Sohrab Homi Fracis
Sohrab Homi Fracis is the first Asian American author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, juried by the legendary Iowa Writers' Workshop and described by the New York Times Book Review as "among the most prestigious literary prizes America offers." He won it for his first book, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America (University of Iowa Press, 2001). Publishers Weekly called it "A reminder of how satisfying the short story form can be...the work of an impressive new talent." India Currents pronounced it “Stunning in its breadth and scope of language and description.” It was translated into German and also released in India. Fracis’s novel, Go Home (Knut House Press, 2016) was shortlisted worldwide by Stanford University Libraries for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Folio Weekly's cover story called it "a quest tale of the highest order.... Fracis is both a deft realist and master mesmerist." Singapore Poetry described it as “newly poignant and even heartbreaking.” His new book of stories, True Fiction (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022), was a national finalist for the Dzanc Books Story Collection Prize. American Book Award winner Rilla Askew says of it: "True Fiction is a tour de force." Khaas Baat (Special Topics) calls it a “brilliant collection.” Sacred Chickens says of it, “Being fearless is what sets some writers apart from the pack.” Fracis taught literature and creative writing at University of North Florida, where he'd received his M.A. in English / Creative Writing. He was Visiting Writer in Residence at Augsburg College, Artist in Residence at Escape to Create, and Artist in Residence at Yaddo. He received the Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature/Fiction and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction. The international South Asian Literary Association bestowed on him its Distinguished Achievement Award.
Interview by Tayve Neese
Tayve NeeseCongratulations, Sohrab, on the publication of True Fiction. How long did it take to put this collection together, and how was this process of pulling a book together different from your past publications?
Sohrab FracisThanks so much, Tayve. Well, very long because I wasn’t trying to write a book, just individual stories intermittently, as and when each one called to me to write it. The first one I wrote, “A Coming,” was done all the way back in 1990, even before I left a short-lived techie career behind in 1991 to get an M.A. in English and Creative Writing at University of North Florida. “A Coming” didn’t make it into my creative-writing thesis because, unlike the realistic stories in there, it was a fantasy story about a budding female messiah who confronts a non-gendered godhead. And I kept writing in the school of realism for a long time, so it didn’t make it into my first story collection either, nor my second book, which is a novel.
The last story I wrote was one I’d procrastinated over for many years, even decades, before tackling: the re-creation, employing modern creative-writing techniques, of an ancient Persian legend that is my naming story. When Florida went into Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, I had no excuses left and sat myself down to write “The Legend of Rostam and Sohrab.” The already solitary nature of the drafting process was greatly intensified, and as the entire endangered world hunkered down in suspense and apprehension, I couldn’t know for sure if I would survive to finish it. That was an eerie feeling we all experienced in one form or another during the pandemic, especially before the vaccines were developed, then released, and eventually proved to be effective. Six million of us didn’t make it. So, it felt appropriate that the legend is a life-and-death story. I didn’t know if my version would be a short story, a novella, or a novel. Once the draft revealed itself to be a “long story” or novelette, comprised of twelve short chapters, I knew I had the concluding/signature story of a new collection. So True Fiction was written, off and on, across the span of three eventful decades.
NeeseI admire how this collection is organized, opening with the story “Open Mic,” which is set in a coffee shop in Jacksonville, Florida’s Riverside area, which is rooted in the real world. But your collection also has a fairy tale, a legend, and even a very experimental piece that leans more toward fantasy and science fiction and is far from "true.” What amazes me about the collection is that no matter what genre of short story you are writing, each is so well-crafted. Each story—rooted in the real world or in a mythic world—has an underpinning of loss and disillusionment. Was this a theme that emerged on its own, or was this something that you used as an organizing principle?
FracisIt's really good to hear all of that, thanks so much. Yes, I’ve always subscribed to the view that no matter to which genre a story belongs, it will be best served if written and crafted at a literary level. Every writing choice, really, should be the one that makes the story better. Artificial divides between, for instance, plot-driven and character-driven writing should be discarded. Both elements are important. Ideally, all elements of craft and art need to come together, as I once wrote in a craft piece for the Florida Heritage Book Festival called “Ring All the Bells.”
Yes, the themes of loss and disillusionment you found emerged organically across the various stories written at different points of time. In fact, I had not consciously thought of them as pervasive until you pointed that out. That’s partly because I just try to reflect, explore, and better understand the complex nature of life through my stories. Then whatever themes emerge on their own will be the themes of our lives. For instance, in her back-cover book description for True Fiction my editor at Stephen F. Austin State University Press, poet and children’s book author Katherine Noble, refers to “Themes of love, family, hope and rebirth.” Again, not particularly conscious on my part, especially beyond individual stories. Nor do I ignore the lighter side of life—it seems to organically make its way into all my stories, to some degree. It was good to see recognition of that in Bridge Eight’s book review by Caleb Michael Sarvis: “I laughed. It was a welcome laugh and it felt freeing to do so while reading literary fiction in 2022.”
My organizing principle for the collection had more to do with the title and the wide variety of stories. As I’ve mentioned, my first two books were in the school of realism. While writing the novel, however, I wrote a story, “Steven,” that departed from strict realism. And after the novel was published, other stories began to trickle in haphazardly, some realistic, some imaginative/speculative. So, I didn’t even think I had the makings of a unifiable collection until I happened to write a realistic story called “True Fiction,” in which the narrator’s friend tells him he ought to write true fiction. Now, you can read that paradox at least two ways, depending on whether you place the emphasis on fiction, i.e., truly fictional or as the friend puts it “all made up,” or on true, i.e., fiction that has its basis in truth. So, for instance, the story you mention (“The Straight,” I think) “that leans more toward fantasy and science fiction and is far from 'true'” is nevertheless true fiction in the first sense: truly out there. That’s when I realized I could bring my realistic and imaginative stories together under that paradoxical umbrella category. “Open Mic” was the natural choice to open the book, and two more Florida stories, “All Right, Now, Cupid” and the pivotal title story, were also realistic, so I kept them all together. That led logically into the fourth Florida story, “Steven,” which also opened Pandora’s box to let out the fantasy characters and tales.
NeeseMany of the protagonists in your collection are searching for something by examining interior and exterior motivations. The character Pervez, in “Open Mic,” loses his favorite coffee shop where he seemed to find a sense of belonging and personal identity with other immigrants. You yourself are from Bombay, which is now Mumbai. Why does the collection open with this story and do you see this story as running parallel to what is happening nationwide now—disillusionment of the old “American Dream” for many immigrants?
FracisWell, when you think of an open mic, you think of a variety of voices being heard, a number of different voices brought together and given a platform and an audience. So “Open Mic” was a backup option to even be the book’s title story. But, of course, True Fiction is a more fresh and intriguing overview title, while “Open Mic” works perfectly to open the proceedings. I hadn’t thought of this until now, but it reminds me of the prologue’s title in my transnational novel Go Home: “Hear Me.”
Incidentally, Go Home was recently taught in a course at Flagler College called The American Dream / Immigrant Voices. I was invited by the professor, Allan Marcil, to chat with his students, and I remarked to them that I couldn’t recall the term "American Dream" ever appearing in the novel, though certainly there are textual grounds for such an interpretation, as when author Bob Shacochis writes, “I’m grateful to Fracis for his highly topical reexamination of the American Dream.” Similarly, I see the grounds for your question about “Open Mic,” though again it was not explicitly on my mind when I wrote the story from the point of view of the immigrant narrator Pervez. I was thinking more about the ongoing “local vs. global” debate as Pervez introduces his central characters, aspiring guitarist Max and Rwandan refugee Henri, one of whose voices is opening up while the other’s is shutting down. Disillusionment with the American Dream has not only been for some immigrants but also for some Americans such as Max and the coffee shop’s owner who find it increasingly difficult to achieve. On the other hand, the USA and several other immigration-driven diverse countries are shrinking the world, bringing local and cosmopolitan people like Henri, Max, and Pervez together. As Pervez observes, local and global are not mutually exclusive—they can and do coexist, even coincide increasingly, and work well together. It’s time we move beyond nationalism (which has been making a dangerous comeback around the world) and aspire instead to a transnational Global Dream.
NeeseIn your story “Steven,” the protagonist is an aging, married man with a family. Much like Kafka’s metamorphoses, Steven wakes up one day and realizes that he is becoming a woman. In the story “A Coming,” you write from the point of view of a female fairy as well. These two stories are very different from “True Fiction.” In that story, your characters discuss women through a very sexualized lens. In another “All Right, Now, Cupid,” you even make mention of Bukowski—a writer certainly imbued in gender controversy. Can you share more about your exploration of gender in your work through the characters that you created?
FracisGladly. Aimee Bender’s brilliant short-short, “The Rememberer,” begins: “My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.” The narrator’s boyfriend Ben first regresses to an ape, then a sea turtle, and eventually a salamander, which she ceremoniously releases into the sea before he turns into some “one-celled wonder.” When I read this delicately developed extended metaphor (she’s not the first woman to think some guy’s an ape, often for good reason) I was reminded of Kafka’s story, and the seed for “Steven” took root in my head. The Scottish American protagonist in his late thirties, its first line reveals, “is watching TV with his wife and kids when he realizes he is becoming a woman.” So, Steven has no agency in his uniquely organic transformation: “It’s not of his volition; it’s just happening, and he wishes he knew why and what.” Tricky territory, but a compelling premise.
Years earlier, a new Parsi Indian Canadian friend had shared with me that she “couldn’t stop crying for three days” after her first boyfriend broke up with her. It seems obvious she meant she’d cried every time she thought of it, but in my head, I had a vision of her crying nonstop for seventy-two hours, even when speaking, eating, sleeping, etc. So, I wrote a story about “a plain fairy” in which those three days became three decades. The vulnerable young character grew into a tremendously strong female messiah who “never cried again.” And that’s how “A Coming” came to be.
You’re right about “True Fiction.” The narrator Pervez, his friends Arun and Ken, and even his girlfriend Jodi, all realistic products of patriarchal times/societies/cultures, say and think some sexualized and even sexist things about women (and occasionally men). As integral aspects of a relationship, sex and sexuality are necessary parts of its development in a realistic story, for depth and insight and, from a craft perspective, for the reader to fully suspend his or her disbelief and feel it all to be really happening rather than merely written. For instance, in “Steven,” how convincing would his transformation be if there were no sex scene between him and his wife Marla? In “True Fiction” it helps that Pervez’s retrospective point of view allows him sometimes to be relatively self-aware as he looks back upon his relationship with Jodi and their complicated feelings for each other. “Over the years I’ve actually come to feel that I acted as if I’d owned her,” he confesses to Arun. It’s about the damage people in failing or failed relationships and marriages often do to each other, about “mating calls gone wrong.” But it’s also about something beautiful that may unexpectedly survive the fallout.
Yeah, wow, I Googled Bukowski and found references to what you mentioned. It’s a good example of far more sexist times and mores when he was writing. That’s not at all to say sexism is a thing of the past, of course, though progress is being made. The way the Bukowski reference got into “All Right, Now, Cupid” is an illustration of how sometimes one element organically leads to another when drafting. In response to the online-profile prompt, What I’m doing with my life, the narrator, a bank loans officer, remarks on how a teller at his branch was fired and went postal. At that point, as I drafted, I recalled having read a Bukowski novel, Post Office, about a disgruntled postal worker, on the enthusiastic recommendation of a writer friend—a woman, it’s worth noting in this context. Being no fan of bureaucracy and abuse of power, I appreciated Bukowski’s critique of ’60s and ’70s P.O. managers and his unvarnished take on life back then. It’s many years ago, but I also seem to recall raunchy humor and not thinking much further about it, given its time period. What mattered at a much later time while drafting the new story was that I could work his semi-autobiographical character Chinaski into my narrator’s account of employee resentment for some texture that’s relevant to my “going postal” scene, and simultaneously foreshadow another profile prompt: Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food. As the narrator acknowledges to his dating profile’s female readers: “Chinaski’s something of an ass, but still.”
NeeseYour experimental story “The Straight,” continues this exploration of gender, almost as if looking at some sort of creatures from outer space, but the story seems to be about the folly of our own sexuality and its foibles. Your story reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” in which nonsensical language reveals the premise of the poem through tone of the nonsensical language. Can you share more about why you decided to write about sexual coupling and gender using very abstract imagery that the reader has to “decipher”?
FracisIt's an honor for “The Straight” to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” thanks. I just had to revisit it now; it has been so long. Yes, it’s really wonderful how the combination of tone and context conveys the gist of the inventive vocabulary and how you can follow along quite nicely if you just trust in Carroll, as you should. I’d grown accustomed to guiding the reader along some occasionally interspersed Hindi or Gujarati words in my stories but had also fretted at not being able to go full-bore Hinglish or Gujinglish, knowing the difficulty that would present to the non-Indian reader.
So when I was playing with the idea of writing an alternate-world story, I felt A) it would just be wrong to have its inhabitants’ terminology for things in their world be exactly the same as ours, and B) I could perhaps substitute simple, familiar, and appropriate English words that sort of described the objects, making it easier to follow along than if I outright invented nonsense words (as Carroll did). That way I could grow a small sub-lexicon that the reader would begin to acquire and to recognize when those items recurred in the story. Much easier than having to actually decipher a new vocabulary. I also decided on C) a naming system for the alternate species: three-letter names, all consonants with vowels merely implied between them, as is often the case in the Devanagari script for Hindi and Sanskrit. Right away, almost the way the opening line for “Steven” had surfaced in my mind, I had the first line of this story: “Wnf saw the round rolling along the straight a while before they met.” And that gave me the title as well, and a glimmer of where the straight would lead.
Once my nascent landscape was peopled by rounds such as Mlp, whom Wnf sees approaching, and by flats such as Wnf himself, I had two ways to go: a showdown of sorts or a tryst between lovers. I’d been watching a lot of nature/wildlife shows at the time, so the answer became both. Mating displays by flats to impress the attractive round and battles between rival flats to win the right to reproduce with her. Life anywhere and in any form pretty much boils down to propagation of the species.
NeeseSomething that I love about your story “Steven” is how the character looks to the natural world for answers about his own transformation from male to female. Steven explores hermaphrodites in other species. Did you stumble across this information prior to crafting your story and use it as a catalyst for your story, or did you need to do some research about this information after you’d already begun writing the story?
FracisYes, while Steven is unique (and in actuality nonexistent outside of this fiction) among human adults in his mysteriously spontaneous, organic transformation from male to female, organic sex changes are not uncommon among some other species. The story’s catalyst was Aimee Bender’s “reverse evolution” story, but well before reading “The Rememberer” I had in composition courses at University of North Florida taught paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s remarkable essay, “Sex and Size,” in which he describes for instance how, as Steven tells his wife Marla, “as [a male slipper limpet or snail] grows…it turns into a female.” Researching for the story, I learned that for humans if the estrogen level is higher than testosterone when the egg is fertilized, that’s what triggers the female combination of two X chromosomes. On the other hand, if the testosterone level is higher, you get the male combination of an X and a Y. As simple yet life-altering as that. I’d also earlier read Steve Jones’s insightful book, Y: The Descent of Men. It had some amazing information from which my similarly named protagonist Steven derives this healing and unifying perspective: “Three hundred million years ago, before there were chromosomes, there were autosomes—think A for asexual or androgynous. Go back far enough and there was no battle of the sexes…because there were no sexes.”
NeeseAging and the disillusionment of how our bodies change as we age is found in a number of stories, including, “All Right, Now, Cupid.” I adore this story which uses dating profile questions as the scaffolding of the story. Can you talk more about how you structured this story using the profile as a story within a story?
FracisSure thing. You nailed it with the word scaffolding. I happen to be a third-generation civil engineer by early education—my father and maternal grandfather were partners in a reputed construction company in Bombay. So, words like that still have resonance for me. Structural Design and Metal Foundry were important courses well before fiction and poetry workshops, so maybe some of that sense of structure filtered into my stories and books. Online profile prompts, although fairly generic (Favorite Movie or Song or Place or Show or whatever), struck me as natural pegs off which to hang parts of my central character’s story and thus build the whole. OkCupid’s opening prompt, an overly broad My self-summary, inspired from the dating site’s actual visitors many an APB or All Points Bulletin, as my creative-writing professor at University of North Florida, Dr. Kathy Hassall, liked to call a bunch of characteristics lumped together as an amateurish way to introduce a character. Instead, I had my anonymous profile-creator launch right into describing a scene that I felt would characterize both him and, metaphorically, the dating process: as he drives to his local coffee shop, a blind man with a cane stumbles off the curb almost into the path of the Sonata, then presses forward anyway, sweeping the sidewalk “frantically with his cane as he lurched ahead through his personal minefield.” Walking toward him comes a woman who “take[s] his cane hand in hers, stilling his jumpy moves and speaking to him quietly.” And just like that, the story was off and running, helped along periodically by inquisitive but revealing OkCupid prompts such as I spend a lot of time thinking about and The most private thing I’m willing to admit.
NeeseIn your last story “The Legend of Rostam and Sohrab,” the protagonist Sohrab is searching for his father. You point out in your acknowledgments that this is an old and unknown epic poem here in the west but that its motif of searching for the father is well-known in stories such as Oedipus and Star Wars. What are the costs of understanding who we are within our family, and why are these types of stories and legends still necessary today?
FracisYes, the ancient Persian Empire legend from which I got my first name was part of Abolquasem Ferdowsi’s sprawling epic, Shahnameh, or Book of Kings. Well before he wrote it around 1010 A.D. with the help of earlier transcriptions, its stories were orally handed down (as I recreate in my fireside storyteller/narrator The Singer, who then gives voice to my other first-person point-of-view narrators) across generations in Iran. To this day there, its heroic figures are venerated as part of Iran’s pre-Islamic ancient-Persian culture and traditions. While societies change, sometimes drastically, human nature is relatively constant. So, we can empathize with the bastard prince of Samangan when he feels the lack of a father’s presence like an aching void, and also with his heartbroken mother as she tries desperately to not lose her son as well. And when ancient Turkey and Iran mobilize for war, pitting father and son unknowingly against each other, we can vicariously feel the lesson that appears impossible for nations the world over and throughout history to learn once and for all: war is a deadly and tragic business on an enormous scale. It’s way past time for a global body such as the United Nations to be given real capacity to mediate any differences peacefully.
NeeseYour title story is “True Fiction.” As a fiction writer, you seem to create composite characters and pull from a variety of facts from a number of real people’s lives. This is, after all, what fiction writers do. Your short story “True Fiction,” opens with the character Arun discussing this crafting strategy with Pervez, the writer, to which Pervez responds, “that muddling of the facts, as you so flatteringly put it, is what it takes to make a good story of our lives.” Is fact the jumping-off point for you as you write? Is this what helps you make a story “go,” and what would you say to someone who may see themself in one of your characters?
FracisWell, I would say fact is often the jumping-off point or nucleus for my realistic stories, and an understanding of the world in general and human nature, in particular, is what drives them, fantasy stories included. When something in real life sticks with me, gnaws at me, demands repeatedly over time that I work at trying to better understand it, that tells me I may have the kernel for a story that would probably intrigue a reader too. And when exploring such tricky territory, it gives me as a writer a reassuring sense that my story is grounded in reality, that it’s true fiction in that sense, that I’m discharging some basic form of responsibility to my readers by essentially keeping it real.
To someone who may think he or she is one of my characters, I’d say relax, there’s no one-to-one correspondence between a composite character and a real-life person. I never aim for that one-to-one representation, or else I would be writing memoirs. I aim for characters (whether realistic or imaginary) who best serve my stories. That character, by definition, is not you.
That said, it’s a compliment to my character creations that they come alive, so to speak, for readers and reviewers who believe in them and care about what happens to them like they do exist, instead of having to dismiss less-convincing creations as merely something written. In this sense, they’re fictional yet true. Maybe they’ll live on for a bit after I’m gone.
Sohrab FracisThanks so much, Tayve. Well, very long because I wasn’t trying to write a book, just individual stories intermittently, as and when each one called to me to write it. The first one I wrote, “A Coming,” was done all the way back in 1990, even before I left a short-lived techie career behind in 1991 to get an M.A. in English and Creative Writing at University of North Florida. “A Coming” didn’t make it into my creative-writing thesis because, unlike the realistic stories in there, it was a fantasy story about a budding female messiah who confronts a non-gendered godhead. And I kept writing in the school of realism for a long time, so it didn’t make it into my first story collection either, nor my second book, which is a novel.
The last story I wrote was one I’d procrastinated over for many years, even decades, before tackling: the re-creation, employing modern creative-writing techniques, of an ancient Persian legend that is my naming story. When Florida went into Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, I had no excuses left and sat myself down to write “The Legend of Rostam and Sohrab.” The already solitary nature of the drafting process was greatly intensified, and as the entire endangered world hunkered down in suspense and apprehension, I couldn’t know for sure if I would survive to finish it. That was an eerie feeling we all experienced in one form or another during the pandemic, especially before the vaccines were developed, then released, and eventually proved to be effective. Six million of us didn’t make it. So, it felt appropriate that the legend is a life-and-death story. I didn’t know if my version would be a short story, a novella, or a novel. Once the draft revealed itself to be a “long story” or novelette, comprised of twelve short chapters, I knew I had the concluding/signature story of a new collection. So True Fiction was written, off and on, across the span of three eventful decades.
NeeseI admire how this collection is organized, opening with the story “Open Mic,” which is set in a coffee shop in Jacksonville, Florida’s Riverside area, which is rooted in the real world. But your collection also has a fairy tale, a legend, and even a very experimental piece that leans more toward fantasy and science fiction and is far from "true.” What amazes me about the collection is that no matter what genre of short story you are writing, each is so well-crafted. Each story—rooted in the real world or in a mythic world—has an underpinning of loss and disillusionment. Was this a theme that emerged on its own, or was this something that you used as an organizing principle?
FracisIt's really good to hear all of that, thanks so much. Yes, I’ve always subscribed to the view that no matter to which genre a story belongs, it will be best served if written and crafted at a literary level. Every writing choice, really, should be the one that makes the story better. Artificial divides between, for instance, plot-driven and character-driven writing should be discarded. Both elements are important. Ideally, all elements of craft and art need to come together, as I once wrote in a craft piece for the Florida Heritage Book Festival called “Ring All the Bells.”
Yes, the themes of loss and disillusionment you found emerged organically across the various stories written at different points of time. In fact, I had not consciously thought of them as pervasive until you pointed that out. That’s partly because I just try to reflect, explore, and better understand the complex nature of life through my stories. Then whatever themes emerge on their own will be the themes of our lives. For instance, in her back-cover book description for True Fiction my editor at Stephen F. Austin State University Press, poet and children’s book author Katherine Noble, refers to “Themes of love, family, hope and rebirth.” Again, not particularly conscious on my part, especially beyond individual stories. Nor do I ignore the lighter side of life—it seems to organically make its way into all my stories, to some degree. It was good to see recognition of that in Bridge Eight’s book review by Caleb Michael Sarvis: “I laughed. It was a welcome laugh and it felt freeing to do so while reading literary fiction in 2022.”
My organizing principle for the collection had more to do with the title and the wide variety of stories. As I’ve mentioned, my first two books were in the school of realism. While writing the novel, however, I wrote a story, “Steven,” that departed from strict realism. And after the novel was published, other stories began to trickle in haphazardly, some realistic, some imaginative/speculative. So, I didn’t even think I had the makings of a unifiable collection until I happened to write a realistic story called “True Fiction,” in which the narrator’s friend tells him he ought to write true fiction. Now, you can read that paradox at least two ways, depending on whether you place the emphasis on fiction, i.e., truly fictional or as the friend puts it “all made up,” or on true, i.e., fiction that has its basis in truth. So, for instance, the story you mention (“The Straight,” I think) “that leans more toward fantasy and science fiction and is far from 'true'” is nevertheless true fiction in the first sense: truly out there. That’s when I realized I could bring my realistic and imaginative stories together under that paradoxical umbrella category. “Open Mic” was the natural choice to open the book, and two more Florida stories, “All Right, Now, Cupid” and the pivotal title story, were also realistic, so I kept them all together. That led logically into the fourth Florida story, “Steven,” which also opened Pandora’s box to let out the fantasy characters and tales.
NeeseMany of the protagonists in your collection are searching for something by examining interior and exterior motivations. The character Pervez, in “Open Mic,” loses his favorite coffee shop where he seemed to find a sense of belonging and personal identity with other immigrants. You yourself are from Bombay, which is now Mumbai. Why does the collection open with this story and do you see this story as running parallel to what is happening nationwide now—disillusionment of the old “American Dream” for many immigrants?
FracisWell, when you think of an open mic, you think of a variety of voices being heard, a number of different voices brought together and given a platform and an audience. So “Open Mic” was a backup option to even be the book’s title story. But, of course, True Fiction is a more fresh and intriguing overview title, while “Open Mic” works perfectly to open the proceedings. I hadn’t thought of this until now, but it reminds me of the prologue’s title in my transnational novel Go Home: “Hear Me.”
Incidentally, Go Home was recently taught in a course at Flagler College called The American Dream / Immigrant Voices. I was invited by the professor, Allan Marcil, to chat with his students, and I remarked to them that I couldn’t recall the term "American Dream" ever appearing in the novel, though certainly there are textual grounds for such an interpretation, as when author Bob Shacochis writes, “I’m grateful to Fracis for his highly topical reexamination of the American Dream.” Similarly, I see the grounds for your question about “Open Mic,” though again it was not explicitly on my mind when I wrote the story from the point of view of the immigrant narrator Pervez. I was thinking more about the ongoing “local vs. global” debate as Pervez introduces his central characters, aspiring guitarist Max and Rwandan refugee Henri, one of whose voices is opening up while the other’s is shutting down. Disillusionment with the American Dream has not only been for some immigrants but also for some Americans such as Max and the coffee shop’s owner who find it increasingly difficult to achieve. On the other hand, the USA and several other immigration-driven diverse countries are shrinking the world, bringing local and cosmopolitan people like Henri, Max, and Pervez together. As Pervez observes, local and global are not mutually exclusive—they can and do coexist, even coincide increasingly, and work well together. It’s time we move beyond nationalism (which has been making a dangerous comeback around the world) and aspire instead to a transnational Global Dream.
NeeseIn your story “Steven,” the protagonist is an aging, married man with a family. Much like Kafka’s metamorphoses, Steven wakes up one day and realizes that he is becoming a woman. In the story “A Coming,” you write from the point of view of a female fairy as well. These two stories are very different from “True Fiction.” In that story, your characters discuss women through a very sexualized lens. In another “All Right, Now, Cupid,” you even make mention of Bukowski—a writer certainly imbued in gender controversy. Can you share more about your exploration of gender in your work through the characters that you created?
FracisGladly. Aimee Bender’s brilliant short-short, “The Rememberer,” begins: “My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.” The narrator’s boyfriend Ben first regresses to an ape, then a sea turtle, and eventually a salamander, which she ceremoniously releases into the sea before he turns into some “one-celled wonder.” When I read this delicately developed extended metaphor (she’s not the first woman to think some guy’s an ape, often for good reason) I was reminded of Kafka’s story, and the seed for “Steven” took root in my head. The Scottish American protagonist in his late thirties, its first line reveals, “is watching TV with his wife and kids when he realizes he is becoming a woman.” So, Steven has no agency in his uniquely organic transformation: “It’s not of his volition; it’s just happening, and he wishes he knew why and what.” Tricky territory, but a compelling premise.
Years earlier, a new Parsi Indian Canadian friend had shared with me that she “couldn’t stop crying for three days” after her first boyfriend broke up with her. It seems obvious she meant she’d cried every time she thought of it, but in my head, I had a vision of her crying nonstop for seventy-two hours, even when speaking, eating, sleeping, etc. So, I wrote a story about “a plain fairy” in which those three days became three decades. The vulnerable young character grew into a tremendously strong female messiah who “never cried again.” And that’s how “A Coming” came to be.
You’re right about “True Fiction.” The narrator Pervez, his friends Arun and Ken, and even his girlfriend Jodi, all realistic products of patriarchal times/societies/cultures, say and think some sexualized and even sexist things about women (and occasionally men). As integral aspects of a relationship, sex and sexuality are necessary parts of its development in a realistic story, for depth and insight and, from a craft perspective, for the reader to fully suspend his or her disbelief and feel it all to be really happening rather than merely written. For instance, in “Steven,” how convincing would his transformation be if there were no sex scene between him and his wife Marla? In “True Fiction” it helps that Pervez’s retrospective point of view allows him sometimes to be relatively self-aware as he looks back upon his relationship with Jodi and their complicated feelings for each other. “Over the years I’ve actually come to feel that I acted as if I’d owned her,” he confesses to Arun. It’s about the damage people in failing or failed relationships and marriages often do to each other, about “mating calls gone wrong.” But it’s also about something beautiful that may unexpectedly survive the fallout.
Yeah, wow, I Googled Bukowski and found references to what you mentioned. It’s a good example of far more sexist times and mores when he was writing. That’s not at all to say sexism is a thing of the past, of course, though progress is being made. The way the Bukowski reference got into “All Right, Now, Cupid” is an illustration of how sometimes one element organically leads to another when drafting. In response to the online-profile prompt, What I’m doing with my life, the narrator, a bank loans officer, remarks on how a teller at his branch was fired and went postal. At that point, as I drafted, I recalled having read a Bukowski novel, Post Office, about a disgruntled postal worker, on the enthusiastic recommendation of a writer friend—a woman, it’s worth noting in this context. Being no fan of bureaucracy and abuse of power, I appreciated Bukowski’s critique of ’60s and ’70s P.O. managers and his unvarnished take on life back then. It’s many years ago, but I also seem to recall raunchy humor and not thinking much further about it, given its time period. What mattered at a much later time while drafting the new story was that I could work his semi-autobiographical character Chinaski into my narrator’s account of employee resentment for some texture that’s relevant to my “going postal” scene, and simultaneously foreshadow another profile prompt: Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food. As the narrator acknowledges to his dating profile’s female readers: “Chinaski’s something of an ass, but still.”
NeeseYour experimental story “The Straight,” continues this exploration of gender, almost as if looking at some sort of creatures from outer space, but the story seems to be about the folly of our own sexuality and its foibles. Your story reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” in which nonsensical language reveals the premise of the poem through tone of the nonsensical language. Can you share more about why you decided to write about sexual coupling and gender using very abstract imagery that the reader has to “decipher”?
FracisIt's an honor for “The Straight” to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” thanks. I just had to revisit it now; it has been so long. Yes, it’s really wonderful how the combination of tone and context conveys the gist of the inventive vocabulary and how you can follow along quite nicely if you just trust in Carroll, as you should. I’d grown accustomed to guiding the reader along some occasionally interspersed Hindi or Gujarati words in my stories but had also fretted at not being able to go full-bore Hinglish or Gujinglish, knowing the difficulty that would present to the non-Indian reader.
So when I was playing with the idea of writing an alternate-world story, I felt A) it would just be wrong to have its inhabitants’ terminology for things in their world be exactly the same as ours, and B) I could perhaps substitute simple, familiar, and appropriate English words that sort of described the objects, making it easier to follow along than if I outright invented nonsense words (as Carroll did). That way I could grow a small sub-lexicon that the reader would begin to acquire and to recognize when those items recurred in the story. Much easier than having to actually decipher a new vocabulary. I also decided on C) a naming system for the alternate species: three-letter names, all consonants with vowels merely implied between them, as is often the case in the Devanagari script for Hindi and Sanskrit. Right away, almost the way the opening line for “Steven” had surfaced in my mind, I had the first line of this story: “Wnf saw the round rolling along the straight a while before they met.” And that gave me the title as well, and a glimmer of where the straight would lead.
Once my nascent landscape was peopled by rounds such as Mlp, whom Wnf sees approaching, and by flats such as Wnf himself, I had two ways to go: a showdown of sorts or a tryst between lovers. I’d been watching a lot of nature/wildlife shows at the time, so the answer became both. Mating displays by flats to impress the attractive round and battles between rival flats to win the right to reproduce with her. Life anywhere and in any form pretty much boils down to propagation of the species.
NeeseSomething that I love about your story “Steven” is how the character looks to the natural world for answers about his own transformation from male to female. Steven explores hermaphrodites in other species. Did you stumble across this information prior to crafting your story and use it as a catalyst for your story, or did you need to do some research about this information after you’d already begun writing the story?
FracisYes, while Steven is unique (and in actuality nonexistent outside of this fiction) among human adults in his mysteriously spontaneous, organic transformation from male to female, organic sex changes are not uncommon among some other species. The story’s catalyst was Aimee Bender’s “reverse evolution” story, but well before reading “The Rememberer” I had in composition courses at University of North Florida taught paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s remarkable essay, “Sex and Size,” in which he describes for instance how, as Steven tells his wife Marla, “as [a male slipper limpet or snail] grows…it turns into a female.” Researching for the story, I learned that for humans if the estrogen level is higher than testosterone when the egg is fertilized, that’s what triggers the female combination of two X chromosomes. On the other hand, if the testosterone level is higher, you get the male combination of an X and a Y. As simple yet life-altering as that. I’d also earlier read Steve Jones’s insightful book, Y: The Descent of Men. It had some amazing information from which my similarly named protagonist Steven derives this healing and unifying perspective: “Three hundred million years ago, before there were chromosomes, there were autosomes—think A for asexual or androgynous. Go back far enough and there was no battle of the sexes…because there were no sexes.”
NeeseAging and the disillusionment of how our bodies change as we age is found in a number of stories, including, “All Right, Now, Cupid.” I adore this story which uses dating profile questions as the scaffolding of the story. Can you talk more about how you structured this story using the profile as a story within a story?
FracisSure thing. You nailed it with the word scaffolding. I happen to be a third-generation civil engineer by early education—my father and maternal grandfather were partners in a reputed construction company in Bombay. So, words like that still have resonance for me. Structural Design and Metal Foundry were important courses well before fiction and poetry workshops, so maybe some of that sense of structure filtered into my stories and books. Online profile prompts, although fairly generic (Favorite Movie or Song or Place or Show or whatever), struck me as natural pegs off which to hang parts of my central character’s story and thus build the whole. OkCupid’s opening prompt, an overly broad My self-summary, inspired from the dating site’s actual visitors many an APB or All Points Bulletin, as my creative-writing professor at University of North Florida, Dr. Kathy Hassall, liked to call a bunch of characteristics lumped together as an amateurish way to introduce a character. Instead, I had my anonymous profile-creator launch right into describing a scene that I felt would characterize both him and, metaphorically, the dating process: as he drives to his local coffee shop, a blind man with a cane stumbles off the curb almost into the path of the Sonata, then presses forward anyway, sweeping the sidewalk “frantically with his cane as he lurched ahead through his personal minefield.” Walking toward him comes a woman who “take[s] his cane hand in hers, stilling his jumpy moves and speaking to him quietly.” And just like that, the story was off and running, helped along periodically by inquisitive but revealing OkCupid prompts such as I spend a lot of time thinking about and The most private thing I’m willing to admit.
NeeseIn your last story “The Legend of Rostam and Sohrab,” the protagonist Sohrab is searching for his father. You point out in your acknowledgments that this is an old and unknown epic poem here in the west but that its motif of searching for the father is well-known in stories such as Oedipus and Star Wars. What are the costs of understanding who we are within our family, and why are these types of stories and legends still necessary today?
FracisYes, the ancient Persian Empire legend from which I got my first name was part of Abolquasem Ferdowsi’s sprawling epic, Shahnameh, or Book of Kings. Well before he wrote it around 1010 A.D. with the help of earlier transcriptions, its stories were orally handed down (as I recreate in my fireside storyteller/narrator The Singer, who then gives voice to my other first-person point-of-view narrators) across generations in Iran. To this day there, its heroic figures are venerated as part of Iran’s pre-Islamic ancient-Persian culture and traditions. While societies change, sometimes drastically, human nature is relatively constant. So, we can empathize with the bastard prince of Samangan when he feels the lack of a father’s presence like an aching void, and also with his heartbroken mother as she tries desperately to not lose her son as well. And when ancient Turkey and Iran mobilize for war, pitting father and son unknowingly against each other, we can vicariously feel the lesson that appears impossible for nations the world over and throughout history to learn once and for all: war is a deadly and tragic business on an enormous scale. It’s way past time for a global body such as the United Nations to be given real capacity to mediate any differences peacefully.
NeeseYour title story is “True Fiction.” As a fiction writer, you seem to create composite characters and pull from a variety of facts from a number of real people’s lives. This is, after all, what fiction writers do. Your short story “True Fiction,” opens with the character Arun discussing this crafting strategy with Pervez, the writer, to which Pervez responds, “that muddling of the facts, as you so flatteringly put it, is what it takes to make a good story of our lives.” Is fact the jumping-off point for you as you write? Is this what helps you make a story “go,” and what would you say to someone who may see themself in one of your characters?
FracisWell, I would say fact is often the jumping-off point or nucleus for my realistic stories, and an understanding of the world in general and human nature, in particular, is what drives them, fantasy stories included. When something in real life sticks with me, gnaws at me, demands repeatedly over time that I work at trying to better understand it, that tells me I may have the kernel for a story that would probably intrigue a reader too. And when exploring such tricky territory, it gives me as a writer a reassuring sense that my story is grounded in reality, that it’s true fiction in that sense, that I’m discharging some basic form of responsibility to my readers by essentially keeping it real.
To someone who may think he or she is one of my characters, I’d say relax, there’s no one-to-one correspondence between a composite character and a real-life person. I never aim for that one-to-one representation, or else I would be writing memoirs. I aim for characters (whether realistic or imaginary) who best serve my stories. That character, by definition, is not you.
That said, it’s a compliment to my character creations that they come alive, so to speak, for readers and reviewers who believe in them and care about what happens to them like they do exist, instead of having to dismiss less-convincing creations as merely something written. In this sense, they’re fictional yet true. Maybe they’ll live on for a bit after I’m gone.
