Sejal Shah: “All my life, I have been biking with brakes on.”

Sejal Shah writes beautifully and poignantly about what it means to live in a culture that is obsessed with attaching labels to identities. She consistently raises the question: “What does it mean to move in a body often viewed as other?” In “Who’s Indian?” she explores the complexity of the question “Where are you from?” proclaiming at first, “Perhaps it’s not entirely possible to answer the question of where we come from, nor is it necessary.” Later, she complicates this answer, deciding, “Still, as a writer and generally curious person, I find myself wanting to know the answer to this question.” In “Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent,” she writes about the grief and loss of midlife, when one realizes that what they had planned for themselves hasn’t come to fruition. Yet within the prose is an acknowledgment that maybe the failure came from the plans themselves—in her case, because they were designed for success within a broken system of academia. Shah’s essays favor questions over answers; the book’s comfort with not-knowing and ambiguity is an antidote to the unearned certainty of American whiteness. Her writing is lyrical and fragmented, and it couldn’t be any other way: the language brilliantly skirts genre in ways that mimic the liminality, grief, and identity contained within each piece.

An essayist, fiction writer, and poet, Shah has taught creative writing at the University of Rochester, Mount Holyoke College, and elsewhere. She is currently on the MFA faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop. I’ve admired Shah’s work since reading “Even If You Can’t See It: Invisible Disability and Neurodiversity” in the Kenyon Review Online and was eager to interview her about her debut collection. Shah and I talked at length via phone in June. Below is a transcription of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

– Kelly Sundberg for Guernica

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