#sejal shah

Wellesley alum Sejal Shah published a collection of essays titled This is One Way to Dance: Essays (University of Georgia Press) last year and recently spoke withHYPHEN Magazine about the process of putting out the collection last summer in the midst of a global pandemic and renewed protests for racial justice. 

Here is an excerpt from that interview: 

[Interviewer Ansley Moon]: You write in the introduction to the book, “I don’t subscribe to the notion of fixed genres — not when I and others move from one culture to another, from one kind of dance to another; from what looks like a poem to what looks like an essay to what could be a story. The world wants to know where to place you, how to classify you. I began my writing life as a poet and later turned to prose. In the last several years, for me, creative nonfiction has encompassed the wildest field of voice, thought and performance. I view the essay as hybrid and nonbinary, the aesthetic as queer.” This is probably one of my favorite descriptions of the essay, the lyric essay, and in so many ways, it reminds me of dance, of movement and even resistance. How does this resistance come into play in your writing?

[Sejal Shah]: Thank you so much. I worked for a long time on the introduction. For me, resistance came in terms of pushing back against disciplinary boundaries and classifications: how genre was defined and defended in MFA programs and publishing and how my work, for as long as I can remember, certainly since graduate school, did not seem to fit in the genres or disciplines as I encountered them. I asked poets Sarah Gambito and Cathy Park Hong to help me launch my book —  and I think that in part that was reclaiming my earlier life and identity as a poet. Sarah, Cathy and other poets read and recognized some of the essays as prose poems and called them as such. And that also felt like a kind of resistance and support. Though I had been known as a poet while growing up and in college, my writing did not fit the prevailing aesthetic in poetry at UMass; that was okay, I was there on the fiction side of the MFA program. I also had to contend with sexual harassment. I learned I needed places outside of creative writing to survive as well as interdisciplinary spaces like Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies and non-academic spaces like dance and yoga classes. These spaces and interdisciplinary work outside of my university became sites of resistance and community-building for me.

I think a lot about self-determination and self-definition. I’m late to the term intersectionality, but I attended a women’s college and found my voice through reading and speaking in interdisciplinary spaces. The lyric essay, a term I first heard through poets Philip WhiteandLisa Williams, felt as though it was a form that could hold my penchant for images, compression and the experience of writing around and through traumatic experiences in which the language itself fractures. Lyric essays showed me a way to hold space for silence, utterances and the unsayable.

In these essays I did not directly address some of the complexities of experience about class, sexuality, power, speech and silence in academia and in my family and culture. I identify as queer and bisexual. My writing community, my friends, my partner all know this, but I chose not to name it as an identity category in the book or in promotion. It’s something I’ve been ambivalent about writing, because of my traditional and religious parents. I did not name my queerness directly in my book, perhaps out of deference to their conservative beliefs, my father’s compromised health, and out of respect for our sometimes-difficult relationship, but I wish I had, actually, because it’s an important lens. I tried to signal my positionality, politics and aesthetics through claiming the genre itself as queer and nonbinary, ending the book on a note about the legalization of gay marriage on my wedding day and exploring my ideas about genre, politics, legibility and publishing in companion essays, which appeared close to when Dance was published. I wrote about genre slippage and hybridity in a craft capsule for Poets & Writers Magazine called “Breaking Genre.” I felt fewer rules and restrictions in nonfiction than I did for poetry and fiction, maybe because I didn’t study nonfiction (my MFA was in fiction).

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To read the full interview:HYPHEN: “I’m Never Not Thinking About Home and Kinship” (December, 2020)

This is One Way to Dance: Essays is out now.