INSIDE VOICES

INSIDE VOICES

Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Shastri Akella

Shastri Akella’s debut novel, The Sea Elephants, was published by Flatiron Books in the USA and Canada and by Penguin in India. He was a writing resident at the Fine Arts Works Center and the Oak Springs Garden Foundation. He is the winner of the 2022 FracturedLit Flash Fiction Contest and the 2023 Best Microfiction Contest.

His writing has appeared in Guernica, Fairy Tale Review, CRAFT, The Masters Review, Electric Literature, World Literature Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Most recently, his story The Magic Bangle was included in The Best American Short Stories 2024, which was edited by Lauren Groff.

He earned an MFA in Creative Writing and PhD. in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He’s currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Michigan State University.

Jeffrey: I’m always interested in book covers and titles as the way into the story. You've a couple of different covers, but my favorite is the blue, red, and white mask. Why sea elephants? What is the significance of sea elephants, and how does it show up in the cover and the story itself?

Thank you! The cover was designed for the novel by the artist Dave Litman and it is meaningful to me because it stems from a formative moment in the story.

The main character, Shagun, is a street performer, traveling the breadth of the country with an itinerant troupe of actors and performing stories that have been axed out of conservative translations of the Hindu mythology. When he enacts the role of Chitrangada, a trans character from The Mahabharata, removed from most translations of the epic, he starts to accept his own gender fluidity, an aspect of himself that he has been ill at ease with until then. The cover is the mask he wears when performing Chitrangada.

Robert: I'm so taken by the very different worlds your protagonist navigates, Home, Magpies the boarding school, the street theatre culture, being locked away, and even the small world of the cauldron in which he escapes on his own. All of these are unfamiliar to me and to most who grew up in North America. How did you create these places in a way that captivates someone like me who doesn't know of them, has no frame of reference?

I wanted Shagun’s lived reality—the multiplicity of histories and complex cultural spaces he moves through—to be a vital, throbbing part of the narrative geography. I leaned on two narrative methods to make these spaces familiar to readers who encounter them for the first time.

Shagun leaves home at sixteen and is on the run from the time he is seventeen. He is a newcomer—an outsider, if you will—to nearly the spaces he enters, looking at them not with world-weary eyes but discovering them. So readers discover alongside Shagun and his attitude towards these spaces—curiosity, wariness, comfort, disgust—cue readers on how to code these spaces.

When I revised the novel, I listened for the emotional heartbeat of each of these spaces and I revised to clarify and sharpen its presence so it resounds through the spaces and guides the readerly attitudes towards them the way the color of the wall affects our mental state within certain rooms. And readers, no matter who we are or where we’re raised, are able to anchor into that emotion—the pain of finding yourself alone, the power of feeling visible, the calm force of clarity—and navigate the unfamiliar.

Jeffrey: "If you don't matter, none of your troubles matter." I heard you say that in an interview I saw. I'd love to hear more about this observation and how it relates to your story.

In an essay I wrote for LitHub, I described my experience of feeling alienated from my family in those years when I refused to have an arranged marriage. I found refuge in the hills and mountains of the Himalayas. Their ancient, quiet majesty—the fact that they have remain for centuries before existed and will continue for centuries after I am gone—made me feel gratefully small; not in a way that diminished my sense of self but in a way that allowed for ego death that allowed me to see that in the context of Deep Time, I am at best fractional shift in light. That thought released from the vice that my problems held me in, preventing me from looking beyond them and finding an answer.

A character in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things articulates this feeling best. He says that if the earth was woman, she would be forty-two years old and all of human civilization is a glint that has just begun to appear in the earth woman’s eyes.

I was a tech employee and never wrote until I was twenty-five and I do not think I would have become a writer or, more importantly, come out without the transformative experience of that ego death. In my novel, Shagun experiences that transformation when he performs ancient, mythic characters. The street theater actors I worked with when researching the novel see the greenroom tent as both a deathbed and a birthing room: it is a space where the self exits the body and the character enters it, the actor ‘becoming’ the character for the duration of the performance. So Shagun, in no longer being himself, in becoming something that is ancient, has that Deep Time experience which allows himself to release the fear and the panic his difficult situation has filled him with. It is then that he realizes ways to surmount those problems, with and through his community.

Robert: I understand you have an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in comparative literature, but I wonder how your corporate experience with shaped the way you write.

The structural approach to problem-solving at Google shapes my late-stage editing process when I am editing not for content but for the sentence. I want my stories to have a certain sonic quality—to sound a certain way. And when a sentence doesn’t have the aural quality that ‘feels right’, I isolate it by pasting it on a blank document, giving each word its own line. The white space surrounding the text allows me to study and tinker with its sound until it satisfies my inner ear.

It has also shaped my practice as a writer, giving me the discipline of writing every morning. When you work for a corporation, those early hours are the only ones that no one can make demands on and the only time when your mind is clear and not clogged with deadlines or workplace narratives, and I learned how to claim them for writing.

Jeffrey: How does this idea of vertical and horizontal family show up in The Sea Elephants?

I found the idea from Andrew Solomon’s incredible collection of essays, Far From the Tree. Vertical identity is the normative phenomenon of family: you are expected to be similar to the biological family that birthed you. The word ‘reproduction’ itself implies that the child will be a replica of their birth parents, having the same values, pursuing the same professions. But when you are an apple that falls far from the tree—a prodigy, for instance, or a queer child—you are perceived as an aberration who has rejected the inherited identity and your biological family often has a hard time comprehending you. And I can tell you that it is an incredibly alienating experience. The isolation I have felt through my twenties is profoundly life-altering. But when I came out, in Amherst, I was able to find a community that made me feel visible. Those peers and friends became my found my family—I gravitated towards them, we clustered around each other and formed a space of horizontal identity: our affinity was not inherited but rather chosen based on mutual respect and fierce love for our full selves.

Robert: I've heard you touch on the art of subtext in interviews, and I love what you said. Will you talk about subtext and, specifically, how the subtext (that festering need) changed Shagun's story into a love story?

Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext is a masterpiece that I wholeheartedly recommend to every writer and serious reader. He describes subtext as the narrative energy that festers on the margins until, at some point in the story, a narrative event—an action a character takes, an action that happens to a character—causes it to explode to the surface and it can no longer be ignored. Shagun’s history makes him deeply afraid of physical love, and it is an aspect of himself that he lets fester in his subconscious until he meets the man he falls completely in love with. Then, he must make the choice of facing his fear or losing his love, a choice which causes the fear to erupt from the space of the subtext to an active narrative element that shapes the plot of the story.

Jeffrey: Will you talk about your very exciting news about having a short story in the next Best American Short Story Collection?

The Magic Bangle was originally published in the Rainbow edition of the Fairy Tale Review that was a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Anthology. I am tremendously grateful to the editor Benjamin Schaefer for selecting my story, for his editorial insights that strengthened it, and for nominating it for The Best American Short Story anthology.

It was written in response to a homophobic experience I had in my hometown of Hyderabad. I was on a bus when a text notification lit up my phone screen where I had a picture of my boyfriend and me on the background. The passenger sitting next to me saw the photo and started shouting at me, a diatribe filled with homophobic slurs and a commentary on how I was defacing the purity of Hindu culture. He drew the attention of other passengers who joined him in his shouting match—picture being surrounded on a bus seat by six or seven, big, angry men yelling at you.

I found refuge from the experience in story: I reimagined the old city of Hyderabad as a queer utopia where homophobia does not exist. That was how The Magic Bangle was written.

Robert: What's next for you?

Without giving too much away: I am working on a fantasy novel set in the near future where America’s white population has become the minority and the conservative regime in power decides to ‘fix this crisis’ by giving political asylum to vampires and documenting them as Caucasian when they arrive at Ellis Island.