Check it out here!
“For Me the Story Is Always the Characters”: An Interview With Ranbir Singh Sidhu
Check it out here!
Category: Interview
Orphanhood and Exile Central to Our Age
The blogger Kelly Lynn Thomas recently interviewed me — and asked some excellent and searching questions. Read the whole interview here.
For me as a person, the idea of home is one I feel increasingly distant from. I’ve never felt “at home” anywhere—it’s a stance that’s been useful to me as a writer, for it’s allowed me to remain to some degree an outsider. It’s also a deeply uncomfortable feeling, and one I don’t particularly enjoy, and yet I have no experience of the opposite—what it would feel like to be at home somewhere, or to have a sense that you come from somewhere, that you have a hometown, that you have a place to go where you feel accepted and yourself. All of these experiences are completely alien to me.
A conversation with Quintan Ana Wikswo
Over at the Degenerate Art Ensemble, Quintan Ana Wikswo and I talk about hellhounds, death, toast, TS Eliot, talismans, and jam. Check it out here.
Far outside the expectations…
A feature interview over at India Abroad this week. Check it out here.
“Stuck on a story for years…”
A lovely new interview up over at W3Sidecar. Check it out here.
I can be stuck on a story for years—actually many of the stories included here were written in part, left unfinished, and then returned to years later to finish. Where that final push comes from I don’t know, except that time is mysterious, it allows connections to be made that otherwise wouldn’t have, and it allows a much deeper immersion into a character—someone I might have casually created without any clear goal in mind—to develop and emerge.
“I get bored when everyone is going along nicely and not questioning”
The fine folks at The Aerogram have published an extended interview with me on the book. Take a look here.
In my view, one of the central purposes of art is to unsettle, and to destabilize our own fixed notions of who we are, and who our fellow humans are. If, after having read this collection, the ground is a little more unsteady under the reader’s feet, then I’ve done my job. There’s something of the natural provocateur in me, and I get bored when everyone is going along nicely and not questioning the larger structures of their own lives. So I do hope that it provokes, and that it reaches those people who are at the moment sitting a little too comfortably in their own lives.
Writing in bed, and other revelations
Over at her Intermittent Visitors site, the marvelous poet and blogger Joanne Merriam has a brief interview with me up. What will you learn? That I’m a messy writer who hates getting out of bed, thinks you should ignore all writing advice, and oh yeah, still an Alasdair Gray fanboy after all these years. Take a look here. And check out her small publishing house, Upper Boot Books, here.
What is your writing process?
Messy and undisciplined, with no clear schedules. I write in bed when I can, and I often try and get away and write while traveling, where I can keep the laptop next to my head, wake, sit up with some pillows behind my back and pull the computer onto my lap and get immediately to work, often still half-asleep and remembering dreams.
RANBIR SIDHU 