Sumana Roy
/How did you become a writer? I have no idea how that happened. I mean, I can answer this with only as much honesty as I can say how I became a lover or my parents’ child. I am a reader, and it would have been the desire to share the immediacy of my experience of reading, whether it was a book, a film, the sky, a forest, that must have compelled me to start writing. Like many women, I began writing quite late. One needs permission from one’s imagination to be able to think of oneself as a writer or an artist, I suppose.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I grew up in a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal where there were no public libraries or even bookshops. We read whatever came our way – old copies of the National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, newspapers and magazines that had been sold to scrap collectors. I did not have the privilege of growing up amidst books. It must have been this deprivation that compelled me to read whatever I could find in the college library. Apart from poetry and fiction, I became addicted to literary criticism – 20th century literary criticism until the 1970s, for books arrived very late in provincial places like ours. I think of these writers and critics as my first teachers – from their curiosity and investigation about language, how it worked, the weight and measure of every word, what it could do and what it couldn’t, I must have moved towards creative expression without becoming conscious of the direction I was taking.
When and where do you write? Ideally, I like to write sitting on my bed in my room in Siliguri – my bed feels like my universe, like the ‘little roome’ did to John Donne, I suppose. But that isn’t always possible – so I write whenever I want to, whether I’m on a train or plane, railway station or airport, doctor’s clinic or between teaching. I don’t have a writing ‘routine’. I write whenever I can, building up sentences inside me as I go about my day, cooking, cleaning, housekeeping, gardening, teaching. At some point, like an insect, I try to deposit it into my laptop. Until then, the mind or a notebook will carry this weight and fidgetiness.
What are you working on now? An essay, a few essays, for I work on things simultaneously. Some of these have been inside me – and the laptop – for years.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? There are various kinds of blocks that every person – and every artist – faces. I’ve not been able to write with any degree of joy or fluency for more than two months now because of urgent caregiving responsibilities at home. I take them to be as natural as fallow periods.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? To be honest, I’ve never asked anyone for writing advice. I suppose I have learnt from studying the writing of my favourite writers, reading them over and over again, just to be let into the magic about how that language comes into being.
What’s your advice to new writers? I could actually do with some advice myself. I can only repeat what I tell my students and myself – that we are living in a time where everyone is lying: politicians, publicists, reviewers, bankers, insurance agents, doctors, engineers, teachers, students, parents, children, the State … . My advice – and request – to writers is to write honestly, not to milk market trends but to obey their writer’s instinct, even though it might be hard to get published. I’d like to believe that only honest writing will survive as literature.
Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials, as well as Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
