 Linoleum cut print (a reduction print) and letterpress work in action. Photo and art by Stephen West at Flower City Press in Rochester, New York. |
| Dear Friends, My friend Stephen West is a writer and visual artist. We’ve been part of a writing group (on pause since the pandemic) since 2014. That’s backstory, process, behind the scenes, but it’s the kind of thing that matters to me as much as a book. When Stephen asked me for something that got cut from This Is One Way to Dance to use for making a letterpress broadside, I was stumped. That was stuff I cut. I sent him an essay called “India West” that got cut from the book. But Stephen didn’t want a finished piece. He wanted something that got edited out of an essay that was in TIOWTD. I decided to give him an earlier version of the final essay in the book: “Saris and Sorrows.” The earlier draft had an entire section about cultural appropriation and white yoga teachers and white people I knew getting married to each other in saris and other Indian garb. I found the phenomenon jarring: a spectacle, but I also found my own wedding and clash of religious traditions upsetting. There was a lot of trauma there for me. I could not write about my wedding or my feelings about white people sampling Indian culture honestly. Who was my audience? To tell the truth felt dangerous. Someone’s feelings would get hurt or be offended. I silenced myself. I bit my tongue. I bit my own tongue. Stephen chose lines from the outtakes that had to do with saris. Then he asked to see the pattern of my wedding sari. I sent photos of that bright fabric, draped and patterned, and explained why I had struggled so much, but that I also did love the lotus pattern and fabric my wedding sari.  |
| I enjoyed hearing Stephen’s response to the textiles, patterns, colors, and photos as a visual artist in a way I never enjoyed anything in the months leading up to the wedding. It was almost what I would imagine it might be to share these details with a bridesmaid or other member of the wedding party—someone invested, with a stake. My conversations with Stephen happened after I had completed a year of virtual book tour. Since our world changed so drastically in 2020 I found it hard to talk about essays I wrote between 1999 and 2019—how to talk about them in 2020 in a global pandemic, the world unraveling, George Floyd murdered, protests, the election. What had I said in the previous 20 years that had any bearing on this moment? I didn’t know. I was living it too and the aftershocks. And the shocks. And then my uncle passed. And then talking about my book over Zoom meant exactly nothing to me.I spent the spring grieving Kirit Kaka, my uncle who was also a writer and the one I went to with all my transliteration questions. The micro-press of broadsides: just me and Stephen with my assistant Abbey (a poet!) weighing in and a few writer friends, Indian writers and Indian family friends on spelling and capitalization of Kanchipuram and panetar. (The image below is a mock-up and I changed the spellings later to how I wrote it above.)  Stephen and I are poets who work in prose. We are crossers of genres and disciplines. Though we may look different—male, female, white and brown: what I like was that I was working with a writer & editor who was listening and got what I was trying to say, (listen for the sound). It’s a call and response.It’s taking scraps — fabric, strips, and Forging something new. It’s quitting, quilting And scavenging.This is why we write and read: conversations with other writers and readers.A few weeks ago, Stephen stopped over with this gorgeous broadside. We talked about printing and process. I felt lucky to have such a generous writer friend, interested in the things I removed, interested in what got edited out, interested in collaboration and printing and conversations and textiles. May we all have such generative friendships. Stephen has a limited number of these broadsides for sale. If you are interested, please reply to this email and I’ll put you in touch with him. Or you can reach him directly through his website above. ***Thanks for reading my newsletter. If you enjoyed it, you can help support it by forwarding it to someone who might like it, requesting my book at your local library, hiring me to speak, or purchasing a copy of This Is One Way to Dance as a present for a friend. This newsletter was originally sent out on July 3, 2021. If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can read previous issues and subscribe here. Wishing you a happy and restful long weekend. Warmly, Sejal |