To open by listing author Anis Shivani’s many accomplishments — the prestigious journals where his work has appeared, the awards, the accolades — would be to take up half my column-space. Suffice it to say that Shivani, who writes short fiction, poetry, criticism, and has his first novel coming out this fall, has been humbly sharpening his craft here, in his adopted home, since the mid-90s.
What brought you to Houston? From where did you come?
By the mid-1990s I felt like I needed to get away from the New England/New York bubble if I was ever going to become a “real” writer. The decision to move to Houston, or any culturally less-sophisticated place (which Houston was then, but is less so now), extracted a heavy toll in terms of alienation, but it was a price worth paying.
I wrote a tremendous amount of crap in the late 1990s, making every literary mistake possible, but it’s an unavoidable process. I must have written a million terrible words of fiction before anything good came out. I had to overcome a tendency toward didacticism, because I’d done a fair amount of journalism, and I also had to get past the scholarly attitude and instead think like a writer. That started happening when I cut myself off from academic ties, and tried to make sense of writing from many different time periods and genres, as someone in the 1920s or 1930s might have done in some bohemian enclave in New York or Paris without the institutional support and grant money which is the staple of the artistic life today. I acted as though the structural mechanisms of writing didn’t exist, so I could discover my own style without any pressure to conform. My writing would have been utterly different had I not followed this idiosyncratic path. In the early years I socialized very little, lived in a miserable ghetto, and spent all day every day at the library; I couldn’t exert a fraction of that sort of inhuman discipline if I wanted to now.
The conservatism of the South was a shock; I’d never encountered such belief in faith, family, and homeland before, but I did appreciate that the people seemed more “real” than the theory-besotted pseudo-intellectuals in our bohemian capitals. I still appreciate that.
What do you think of the local literary scene? How do you fit in (or not)? In other words, what is your place in the local literary “scene?”?
The local literary scene is becoming more diverse by the day. Different aesthetics can now flourish on their own without being pushed by competing tendencies. The growing interaction of the broader arts community with the literary community is an exceptional development. The geographical concentration of artistic and literary activity in a single district is also great, because such density is helpful for organic evolution. Lately I’ve become worried though about the accelerated gentrification of the arts district, which can damage the critical mass that’s already developed. The neighborhood has barely had time to take off before the vultures have swept in.
All kinds of fiction and poetry are being written here; you can always start a group or movement to suit your tendency. I love what Fran Sanders does with Houston Public Poetry, and I’m happy to be part of it. It’s great exposure for KUHF’s Front Row to interview poets reading in that series! The Mongoose vs. Cobra series run by Shafer Hall brings in diverse voices from around the country; Houstonians should go out of their way to support it. I’m thrilled to be reading at Kaboom Books soon, as part of Steven Wolfe’s LitFuse series. There’s some interesting literary event or other always going on. Brazos Bookstore brings exciting writers almost every day. Poet Kevin Prufer has started a series bringing in readers from far away. The Inprint reading series has its all-time most impressive lineup this year, including Mohsin Hamid in March, so all credit to Rich Levy. It’s exciting that a major poet like Fady Joudah, who just won the Griffin Prize, lives in our midst. Being part of this scene is very rewarding.
My one big reservation is the dominance of the UH creative writing program, but I hope we’ve created enough of a base that their hegemony is less threatening. It’s never healthy when a city has a well-known MFA program that monopolizes every outlet and establishes an exclusivist sense of hierarchy, based on the necessity of supporting members of the in-group alone. This still happens-for example, the UH clique’s tendency not to attend readings by anyone else outside their own group-but there’s so much else going on that we can safely ignore them.
I would love to see even more interaction between the arts and literary communities. It would be nice to have more discussions, not just readings of one’s own work, but this goes against the MFA aesthetic of reciting one’s musings as though they were revelations from on high, not susceptible to critical analysis. It’s time to take it to the next level in Houston by becoming more collaborative and sophisticated. The emergence of more informal salons, rather than the usual established venues, would be welcome. This will all happen over time. Much of what one experiences as “readings” hardly ascends to the level of art, it is simply confessional/memoiristic outpouring little touched by the subtleties of technique, but in a dynamic environment there are ways to get past that.
Sometimes you use non-English words which may not be familiar to all your readers (murshid, pehelwan, parathas, tamasha, lathis, etc). Why do you do this? What is gained by this, and is it worth it to risk alienating some readers to this end? (I also do this, but I will refrain from sharing my reasons unless you want to know.)
Some literary agents have wondered about that in the past, and I haven’t liked it. I always provide enough context within the narrative to make sense of the unfamiliar vocabulary. It’s the lazy reader not willing to invest in the concreteness of the world I’m creating who gets so easily alienated. It’s a dead giveaway of someone who comes to my work with a preconceived bias. The other common ones are, “Your female characters are too strong” (a prominent agent on the west coast told me that about Anatolia), or that “Your work is too real” (a top editor felt that way about Karachi Raj).
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