V.V. Ganeshananthan is an author, poet, and journalist, whose works have been featured in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota as a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. Ganeshananthan also co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast with Whitney Terrell, which explores writers and literature as mouthpieces for our cultural landscape. In this episode, we talk about Ganeshananthan’s 18-year-long writing process for her latest novel. Ganeshananthan maps her journey with Brotherless Night, from “bluffing her way into” a novella class during her own time as an MFA student to her techniques for “fielding facial expressions” of doubt over the novel’s completion. We revel in our common ground in the literary ecosystem, with Bloomsday poet Jabari Asim and Kate and Jessica’s longtime mentor, Michael Knight, both appearing on the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast. While fondly recounting how MFA writers at the University of Minnesota experiment in “speed-dating” to “workshop the workshop,” Ganeshananthan reflects on the value of an MFA program that isn’t genre-siloed and the living body of work that speaks to writers of color. Finally, while celebrating the release of Brotherless Night and asking what’s next for Ganeshananthan’s writing, we try to “remember how to start things.”

Published Date: November 7, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare Podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2023 AWP conference and book fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a third year and have invited a [inaudible 00:00:16] guest that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Podcast host:

Really excited to have you today. Our esteemed guest today is V. V., also known as Sugi Ganeshananthan, and we're excited to have you for a number of reasons. But there are a couple that I would like to start out with, which are things that we have in common, which is that we were both born in 1980.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Oh, that's a good year.

Podcast host:

It was a great year. And we have dogs that look very similar to one another.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Are you serious?

Podcast host:

Yeah. Can I show you a picture?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

How do you not lead with this in our correspondence?

Podcast host:

Well, I had to save some juicy stuff for the show. Let me find this picture of my dog who is no longer with us, but I saw the picture. She was 14 and she was my absolute first love.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Aw. Was she a schnoodle?

Podcast host:

She was just a regular poodle.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Aw, look at her little face.

Podcast host:

Doesn't your dog have the little white chin?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

My dog does have a little white chin, which we always attributed to the schnauzer in her because she is a schnoodle.

Podcast host:

A schnoodle?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Yes.

Podcast host:

I'm showing it like anyone cares. But this is important to you and me, I think.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

It is.

Podcast host:

They called her a parti poodle. Parti was spelled P A R T I, which accounted for the white on the paws and the chin. But really I think it was just, you're not getting a real poodle, like I cared. I just thought she was cute. I don't know.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

She was super cute.

Podcast host:

She was cute. So your dog at home, what's happening? Is it Kunj?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Kunju.

Podcast host:

Kunju?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Yeah, which means sweetie or honey or darling in Tamil. She's great. I just this morning was discussing with a pal how I wish that I could have brought her with me. She would've been very interested in all of this.

Crew member:

Of course.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

She likes to smell the books. She likes the smell of new books.

Podcast host:

Who doesn't?

Crew member:

Oh yes.

Podcast host:

I ask, who doesn't?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

She's on the verge, I think, of having her own dogstagram slash literary recommendations Instagram. So be on the lookout.

Podcast host:

I'd be your number one follower, so just put me down on the list because that sounds exciting. I'm all for pet literary content. I think it's important. But that's the end of our similarities, unfortunately. You were a Harvard grad. You have received fellowships from Yada McDowell American Academy in Berlin. I've not received any of those.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

We both host podcasts.

Podcast host:

That's the other thing. We both host podcasts. I should have led with that, and the dog, and 1980. Those are important things, I think. Okay. And you teach at the University of Minnesota in the MFA program-

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

I do.

Podcast host:

which is very exciting. We're going to actually do real podcasting content, which is good. That's what we're here to do. I want to hear about Brotherless Night, which was a novel 15 years in the making. I've heard a couple accounts. 10, 15?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

I started in January 2004, more or less and then I finished it in 2022. So, a while.

Podcast host:

Interesting.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

A while, that particular unit of time.

Podcast host:

It's been a long period of time and you're sitting on a panel that I won't be able to attend. So I wanted to get the bird's eye view of that talk, which is called 'Playing the Long Game: Novels and Memoirs 10 Years in the Making.'

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

So the quick and dirty version of writing a novel for 18 years. I feel like I should start talking like the micro machine man right now. So in January 2004, I started the book. I was an MFA student and I had put the draft of my first novel away and basically started messing around with a little bit of research that I had found while researching that other novel that didn't fit into that book and wrote a fictionalized version of that bit of research to get into a class in my MFA program where I had not registered because it was a class about form and I thought I wasn't interested in that form.

That's actually not the reason to sign up for a class, weirdly. It's just, do you want to be in the class with that teacher and that set of classmates who were taking the class? So I discovered that the rest of my classmates had been intelligent enough to sign up for that class and I had been foolish. So I tried to essentially hoodwink my way into the class. And it was a novella class, so I was like, "I will go first if you let me in. I will workshop first." I had no novella.

Podcast host:

That's an important lesson. If you're going to go ask somebody for something, bring something with you. A negotiation tool.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

A negotiation tool where you have nothing and you're just fully bluffing. So then I wrote, not a novella, but a very long short story for the first week of the class. And then that became the beginning of the novel. And the class was very encouraging about it. And it was a novella class with Ethan Canin and then I kept working on it from there. And it was what I worked on for a lot of my time as an MFA student. And then I was on fellowship for a year at Exeter where I worked on it. And then I put it away because I didn't get another fellowship and I got into journalism school, where I didn't really want to go but ended up anyway. And then was running out of money in New York in the fall of 2006 and was talking to my [inaudible 00:05:43], and she was like, "Well, which one's closer to done?"

And it was actually the first novel that was closer to done, and so we sold them. And then Brotherless Night was not called Brotherless Night then and it was sold as part of a two book deal, which was...

Important note: pre 2008, so before the financial crash, who knows that that would've happened in a later period of time? It was lucky and also difficult because it was a book that was sold without having been finished, which I think was part of the challenge. So that was how it began and then I'd been working on it since then and have spent time teaching at the University of Michigan and on fellowships at different places. And I've just been working on it and been working on it and then sometimes not working on it and then sometimes working on it. And then sometimes fielding questions like, "Will you truly finish?"

Podcast host:

From people who have a certain expectation?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Yeah. And when I say fielding questions, I really mean fielding facial expressions. There's a facial expression for, "That person's not finishing. That person is a full on screw up,"

Podcast host:

Is it the facial expression I get from him a lot of the time? That one.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

It's similar. Then there's the facial expression you've got to give back, which is like, "I don't see your facial expression and I'm just going to keep plugging away." And I was also fortunate to have a ton of people around me who were like, "You can do it. Keep going," like my agent. I went through a couple editors. My first editor left Random House, my second editor left Random House, and now I have a third lovely editor. And then I shockingly turned it in and wrote the acknowledgements in July of 22 and was done.

Podcast host:

And now it's here.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Now it's here, confusingly.

Podcast host:

Well, a hardy congratulations on that story. We hear a lot of publishing journeys on the show. That's a good long one, which is an encouraging thing to tell other people out there that it can be done.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Yeah. Be on the lookout for the facial expression. Have your own facial expression prepared.

Podcast host:

Get it prepared. That's a good takeaway, a solid takeaway.

Okay. I want to talk about Fiction Nonfiction, which I had the joy to dig into in preparation for our talk today. I love the premise that whatever we're talking about, the cultural here and now has already been done somewhere in literature and you make those connections. Tell me about the origin of that podcast and how you became partners with Whitney, is it Terrell or Terrell?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Terrell.

Podcast host:

And how that landed with the literary hub.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Sure. Well, I have to give, I mean really for the idea, full credit to Whitney. It was his idea. Like me, he's a journalist and novelist.

Podcast host:

And were you guys buds?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

We were not buds.

Podcast host:

Oh my gosh.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

We both had been taught by Jim McPherson at the Iowa Writers Workshop about a decade and change apart. And I was visiting faculty at the workshop in the fall when Jim died late in the summer of '16. I actually met Whitney at his memorial service, and then a bunch of people went out to dinner after that. And then he and I kept in touch and then he was like, "So I'm thinking of doing this show. You seem like you would be fun to do the show with." And I was like, "I've seemed fun? Excellent."

Podcast host:

Evidence [inaudible 00:08:56]

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

He just knows a lot. He probably still does know a lot more about podcasts than I do. And we both knew John Freeman, who was working at Literary Hub. We were connected to Johnny Diamond and then had a conversation with him about it. I think we were Lit Hub's second podcast. We were doing it every two weeks, and now it's a weekly show. And it is super fun.

So an example of a recent episode about things being in literature before the news. We had Ann Beattie on. I'm still blown away that we actually got Ann Beattie to be on the show.

Podcast host:

That's amazing.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

We got Ann Beattie to be on the show and she talked about Bartelme's short Story, the Balloon, which was in the New Yorker. And she had written an essay for Lit Hub about that in relation to the Chinese spy balloon. I really fun to talk to her. She's totally brilliant. That's a good example. The balloon has been in your books already. And look at the sky, and Barthelme has thoughts about how you should look up at the sky.

Podcast host:

Yeah, check that one out. It's a really good episode. That's super fun. Very cool. Our Anne Beatty was Jericho Brown. We have constantly been surprised at how generous authors are to come on and just give it a whirl and talk about-

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Your list of guests is awesome.

Podcast host:

Thank you. Well yes, clearly.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

I don't mean me. I was looking up your episodes and was like, "oh, fun."

Podcast host:

Yeah, super fun. And Jericho comes on and sings Whitney Houston. How do we get to do this?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Yeah.

Podcast host:

It's pretty awesome. It's a lot of fun. I'm glad that your podcast is in the world.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Thank you, and yours.

Podcast host:

Very, very cool. I was going through your list and seeing all the connections that we had. One of our poets was on your show, Jabari Asim.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

He's so great.

Podcast host:

Oh yeah, he's great. He's great. So we are co-founders of Bloomsday Literary, and our third partner is in Boston. So that's the connection to Jabari. But then also you had Michael Knight on the show who was our mentor.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Oh, he was so lovely. That episode, he was so funny.

Podcast host:

He's a funny guy.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

That was an episode about literary dinner parties that Whitney thought up after the Mar-a-Lago dinner incident involving Ye and Nick Fuentes.

Podcast host:

Yeah, fun times. That's the thing that I love about AWP and the literary community and ecosystem in general.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

It's a small world.

Podcast host:

There's all these connections that can be made both from the literature but also from the people who inhabit these spaces. Okay, could you tell us a little bit about University of Minnesota and your work there with the MFA students?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Sure.

Podcast host:

We're particularly interested in what you're doing to cultivate writers of color and nourish them in the MFA. Since there's been a lot of talk about decolonizing the classroom and the varying ways that programs are starting to teach workshop, how to do the model of workshops. I'd love to hear about how that works at the University of Minnesota.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Sure. So quick context is that I've been there since the fall of 2015. The program is 25 years old, and I think it's one of the few MFA programs that was founded by women. That's not actually a common history. It's a three genre program. It's three years, three students per genre. And it's not genre siloed in the way that some programs are. So when I teach a fiction workshop, there's regularly an nonfiction writer, a poet in it.

Podcast host:

Which is already breaking the rules, the conventions.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Well, it's great because then you get a poet in your class who's like, "But why is setting like that?" And then you're like, "Oh, right now I have to actually articulate that." And it turns out that I have been assuming that everyone understands that and maybe we don't all understand it the same way and we should talk about it. It's a great way to keep the conversation fresh. And I'm so grateful to have those students who are writing across genres in my classes. In terms of nourishing writers of color, that is a priority for us. So for example, we've had a conversation series led largely by my colleague Doug Kearney about workshopping the workshop. And there's a lot of conversations going on about, of course, the Matt Salis' book, the Felicia Rose Chavez book. We had on the show the editors of Letters to a Writer of Color. That book is so good. Oh my God,

Podcast host:

I keep hearing that. I haven't read yet.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

It's so good. Everyone go by that book. It came out on Tuesday and it's fantastic. I'm sure we'll be talking about that book. Our students are funded in different ways. So sometimes I've been funded through teaching, sometimes through fellowships. And I have two new colleagues in fiction who started...

 Oh my God. I'm on sabbatical, so my mind is a bit of a sieve.

Podcast host:

I understand. I understand.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

When did they start? Oh my God, they started this year. They started in the fall of 2022. Amina Ahmad and Megan Giddings, who is also here at AWP, and it's been wonderful to have them join the faculty and join this conversation. So we are always talking about how you teach workshop, and I think for example, when I ran the fiction workshop a while ago, we used Matt's book and people had the option to choose how they wished to be workshopped. We had a little conversation early on where people went through the pros and cons for themselves personally, of each model that he puts in there. People came up with their own hybrids. It was like a speed dating thing where the writers paired up with each other and moved in opposite directions around our circle and were like, "Well, what about this one? Well, what about this one?" I saw people experiment with them, pick one model and then pick a different one.

Podcast host:

I'm over here making flabbergasted hand motions, which I'm now narrating to our live audience, but it's not rocket science. It's just something that we had not done in the workshop for so long. It was like, "Don't say anything. Please don't speak. Be open to every criticism that is coming from the room, regardless of its position or framing for your narrative."

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Sure. But I think one of the great things that Matt's book does is that he moves the conversation beyond that. Because at least for me, I a fairly long time ago had not really been telling my students to be quiet. Some of them were opting for it anyway. And Matt has an interesting thing in his book about why people would do that. But I feel like that book kind of takes the ball down the field and is like, "What are the kinds of conversations that happen when you don't do that? What kind of preparation could you do for workshop differently? How could you articulate who your audience is?" That book and all of the other books that I feel like are part of this conversation.

I should also mention Craft and Conscience by Kavita Das. All of these books, somewhere in the book are like, "And I hope my book is not the last word on this subject. It should be the beginning of the conversation." And I'm like, Yes, thank you. That's so lovely. And that conversation does seem to be growing, expanding with new books on this topic being published at least twice a year.

Podcast host:

Yeah. That's amazing. What is next for you? Brotherless Night came out?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

I'm on this panel at 12:10.

Podcast host:

That's as far as I go.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Yeah.

Podcast host:

Just don't make me cast in the future.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

I don't look forward 20 years because that didn't work out so well for me last time. I was like, "Oh, I'll be done with this in near moments." No, no.

Podcast host:

Also a good life lesson brought to you today.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Yeah, I think I'm fishing around. I might have a residency coming up, so I'll probably use the residency to fish around some more. I'll take the first stint to sleep, which was an important thing that I learned at a residency where someone was like, "You're allowed to sleep for just the first two days."

Podcast host:

Good night. Tuck in.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

And then I'll try to get back to work.

Podcast host:

I love it.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Could you have any guests on who remember how to start new things?

Podcast host:

I'll ask. I have a full slate and I'll ask that question. We will get to the bottom of this and we will let you know.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Great, because I haven't started anything new since 2004.

Podcast host:

We're here to serve writers, and that's what we're going to do for you today.

Crew member:

That's all right.

Podcast host:

Okay. Our last question, not the most consequential question, but an important one. What's the best thing you've overheard at AWP in 2023 so far?

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

So I got here last night, but I will say that one of the things that happens is that I continually overhear people who are trying to get to something on time, but it's sort of management of time at AWP is really difficult, basically, because you're going to run into people that you know between point A and point B. And so how do you calculate your time to assume you'll run into three people between? I came to this booth to record this podcast at a certain time.

Podcast host:

The right time. And we told you to come back.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

It's fine, it's fine. I was like, "Oh shit. What a golden opportunity. I'll wander the book fair." And then I was like, "Oh shit, don't run into anyone. If you run into anyone, you'll be late."

Podcast host:

So if you saw a hooded figure, it was spooky Ganeshananthan trying to avoid you so she could be on time.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

And I've noticed you're like, "Delight! I've seen this... Oh, no, no, not now. Not now. Head down."

Podcast host:

We've been virtual and weird for the last two years, so you're going to have to calculate an extra 20 for everything, I think.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Right. Listening to people be like, "I have to get to-"

And yes, I sympathize with you, and I look forward to seeing you later.

Podcast host:

That's lovely.

Crew member:

We'll eventually meet up.

Podcast host:

Exactly. It was a joy to get to know you and a pleasure to have on the show. Thank you so much for your time today.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Thank you so much for having me on. I love your show.

Podcast host:

Thanks so much.

V.V. Ganeshananthan:

Happy AWP to everyone.

Crew member:

Yes. Awesome. Thank you.

Phuc Luu:

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary, hosted by Kate Martin Williams, Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trustee and hardworking intern is Elena Welsh, with special thanks to Juanita Lester and the AWP staff, without whom this would not be possible.