Shashi Bhat has written three books of fiction, most recently the story collection Death by a Thousand Cuts. Her novel-in-stories, The Most Precious Substance on Earth, was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award for fiction. She is the editor of EVENT and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.
Death by a Thousand Cuts is breathtaking collection about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman. Poignant, unflinching, and sharply funny, these stories wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.
Interviewed by Heike Lettrari
Heike Lettrari (HL): Thank you so, so much for an incredible book of short stories. Death by a Thousand Cuts was a masterclass in crunchy first sentences, sumptuous and well-paced middle sections and zinging final sentences. What incredible emotional punch! To start, can you please elaborate on the encouragement that Professor Michael Koch gave you in a writing workshop when he remarked that he’d sure like to see you write about something you care about (as you mention in the Acknowledgements)? What exactly was that something for you and how does it show up in your writing?
Shashi Bhat (SB): Thank you for your generous words and for this thoughtful question. Professor Koch taught the first fiction workshop class I took as an undergraduate at Cornell University. At the time when he made that comment, I had written at least two stories featuring middle-aged white women, both mothers, as protagonists. I was a twenty-year-old woman of colour with no children. What’s funny is that I would take details from my own life—I remember giving one character the treehouse from my childhood backyard—but I would attach those details to characters who were, at least on the surface, very different from me. It didn’t occur to me to write about a South Asian Canadian woman or girl. I hadn’t ever seen that in a story. I don’t know if, when my professor made that comment, he was referring to my age or ethnicity or if he felt I was missing some more profound connection to my writing, but now when I write I try to bring my own experience to a story and to write about issues that matter deeply to me and about situations that generate for me strong emotions: misogyny, bodily autonomy, chronic illness, female independence, female rage.
HL: I truly appreciated that these stories showed us a number of different, complicated realities of being an Indian woman of colour in Canada, but also with so many relatable layers (at least – there were several for me!). I appreciated the honesty, frankness and humour of the characters, and the gentle generosity of getting to experience a little of these characters’ ways of encountering other people. For example, “Indian Cooking” couldn’t have been written by a white, daughter-of-immigrants woman like me. And “Her Ex Writes a Novel” hit differently with the callousness of the ex barely concealing the protagonist’s identity as an Indian woman. What was most important about bringing these cultural aspects of these women’s truths into writing for you? And doing so with some humour!
SB: I try to approach writing about my cultural background by making it not the main issue or theme of a story, but rather an aspect of identity that compounds tension or complicates a character’s experience. I think the incident in the story “Indian Cooking” could happen to a person of a different background! But it was interesting for me to consider that this is an Indian woman who has in many ways assimilated to North American culture, and she injures herself while frying a traditional Indian snack, to paint a certain impression for her guests. It added another layer of complication to a story about a woman wrestling with a change in her identity. In “Her Ex Writes a Novel,” the character’s cultural identity is another way for her ex to objectify and belittle her; another layer of power he has over her.
HL: Can we talk a little bit about short form writing? I was serious in mentioning your first and final sentences – did you labour over those the most? They evoked in me a lovely sense of wonder and pride for the short story – how so much can be said with the sentences that sandwich a story a few thousand words in length. But further, the overall mastery of the form in these stories is what really supported connecting me as a reader to these characters. Talk to me about how you approach the form of the short story and what you find compelling about it.
SB: There’s nothing I love more than the short story form. Sometimes tears literally come to my eyes when I think about it, which is very embarrassing to admit. I love its artfulness and compression and intensity, its tendency towards omission; how the arc of a story can feel like a tightrope walk and its ending can feel like falling off a cliff. I spend the most time on endings, because they offer the greatest opportunity for emotional impact. I’m always thinking about what the reader will feel in the white space on the page after the story ends.
HL: It’s common for writers to start with a short story published in a literary magazine, followed by another and then another, which becomes a debut collection, followed by, perhaps a first novel. But your path has taken the opposite approach, with two novels published before this collection. Have you always written short fiction, or is this a more recent shift to shorter forms? How did that come about?
SB: I think of myself primarily as a short story writer, and I did start by publishing stories in literary magazines. My two novels both employed short story structure for each of their chapters (though they each focused on a single protagonist), and many of those had been published in journals before they made it into the books. These stories are a selection of ones I wrote over the past fifteen years, and I was writing them alongside my novels. I still publish in literary magazines (and am the editor of one), and I’m grateful to them for publishing my work, especially when I was still very green.
HL: It is always a joy to me when I see writers take inspiration from a wide variety of sources, and your “Notes” section at the end of Death of a Thousand Cuts was wonderfully diverse. Can you please comment on your process of decision making when you encounter material of the world (essays, other stories, movies, articles, technology, podcasts, etc.) as to what will meaningfully inspire your work, or make a presence? Is it something you do consciously, or more of an instinct that you follow based on what continues to resonate with you?
SB: While writing, references often come to mind in the moment. I consume a lot of media and I like making connections; I find intertextuality fascinating, like a door that opens to another door. Media references can also be an efficient means of characterization, of indicating era, and an opportunity for humour. In “Giantess,” for example, the giantess watches the show Friends while longing for friendship, which I thought was both funny and poignant. In “What You Can Live Without,” the character references a few news articles, because I was imagining her as someone who is constantly googling her situation.
There were also cases where I did research; for example, when writing “Her Ex Writes a Novel,” I listened to a podcast episode where they analyzed Stravinsky’s Firebird, because I wanted to better understand the musical technique and the narrative behind it, so I acknowledged that in the “Notes” section, too.
HL: Many writers owe debts to those whose writing inspired them; please share with us (those of the Victoria Festival of Authors community) what some of your all-time favourites are to read, re-read or learn from.
SB: There are so many, but some of my favourite story collections are Danielle Evans’ Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and The Office of Historical Corrections; Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies; Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife;ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere; Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House; and George Saunders’ Tenth of December. I gravitate toward realist or lightly speculative, character-driven stories that mix humour and humanity, and which have the kinds of endings that stay with you.