MP: Absolutely! As soon as you said those three things, I thought, “that’s the chap.” I also think it’s interesting that those themes are present in Giving Care, feminism as a quiet duty, pushing against expectations quietly. I love the way these chapbooks resonate around this idea of what family relationships should be like.
I’m wondering whether these chapbooks were built intentionally as cohesive projects or if the actual flash lead you to the idea that this could be a chapbook?
SSC: I did not plan on this being a chapbook. I just wrote the story “Skin Over Milk” and I had wanted to write something about rain because monsoon is such a phenomenon in India that I just go back to my childhood whenever I hear the rain. I was just writing about life in a house like that and I just don’t know where that milk and tea came from. That story was just three hundred words and it got shortlisted for a prize and I thought, okay, maybe there’s something there, so I took stories about the ripe mango and earpiercing that I’d published before and conceived the story of these sisters who live in this house, and that grew and grew. I just kept adding stories to it while preserving the collective voice of “we.” Once I realized I had ten chapters, I submitted it to Chestnut Review and of course in editing it became twelve chapters.
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