Aster(ix) Journal
Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Learning to Live with Outsider-ness:
An Interview with Geeta Kothari

By Clarissa León

As part of the Aster(ix) in Alphabet City Series for City of Asylum Clarissa León spoke to Geeta Kothari about her writing process, her relationship with her late mother, and the things she left behind.

CL: It’s been about several years – almost two decades – since you last published a book like I Brake for Moose. How do you feel the length of time has affected your work?

GK: I think over time my terrain developed. There’s a sense of estrangement and alienation in the stories. And that developed organically over time. I do think that time helped me mine various aspects of my life that sort of blend into the stories without any real consciousness on my part, in the sense of ‘Oh, I’m going to write another story about someone who’s at odds with their landscape or who feels out of place or like a misfit.’ When I put the collection together there were things I noticed that some of the stories had in common. I noticed there were a lot of cars in my stories and a lot of people moving, and I think that speaks to my own inner restlessness or sense of dislocation or not feeling attached to a particular landscape.

CL: How has your process of writing changed over time?

GK: My process changed a lot over time. The major turning point was when I went to the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop for the first time. We had to write fast. We had to write to prompts. We had to turn around stories in a day. That first workshop taught me a lot about structure, looking for structures, and then writing into a structure. I’m not great at seeing those structures, but when I do see one, it is really helpful to me and it allows me to write more efficiently.

CL: I’m going to go and switch a little bit. I heard once that you wanted to be a flight attendant? What exactly happened there, because it’s a little far off from the goal of becoming a writer? In “Flight Attendants Take Your Seat” you write about a flight attendant in training with motion sickness. Was that any way of referring to your own relationship of having this goal but never attaining it?

GK: I did want to be a flight attendant. It was definitely a goal in my life. I switched gears when a friend said to me, “You know you are essentially going to be a waitress in the air getting your ass pinched and having people throw up on you.” And that kind of put it into perspective. How it relates to writing is again, this theme of people in transit that runs through the collection. In “Flight Attendants Take Your Seat,” I see that character as someone who desperately wants to do something else with his life, but doesn’t quite know what that is. And I think that’s the same in “I Brake for Moose,” and I felt like I was those people at some point, between wanting to become a flight attendant and then eventually becoming something else.

CL: You’ve said before that you’ve felt lost before, without any sure place of where you’re from. Why do you feel that you don’t have that?

Read the rest at Aster(ix).com.