LONE STAR LISTENS: Welcome to Lone Star Literary Life, Chitra, and congratulations on the release of your latest novel, Before We Visit the Goddess. As a reader, I really admire that with every creative effort it seems that you stretch your boundaries and that you’re so productive. Since you published your first collection of poems, Black Candle, in 1991, you have managed a near-annual output across multiple platforms, from poetry, to short stories (Arranged Marriage, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives), to middle-grade titles (Neela: Victory Song and the three-volume Brotherhood of the Conch trilogy), and novels, including The Mistress of Spices, Queen of Dreams, and One Amazing Thing. A novel and short story have been transformed for the stage, while two other novels and another short story have had film debuts. Your novel One Amazing Thing has been optioned by Hollywood. And you did a children’s picture book in 2013, Grandma and the Great Gourd: A Bengali Folktale. Your latest novel is a collection of stories—a novel in stories—that just came out April 19. Would you tell our readers, in your own words, what it’s about?

CHITRA DUIVAKARUNI: Before We Visit the Goddess is the tale of three generations of women—grandmother, mother, and daughter—beginning in India and ending up right here in Texas. The three women, each strong in her own way, search for success and independence, but each has to define for herself what exactly that means. The book asks the readers to consider the question of whether success means something different depending on where and when you live. It is also a novel about what we pass on to our children and grandchildren, lessons and legacies both positive and negative, and how our families can be both the source of our deepest strength and our deepest angst.

You grew up in Kolkata, India. What was that like?

It is difficult to describe in just a few words! Kolkata was vibrant, overcrowded, bursting with colors and smells. It is a very old and culturally active city, full of history, and I grew up with a love of literature, reading lots and lots of books, whatever I could get my hands on, in my mother-tongue Bengali and also in English. I also grew up in a very traditional family, where the expectation for my future was that I would get married and raise children, that's it! I think we were all astonished when I turned out to be a writer!

Then you attended graduate school in Ohio and in California. What was it like moving across the world to study, and ultimately, live?

It was an amazing experience, at once exhilarating and terrifying. I had never lived on my own before this. I loved the freedom, but I really missed my family, friends and culture. the year I moved there, Ohio had its coldest winter in the last twenty years. Ice, ice everywhere, and I didn't have a car, so I had to walk through it. I had never experienced such freezing temperatures in my whole life! That was a shock. I write about that in one of the stories in my collection Arranged Marriage, titled “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs.”

There wasn't much Indian food available in Ohio at that time, no Indian restaurants or groceries (though now there are many) and I craved the comfort foods of my childhood all the time. Maybe that's why there's so much food in my books now! By the time I moved to California, I was much more accustomed to America. I loved the multicultural nature of California, and a number of my books are set there. It was in California that I began to carefully observe immigrant life and the many challenges other immigrants also seemed to be facing. This gave me a subject matter worth exploring. My collection Arranged Marriage comes out of those observances, as does my magical-realist novel The Mistress of Spices.

And for the past decade, you have called Houston home. What has that been like?

I love Houston. It is very hospitable and wonderfully multicultural, and I am happy that I have made many friends here. The county I live in, Fort Bend County, is one of the most diverse in the entire country! That is not something people generally think of when they imagine Texas. I try to highlight this diversity in Before We Visit the Goddess, where Indian, black, white, and Hispanic characters interact with each other.

How have Houston—and Texas—influenced your writing?

Texas has influenced my writing in many ways. First of all, when I came here, I started reading more Texan writers, especially writers of color, and that gave me a sense of the complexity and variety of lifestyles and history that we can find in Texas. Many people don't know that at all. Texas welcomed my writing—one of my young adult titles, The Conch Bearer, was chosen as a Bluebonnet List Book, and I was invited to join the Texas Institute of Letters. I have spoken at many schools and colleges where my books are being taught to students of different ethnicities, who all related to the books in different ways, and this strengthened my belief that literature can reach across communities, cultures, and races. This has given me a lot of inspiration to write my recent books.

What’s your creative process like—how do you balance teaching at one of the nation’s most prestigious creative writing programs, and concepting your own work?

Teaching at the University of Houston has also been very good for my writing. I teach in a nationally ranked creative writing program, so I am always in touch with wonderful writers—my colleagues as well as my students. Teaching keeps me on my toes: I try to read many of the important new books, at least in the field of fiction. We discuss craft issues a lot of the time, so I am much more sensitive about my own craft choices. Time is always a challenge. Teaching takes up a lot of time and creativity, the same as writing. I’ve had to divide my week into teaching days and writing days and I have to make an effort to stay really organized. On my writing days, I start in the morning and write for several hours until I get too tired (or too hungry!). I teach one semester a year and take off one semester to write. Otherwise I would not be able to research and write the books that I’ve published.

How has publishing changed in the three decades that you have been a part of it?

E-publishing has really opened up the world of books. Books are now available in so many forms, and so much more easily if you have an e-reader. I myself read e-books all the time. Self publishing has become a really important thing. When I first started writing, self-publishing was  looked down upon. But now many writers are publishing wonderful books through programs such as Amazon and making them available to so many readers. It is an exciting time!

On the other hand, I think traditional publishers are struggling more now. They are much more concerned about the bottom line, and whether a book can make money for them or not. They used to be less concerned about that when I first started publishing. There was more of an interest in publishing quality literature, including poetry, which generally doesn’t make the publisher that much money. I am also concerned about the health of our independent bookstores. Because of chain bookstores and large discount book sites such as Amazon, they are struggling. I encourage our readers here to support them. There are several wonderful independent bookstores in Houston, such as Brazos Books, Blue Willow Bookstore, and Murder by the Book.

How do you manage to write about India now that it has been a long time since you’ve lived there?

I visit India regularly and spend much of my time there taking notes and gathering ideas for books. Or eavesdropping, which is a great way to get ideas, too! Sometimes I already have the idea for a book, and I will go to particular places to research it.  Because of the Internet, keeping up with India—what's going on there, as well as how people are thinking—has become much easier. And I love Indian women’s magazines. I’m always asking friends to bring them for me when they go to India. that helps me keep track of the pulse of women’s issues. Still, it’s a struggle, since I don’t live there all the time. Therefore, I make sure to have Indian readers who will look at my manuscript and tell me if there’s anything I didn’t get right. And several of my books are set in the India of an older time, for which I would’ve had to do research anyway. For instance, the life of the grandmother in Before We Visit the Goddess was something that required extensive research since she belonged to the generation before mine.

I read many interviews in which you talk about the importance of food in your books, and the importance of cooking for an immigrant to preserve their culture. Will you share more about that aspect of Before We Visit the Goddess?

Food is extremely important in this novel, perhaps more so than in any novel that I’ve written before this. Sabitri is the daughter of a skilled sweet-maker, and she herself is very talented in this field and goes on to open a famous sweet store in Kolkata that she names after her mother, to honor her. Many traditional Bengali sweets are lovingly described in this novel. My mother was an excellent sweet-maker herself, and I think she was at the back of my mind as I wrote some of these sections. Sabitri's daughter Bela is also creative and adventurous, and she creates many wonderful fusion dishes. (Perhaps this is symbolic of the way in which she acculturates herself to America.) But the granddaughter, Tara, is not at all into cooking, a fact that causes a lot of tension between her mother and herself! Thus, in this novel food becomes a symbol for success, creativity, values that we pass on to the next generation, and ultimately rebellion.

As a self-described foodie, have you experimented with the culinary blending of cultures of India and Texas? For example, like a curried chicken-fried steak?

Ahahaha. I do like fusion cooking. I have a number of dishes that I've created and written up on my blog, at www.chitradivakaruni.com/blog/. Curried chicken-fried steak— not yet. But there's an idea!

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