultural appropriation, something Brar has spent a lot of time butting up against in recent years. Things she was once ridiculed for as a child, like turmeric tea and facemasks, are now seen as trendy for wellness in pop culture. 

“It’s fascinating to me that in my lifetime I have seen this transition,” Brar said. “Who is wellness for?” She points out how traditional ayurvedic remedies once used by diverse populations, including the economically-marginalized, are now being overshadowed by consumerism and capitalism, making these wellness remedies inaccessible for the originators. Turmeric, who knew? Oh yeah, Punjabi women, that’s who.

The final stanza references a poem called A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert. In her poems’ response, she questions what Gilbert really saw in Calcutta, wondering if perhaps he was looking through a lens of white privilege and needed to make the scenes of poverty, greed, and prostitution more palpable for himself rather than the reader. 

As a poet, Brar’s struggle is to stay true to her artistic voice.

“One of the big challenges I have in the artistic process is trying to find a way to honor art making and meaning making in my own cultural way and with my mother tongue,” said Brar. She is caught between trying to make art as a Punjabi woman and making it relevant to people who don’t come from the same worldview or frame of reference.

But oftentimes, the struggle comes back to a sense of belonging.

“My biggest concern mirrors this larger insecurity I have of not belonging,” Brar said.  Identity and belonging are not just themes of Brar’s writing, but rather a constant undercurrent. 

The exploration of the interconnectedness between identity, belonging and land has connected Brar with her Indigenous brothers and sisters in Canada. Upon hearing the name of our online literary journal, The Good Life Review, she was reminded of a concept central to Indigenous value systems, “the good life”—to live a life that is balanced, and in connection with family, community, and the land.

This Good Life is something Brar aims for in her work. 

“I am trying to create a balance through my writing,” Brar said, striving for connection with her family, her Punjabi and Canadian communities, and the land to ground her poetry.

Like Canada’s truth and reconciliation work, Brar is hoping to shed light on and address past wrongs and a dark history. 

“We are starting to face some of those dark moments in our past,” Brar said.  She categorizes her own poetry as ‘dark’ because she explores topics such as religious violence, sexual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and occupying both the role of the colonized and the colonizer. But the way she explores those topics and often the themes of belonging and land become transformed through the medium of poetry. 

“Poetry renders the dark into something beautiful,” said Brar.

You’ll find her beautiful poem, Migrant Wish, in Issue #10 of The Good Life Review.