10 Questions for Sheila Sundar
BY FRANCHESCA VIAUD
Nearly two decades ago, shortly after I moved to New York City, I found myself at an Asia Society fundraiser. The party was somewhere in the Upper East Side, in the type of gleaming limestone townhouse I had never before set foot in. I don’t recall what I was doing there. There were only two rich New Yorkers in my family circle—old friends who had immigrated on the same modest and comfortable economic plane as my parents, then earned their wealth through a combination of entrepreneurship, dubious investments, and real estate holdings, so I assume it was through one of them that I secured the invitation.
—from "Yellow Curtains," Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I love this question (and I hate this question), because it forces me to think back to my first attempt at writing a novel, which came after a long period of experimenting with poetry and prose.
In my twenties, I began a dense work of historical fiction set in 1960’s India. It was a rich story with distinct characters and voice, and the process of writing it—the rigors of imagination, research, and world building—consumed about a decade of my life. A queried agent after agent. There was interest, but no bites, and it was painful to come to the eventual conclusion that the book just wasn’t working.
One of the challenges of working on a book for so long is that it changes shape as you go, and it became impossible for me to reconcile aspects of the book that stemmed from my early sense of the novel with those that developed towards the end. Partly for this reason, it didn’t work artistically, and it wasn’t going to work commercially.
I write and talk a lot about this project, because though it devastated me at the time, the process of working through a novel made me a writer. I learned to tear apart a scene and rebuild it. I could not have written Habitations without that first book.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
When I was writing Habitations, I kept a stack of five novels next to my bed, and I went back to them over and over: Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Leavers by Lisa Ko and The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai.
There have been so many writers who have shaped my desire to write, the belief that I can write, and the way I craft language and story. But these five writers held my hand through Habitations and I’m forever indebted to them.
What other professions have you worked in?
Almost immediately after graduating college, I earned my Masters in Education from Teachers College at Columbia. Teaching had always been my ambition, and I spent about fifteen years in middle and high school classrooms. For a brief interlude, I worked in international development in Egypt, still in the general field of education.
What did you want to be when you were young?
My goal, always, was to be a writer and a teacher.
What inspired you to write this piece?
When I was a student at Hampshire, I became friends with a wonderful man named Jim Foley, then a graduate student in writing at UMass (we tutored together at a remarkable school in Holyoke, called The Care Center). Jim was killed a decade later while working as a journalist in Syria. I hadn’t seen him in years, and after his death, I tried over and over to write about our friendship, and the intensity of the loss.
In the final version of the essay, I only touch upon Jim’s death, but it was always the seed of the piece. There’s a line in it that reads: At the margins of my own sadness was the nagging thought that I had no right to it. That was the feeling I was trying to address in “Yellow Curtains”; we don’t always feel entitled to our own sadness.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
It’s so cliché, but New York City. I cannot write a book in which my characters do not, at some point, make their way through New York.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
During the academic year, because of my teaching schedule, Wednesdays are my writing days. I write for a few hours here and there the rest of the week, but Wednesdays are sacred. I don’t take a single meeting or phone call. All I do is write until I am entirely depleted.
The rest of the week, amidst everything else one has to do in life, serves almost as preparation for my Wednesday. I set aside blocks of time just to think about my characters and manipulate them in my head. I’m an avid walker, and I commute a very long distance for my job, so I have stretches of pure thinking time when I don’t have a pen or laptop in front of me. Without this ritual of thinking time, my writing time is worthless.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My friend Val Otarod, a gifted writer with whom I did my MFA at BU, is always the first person I send pages to. My husband is also an excellent critic, but I prefer his opinion towards the final draft.
What are you working on currently?
I’m working on my second novel, which follows the intertwined lives of a career diplomat and a photojournalist, beginning in 2010 and roughly spanning the Obama years. It’s part love story, part coming-of-age, and part reflection of the politics and political legacy of that time.
What are you reading right now?
I just finished André Aciman’s Call me by your Name and Find me. I became interested in the author’s story when I learned that he was born in Alexandria, Egypt (a city I love).
SHEILA SUNDAR is the author of the forthcoming novel Habitations (Simon & Schuster). She is a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.