Kiran Desai tried workshopping at Columbia, decided it wasn’t for her (via).
Just as she has faltered in accepting American citizenship, she has been unwilling to embrace the American style of writing. Having attended a creative writing course at Columbia University, of which she says her first novel Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard was a product, she decided to start afresh. “It was very hard for me to write like that,” she explains. “They demand you write a certain way because you have to present your work in half-hour instalments. You are having to polish only a little bit of it. It suits the short story more than the novel.
“You certainly can’t sit there with the big, huge monster [novel] and function in any kind of way as an American writer, because you are constantly having to make grant applications, and you either have to exit that world or your work must change.”
Desai chose to exit. “I didn’t apply for grants or writers’ centres, I didn’t join writers’ groups. I just couldn’t do it. It didn’t seem an honest way to write to me. When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.”
Instead she lived on her advance, stretching it further by moving to Mexico for a while, occupying small rooms in overcrowded houses in New York.
Everyone was telling her to get a job, get some health insurance, and she managed instead to just write. Getting the Booker must feel mighty sweet.
I’m the Booker does feel good, but I bet it’s better having your mom be Anita Desai, a successful writer able to her daughter through jobless days. Geez, Columbia is so expensive and I know she didn’t get her money back. I’ve got student loans, bring on the grant writing.