The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with Anupa Mehta
1 min readby Zafar Anjum
Let’s get down to brass tacks. Why do you write?
I write as the cathartic process of writing allows me to excavate beauty, even out of ugly things.
I write to make sense of the occasional senselessness of human action.
I write because I am a word junkie : writing offers me a high.
Tell us about your most recent book. What were you trying to say or achieve with it?
My most recent book is a collection of short stories titled UNSEASONAL RAIN, launched towards the end of 2014. Through these stories, I was looking minutely at the idea of loss, the many facets of human loss, and the manner in which it punctuates peoples lives. (Read a story from Unseasonal Rain here)
Describe your writing aesthetic.”Find beauty.” That’s what I tell myself repeatedly. Beauty in language, in form, in nuance, in words, and in the space between words…
The aesthetic is spare though. Very wabi. Much like a Zen monk or a Sufi’s world space. Bare. Yet, rich with undercurrents that hark to the fleeting sense of things, the ephemeral quality of life…
Who are your favorite authors?
Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, an American short story writer called Ann Beattie, Ambai, Jhumpa Lahiri…among so many more…
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