Neema Avaisha is an author and a public school civics and history teacher in Boston. She was born and raised in southern West Virginia to Indian immigrant parents. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Town, explores her early life and development in Appalachia and was published with West Virginia University Press. It was a finalist for the 2022 New England Book Award and won for Book Riot’s 2022 Best LGBTQ+ Memoir. In this episode, we talk about Avashia’s unique position as writer of a queer memoir that depicts one person’s experience and the clear understanding that she’s not a representative for all of queer Appalachia. Given all that, she says was still surprised at the “emotionally resonant” reception she received. We discuss Avashia’s self-given imperative to reinject nuance and depth into the existing narrative and sociopolitical climate. She sets herself the goal of continuously asking “why?” throughout her work and aims to create a relationship with her reader that allows space for exploration and discourages a rush for easy answers. We got to chat about her unconventional route to publication with WVU (hooray for indies!), what book tour for a memoir is like when your audience seemingly already knows your personal life, and the joy of finding a publisher with shared geographic roots. Check out her book and the various outlets for which she rights about education, LGBTQ and BIPOC issues, and motherhood.

Published Date: March 10, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the F***ing Shakespeare Podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2023 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for third year and have invited [inaudible 00:00:15] 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.

Speaker 2:

Author of Another Appalachia, which we will discuss today, Neema Avashia was born and raised in Southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a civics and history teacher in the Boston Public School since 2003. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place is out now with West Virginia University Press. Welcome to the show.

Neema Avashia:

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 2:

Are you still at Boston Public Schools?

Neema Avashia:

I am. I'm on parental leave right now because my partner and I had a little baby in November.

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh.

Neema Avashia:

That's my main job right now.

Speaker 2:

Holy smokes. You're in it.

Neema Avashia:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Oh my word, November.

Neema Avashia:

This is like the first time I've left the house since November.

Speaker 2:

And probably first full night's sleeps. Is your partner silently stabbing daggers in your eyes?

Neema Avashia:

I think probably, but she's very gracious and hasn't told me.

Speaker 2:

She's keeping it to herself.

Phuc Luu:

Like a good partner does.

Speaker 2:

That's amazing. Congratulations on the new baby.

Neema Avashia:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Well, we have lots in common. I did not grow up in Appalachia, but I went to grad school there and my grandparents live, my grandfather lives in the foothills of the Appalachian Trail. It's one of my favorite places on the planet, and I can't wait to talk about your experience and your awesome new book.

Neema Avashia:

I'm psyched to talk about it. Anytime I get a chance to talk about Appalachia, I'm excited.

Speaker 2:

Can we talk about what it was like launching that book, which finalists for the 2022 New England Book Award, as well as Book Riots 2022 Best LGBTQ+ Memoir? What was it like launching and going on some book tours out there?

Neema Avashia:

It was amazing. I was really nervous before launch because I have been outside of Appalachia for as long as I lived inside of Appalachia. I'm half-and-half at this point, and I just had a lot of trepidation about not wanting people in Appalachia to feel like this book didn't represent them. I had had the experience of reading a book about Appalachia that did not represent me, and I didn't want to replicate that. And I felt like I've been really careful about not speaking about anything other than my own experience. But that didn't mean that readers weren't going to feel a way about what they read on the page, but the last 12 months, which the book came out March, 2022, have been such an incredible experience of what it is like to engage with readers around your life, which is what happens when you write an essay collection.

I didn't totally anticipate that like, oh yeah, I walk into rooms and people already know everything about me, right? That was unique. People would like, Laura would come in with me and they'd be like, "Hi Laura." And she'd be like, "What? How do you know who I am?" And it's like, "Well, you're in the book, too." It's been really phenomenal. I think the reception of the book in Appalachia has just been pretty emotionally resonant. Lots of people coming to readings and talking about finding themselves in the book, finding a sense of comfort in the book. Lots of young people really feeling like there's a map for them where maybe there wasn't a map before. And outside of Appalachia, I also think it's made people think in a different way about their perceptions of Appalachia. The cover of my book is a very famous site in southern West Virginia called Babcock Mill.

Almost every West Virginia family has a picture at that mill in the fall. It's kind of classic. But most of those pictures aren't Indian people. And so even if someone doesn't read my book, just looking at the cover and seeing the phrase Appalachia and the word queer and Indian people on the cover kind of disrupts their perception. And so that's been a lot of what I feel like happens when I read outside of Appalachia is it's about disrupting perception. It's about pushing people to consider a region in the country that often really gets stereotyped with more nuance than they've given it in the past.

Speaker 2:

Right, right. Which I wanted to ask you about that because I think of late, what we think about maybe is, especially if we're talking about Memoir in Appalachia, we're going to talk about JD Vance. Hillbilly Elegy came out, what year was that?

Neema Avashia:

2016. I know.

Speaker 2:

You know. Of course you know. Yes. And Jess and I watched that book launch because we had been in grad school in Tennessee. We have ties to Appalachia. My co-founder at Bloomsday, Jessica Cole, wishes she were here doing this interview, because she also lives in Boston, now. But we watched that book come out and catch fire and gain a lot of traction. And what's interesting to me is that your book seems to be an argument for nuance itself, which I think we're so lacking in the increasingly polarized political debate world that we're in now.

Neema Avashia:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

How are you injecting that nuance? Is that your work, do you feel like with memoir?

Neema Avashia:

That's 100% my work. I mean, that's why the title is another, right?

Speaker 2:

Yes. Yes.

Neema Avashia:

But the word Another inherently implies there's more than one.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Neema Avashia:

And I'm not saying mine is the one either, but rather that actually there are so many anothers that you need to consider when you think about Appalachia, that's the opposite of what that book, whose name I refuse to say, does, right? Which is it purports to be like a definitive text about a place. And yet there are no queer people in that book. There are no immigrants in that book. There are no black people in that book. There are no radicals in that book. And that book is profoundly disrespectful to the people who it's talking about and that it blames their conditions on them. It doesn't implicate government, it doesn't implicate industry. It doesn't look at what are all the factors. It doesn't talk about the pharmaceutical companies and the role they played in destroying my home. It's just you are poor people. You are deficient and your problems are your fault, right? And that, I think, is actually the narrative that most of America has bought wholesale about Appalachia.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Neema Avashia:

And not in small part due to the fact that that book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 54 weeks.

Speaker 2:

For so long.

Neema Avashia:

It is the only book about Appalachia that has gotten that kind of coverage and that kind of platform, right? So it's not people's fault necessarily that they have that perception.

Speaker 2:

Because it's so widespread.

Neema Avashia:

It's ubiquitous.

Speaker 2:

Access to it.

Neema Avashia:

And then it became a Netflix movie and then it is a ubiquitous stereotype. So I'm not deluded to think that my little book is going to compete with that book. Mainstream publishing was not interested in my book. Okay, that's fine. But that doesn't prevent me from telling my story and from hoping that any person who reads my story has to think a little bit differently when they're done. A lot of the work I did in my essays was to try to ask the question, why? Why are people making the choices that they're making? What is the root of where we find ourselves right now? I mean, that's the question I think about in my personal life all the time. How have we gotten here? Right?

Speaker 2:

Right. Right.

Neema Avashia:

This level of polarization, it didn't just happen. We got here. And what is the combination of factors that got us here? And I think in the case of a lot of the people who I grew up with, who I love deeply and have lots of care for, there's a lot of grief that people are grappling with. They've watched their region be decimated by a combination of globalization, taking jobs out by the destruction of unions, by big pharma pouring pills into communities. You can't see all of that and not feel a lot of grief.

Speaker 2:

The defunding of public schools.

Neema Avashia:

Right? You are going to feel deep grief. And then who is offering you a narrative to explain your grief? Only a set of politicians who are really interested in polarization. They want you to feel angry. They don't want you to process your grief.

Phuc Luu:

Exactly.

Neema Avashia:

They don't want you to understand what's happening. They just want you to be mad and blame somebody. It's a very human response, right? When you're grieving to be angry if no one helps you do anything else besides be angry.

Speaker 2:

Right. And then what's on the other side of that? What exists for those people on the other side?

Neema Avashia:

That's right. So I feel like that is the area that I was trying to push into is like, can you see people's grief? Can I help you understand? I think the combination of COVID and literally the distancing of people and then social media, which is such a flat place, has gotten us to a really ugly place in this country where people don't have nuance, they don't see each other with any depth. And I think in my book, I was trying to re-inject that depth into how people thought about folks in Appalachia.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that struck me most reading your essays, particularly at the endings of your essays are they're so pointed. I always, at each chapter break, I took a pause and reflected on what you yourself, as the narrative I, in remove from the story that you're telling, what you were doing interrogating your own experience. And at the end of the book, it made me, I think the communication in your writing style made me then say, "This writer is doing that and as a reader I'm to do that, too." And I think it's the thing that I see, it's the thing I love most about Didion or Mary Karr, and I really felt that in your pages as well. It was a very satisfying read. I'm so glad that this book is in the world.

Neema Avashia:

Thank you. I think that's exactly right. I like to say I didn't write a book of answers. I wrote a book of questions. It's sometimes why when people say, my book's a memoir, I'm like, I don't think it is. Because I think people have an expectation in memoir of an answer.

Speaker 2:

Right. Right, right, right.

Neema Avashia:

I don't have any answers. It took me 43 years to find the questions. I'm going to die without the answers to these questions, right? But, I think that if I make my grappling with the questions transparent, it invites readers to do the same. And that's actually what I've received back from readers as feedback is like, I have the same question you have, and I felt really alone with this question.

Speaker 2:

Oh man.

Neema Avashia:

And then I realized you also have this question and that's what I think people want, right?

Speaker 2:

What a gift?

Neema Avashia:

You don't want to be alone with your questions. And I think so often we are. Again, the combination of physical isolation of a social media culture where you curate your identity to such an extent that it seems like you don't have any questions. People are lonely and people have hard questions that they're grappling with and they don't have a place to go with them. And I think that books can be that place if writers are willing to make themselves vulnerable in that way and say, "I don't have the answer either, but I'll tell you my question and I'll show you the set of experiences that are informing how I think about the question. And maybe by doing that I reveal something new to you about the question and new to myself and together then we keep working on the question together."

Speaker 2:

Rather than the book that shall not be named, where it's pointing, this is how you feel. I'm pointing this is how you ...

Phuc Luu:

These are the answers.

Neema Avashia:

These are the answers.

Speaker 2:

And there's no space for the reader to come to that text with anything.

Neema Avashia:

That's right.

Speaker 2:

There's no room.

Neema Avashia:

That's right. I have the answer. The answer is ... blank. And I'm like, "No, there's no answer." We are living in deeply complicated times. To pretend like there are easy answers to these questions is a delusion. I mean, it's very tempting. Right? People want easy answers. So again, blame immigrants for all of our problems, blame queer people for all of our problems. We have a lot of problems. It's easy to latch onto that as the answer. It's not actually the answer. And you're going to fundamentally blame those people, do terrible violence to them and at the end of it still have your problem. But it is I think, a tool that's being used right now in really violent ways.

Speaker 2:

I agree. I agree. You said something a little bit earlier about the book not finding traction with mainstream publishers. Can you tell me a little bit about West Virginia University Press and how another Appalachia found its way there? I keep saying that as though the book walked up to the press and knocked on the door. I'm sure that you were very involved in that process, so I'd love to hear about it.

Neema Avashia:

It does actually feel like the book walked up to the press. I feel like after you publish a book, it's like, oh, you're your own being. There's a little bit of a preview of having a child, I think, where it's like, "I birthed you and now you just do what you do. And I watch and I'm like, oh, okay. Is that what you're doing now? Cool. All right. I'm observing."

Speaker 2:

What do you need from me?

Neema Avashia:

That's right. I'm just observing. So, I don't have an MFA, I didn't follow a very traditional path to publishing. I'm a full-time teacher. I wrote this book in fits and spurts over the course of four years, between 2016 and 2020. And then I was like, "Well, I have a book now what do I do?" And people told me the traditional route, which is okay, you write your proposal, you write your query letter, you query agents, you see who wants your book and request a full manuscript.

Speaker 2:

You say the word proposal and a large part of my heart dies. The proposal is such a daunting task.

Neema Avashia:

It's so much work and it's so hard. I was really lucky. I have a friend, EB Bartels, she recently published a book called Good Grief that's about grieving your pets.

Speaker 2:

I've heard. I've heard of the book.

Neema Avashia:

She's incredible. And so she really was like, "Here's my proposal. Just use it as a template."

Speaker 2:

Oh my God.

Neema Avashia:

Such a gift.

Speaker 2:

Shout out to friends like that.

Neema Avashia:

'Coz I had no idea what goes into this. And she had also received it from someone else. It was like this insider knowledge that I didn't have, right? And she really opened the door and I can't say enough about how important I think that is. If you have the knowledge, share the knowledge.

Nevertheless, I did all those things and it didn't work. Agents were super nice. They were very complimentary. They were like, "This is a beautiful book and I don't know how to sell it, because your book is about queer Indian Appalachian people of whom there are like seven. And what is the mainstream audience for this book?" I think, for me, I just took that as feedback that, okay, that's not the space for this book. So then, what is the space? And I have some mentors, Geeta Kothari, who's a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Jane McCafferty who teaches at Carnegie Mellon, and they were like, "Well, why don't you think about presses with a mission and presses that have geographic roots in an area that's similar to the one that you're writing about.

"And think about, can people who share the values that you share sell your book?" And that was the best feedback anybody could have given me.

Phuc Luu:

That's awesome.

Neema Avashia:

So then thinking about places like Hub City, which is right down the way. Belt Publishing, WVU, these are nonprofit presses. They have a deep mission to tell stories of the region. That's what they want to do, and they know how to sell it because that is what they're doing all the time, right?

Speaker 2:

Right.

Neema Avashia:

So then when I submitted to WVU, they were like, "Oh, we want this and we totally know how to sell it."

Speaker 2:

Nice.

Neema Avashia:

And that has proven to be exactly right. I can't think of a press that could have done a better job.

Speaker 2:

That's great.

Neema Avashia:

Because my questions are their questions, too. This is not like, "Oh, this is a book and we need to sell it because our job is to sell books." This is people who are like, "No, this story is our story." And I think that that is the thing I would, if I could tell writers something, I think that's actually the thing I would say is everybody deserves a press that wants to fight for their story, and that's actually the most important thing is to find people who want to fight for your story. I don't think that people always get that, and I don't think they always know that that's actually the thing you should be looking for. Not necessarily what is the name of the press or what is the size, but what's the belief in your story?

Speaker 2:

That's really good.

Neema Avashia:

I think my book, it's a little book. It's had a really nice long tail and it's done some really cool things. Got coverage on CNN. Funky things have happened with this book. I think they've happened because the press really believed in it.

Speaker 2:

That's great. I love hearing those stories. I think we need to say it again louder, for the folks louder in the back. Because there is a certain, when you talk to young authors, or not young authors, but maybe debut authors who have a manuscript and they're trying to place it, there's a certain level of desperation, especially if they've been out on submission and things aren't going well, and you just want to say, "Hang tight and really make sure that where you put this manuscript, the values align."

Neema Avashia:

Yes. Placement is everything. I think placement is everything when you're publishing essays or stories, also. Right? I always think it's interesting when people are like, "I met a goal of submitting a hundred times a year." And I'm like, "Awesome and exhausting and also maybe submit 15 times, but be really strategic. Think about who's going to champion this story. What are the set of identities and intersections in your work that presses or journals hold? Because if you go to those places, I think you're going to have a lot more success than throwing spaghetti at the wall and being like, I submitted here. I submitted here." You can do that. But there's a cost. There's an emotional cost to doing that.

Speaker 2:

Yes. Okay. We are all going to come sit at your feet so we can be instructed. This is great. This is very good. First novel, first memoir, first book advice. Second and third as well. I don't think it changes. This is the part of the podcast where I completely lose my thread, my train of thought. It just choo-chooed right out of the station. Day two brain. Choo-choo. Here it is. It came back. We had "Sugi" Ganeshananthan on yesterday. I should take a moment to pause and send my apologies out into Instagram live land because we only got half of her face. Because she was our day one guinea pig, which feels very unfair. It was a lovely interview.

Phuc Luu:

It was fantastic.

Speaker 2:

I'm very sad about the half a face thing. If it's any consolation, it was just my nose. So there's that.

Phuc Luu:

That's why you're sitting right here, right now.

Neema Avashia:

I get to be the beneficiary of that. Okay. Well, thank you.

Speaker 2:

We are standing on her shoulders today. But to pay her back, to right the wrongs from yesterday, she asked a very good question and we would like to know if we can have any of our podcast guests give her some helpful advice. She spent the last 15 to 17 years, I don't know, 18 years writing a novel that was recently published, Brotherless Night, and now she needs to know how to start. 'Coz I asked her the question, "What's next for you?" And she was like, "I'm going to sleep. And then I don't know, somebody help me figure out how to start." So what are you going to do next? And do you have some strategy about the next project?

Neema Avashia:

I think that giving yourself the permission to take the time you need is really important. Because I felt like even during launch, literally people were like, "What are you working on next?" And I'm like, "I am launching a book. This is a lot of work. I don't know how to, my publicity brain and my creative brain aren't the same brain."

They are very different, and when one is on, it's really hard to access the other one. So her book just came out. My understanding is it's doing amazing. I had a friend who told me to read it right before I came here. I think first it's like, give yourself permission to be like, "I'm in publicity brain right now," and that means I am thinking about this book. Right? You spend 15 years on a book? It deserves your care for another year while you get it out into the world and do it justice in all the ways you can. I sometimes think the publishing turnover pressure is actually really destructive to creativity because it doesn't let you acknowledge that there are conditions you need for creativity and launching a book is not those conditions.

Speaker 2:

It's not?

Neema Avashia:

No. In fact, it is not at all. So that, I think, is the first thing.

Speaker 2:

That's good.

Neema Avashia:

I think the second thing, and this is maybe a little different for nonfiction than fiction, I'm not sure, but it took me a lot of time to figure out my questions for my first book. It took me my whole life to figure out those questions. So I'm like, "I don't think I'm going to figure out the questions, that mess. It took 43 years to get this first set for a 42,000 word book. So at this rate, I get a question a year for the next 43 years? Okay. That's fine."

There's something about just being patient with yourself and knowing, I don't think it'll take 43 years. I already have started working on a second collection. I think I know what the questions are, but letting yourself have permission to be like, this is going to take the time it takes, and good writing ...

Speaker 2:

Takes time.

Neema Avashia:

... takes the time it takes. It doesn't operate on a, "Okay, so now you publish this, so in three years you need to publish again." I don't think that is a recipe for your best work. I think it's a recipe for satisfying the demands of an industry, but if you can say to yourself, "My best work is more important to me than the demands of an industry," then I think it's really about just giving yourself the time.

Speaker 2:

How did you get so clear-eyed? How did you get it all figured out? These are life lessons I feel it take a lot longer than 43 years.

Neema Avashia:

Longer than 43? God, it's taken me so long.

Speaker 2:

I just want to say, I think you're doing great.

Neema Avashia:

I have amazing mentors who are very clear-eyed.

Speaker 2:

That's great.

Neema Avashia:

Just such a good bullshit, sorry, detector.

Speaker 2:

You're allowed to say it.

Neema Avashia:

I'll text and be like, "This is the thing." And they're just like, "No. Or yes, right?" They've been doing this for about 20 years longer than I have, so they have a lot of clarity that I don't, but I have the common sense to listen to them. So I think having those mentors who are further down the road, who've kind of done the churn, they've done the big press life, they've done the small press life, they've done all the things. They really offer a lot of guidance on what to understand and expect from each space.

Speaker 2:

That's great. Finally, to wrap this up, what's the most AWP thing that you've heard, at the AWP?

Neema Avashia:

I was hanging out with [inaudible 00:23:13] yesterday, who's an amazing essayist, and she said, "I didn't plan to buy any books while I was here," as she was buying books.

Speaker 2:

That's quality. That's quality. Overheard at AWP, right here, folks. That's very good. This has been an absolute pleasure. I'm so glad that we got to meet your work and now meet you in person, and I cannot wait to see what next thing you do, and I'm just glad you're out here in the world doing the work that you're doing.

Neema Avashia:

Thank you so much for having me. It was so lovely talking to y'all.

Phuc Luu:

F***ing 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.