GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2024/25
Ten questions with GBP Short Story Prize author Shastri Akella
(1) HI SHASTRI! THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR SUBMITTING ‘WHAT TREVOR SAW’ TO THE GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE AND CONGRATULATIONS ON ITS LONGLISTING. COULD YOU OFFER OUR READERS A SENTENCE OR TWO, TO INTRODUCE IT?
Thank you very much. As a fan of the fiction you publish, this is especially meaningful to me.
‘what Trevor saw’ is the story of Gagan, a shepherd's child from a small town whose life is altered in ways that's unprepared for when a stranger enters his life briefly. It is a story about the core longings we carry and what we get in places of happiness when the longing is fulfilled.
(2) PLEASE TELL US A BIT MORE ABOUT ITS INSPIRATION, AND THE WRITING OF IT.
I was fascinated by the idea that an image of you can survive without your knowledge or even after you've forgotten posing for it, so that we might encounter it when we're leading very different lives. It feels like a haunting. I was also drawn to an idea I read in an essay by Susan Sontag (‘Regarding the Pain of Others’): Sontag claims that war photographs are documents that depict horrific reality but they're also works of art, so a well-shot war photograph can be beautiful, in the sublime or ugly register of beautiful. I wanted to write a story where these two ideas intersect in the context of a contained, human experience that is photographed and bears witness to that photograph, a lifetime passing between the two.
(3) ‘WHAT TREVOR SAW’ IS A STORY THAT UNFOLDS OVER MANY YEARS. WAS HANDLING SUCH A LARGE SWEEP OF TIME – AS OPPOSED, SAY, TO A SINGLE INCIDENT (OR SHORTER PERIOD) DIFFICULT TO MANAGE?
I believe that the unhealed wounds of our inner child manifest as core longings that haunt us for most of our lives. Gagan’s encounter with Trevor leaves him with a core longing, and when he meets Trevor again as a grown-up, that longing surfaces and he experiences a collapse of time — experiencing the past and the present viscerally, at a body-level. Depicting that was important to me and the time leap allowed me to do it.
I had two other goals:
(i) I wanted readers to experience the passage of time the way characters experience it. For example, Gagan knows that Aarti lives in Mumbai now and has a child, so I need not state it as a fact; instead, I write about his ongoing frustrations about being able to get in contact with her, a detail that also shows how the most intimate relationship he's known has changed.
(ii) I wanted to have seeds planted in the Chamba of of Gagan’s in childhood to bear unexpected fruit in the Delhi of Gagan’s adulthood — Aarti’s dream, of having people clap for her, is fulfilled, but not in the way she wanted.
(4) TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR CHARACTERS, TOO, AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO EACH OTHER. (IN MANY WAYS, I SAW ‘WHAT TREVOR SAW’ AS A TALE OF TWO FRIENDSHIPS: ONE FLIMSY AND ULTIMATELY FALSE – THAT BETWEEN GAGAN AND TREVOR – AND THE ONE BETWEEN GAGAN AND AARTI, WHICH IS BASED ON REAL, ACTUAL LOVE.)
The friendship Gagan has with Trevor, one that he is struggling to even name, is aspirational: Trevor is freedom, he is beauty. Or rather, Gagan learns from his social ecosystem that Trevor is who ‘beautiful’ looks like, his life is what ‘freedom’ feels like. During my travels in Rajasthan, I met a traveler from England who told me that many locals he’s encountered think he’s wealthy because he’s English and White, but he is a postal worker who had to save for two years to make this trip happen. So on the one hand Gagan’s perception of Trevor is not based on reality, on the other Trevor calls Gagan a friend but the friendship Gagan imagines is different. In some ways, their relationship becomes contingent on this vacuum of understanding and it falls apart when (in the last act) that vacuum closes.
Gagan’s friendship with Aarti is based on this deep, slow process of learning the other until they have become your implicit knowledge. When Gagan needs comforting, Aarti offers it without saying a word. There is tremendous, often quiet power when someone bears witness to all of you. That kind of visibility is the highest form of comfort you can offer someone and Aarti offers it to Gagan effortlessly.
(5) HOW IMPORTANT IS IT THAT TREVOR IS GRIEVING?
I think that an ache for travel (not tourism) is felt when there is an abrupt change in reality as we know it. Because traveling creates a literal rupture in time that corresponds to and somehow soothes the narrative rupture we’ve experienced. I wanted that to be true for Trevor. His travels and his art allow him to access his grief and humanize himself. And yet, like all modalities of grieving, it excludes anyone who enters the narrative. So Gagan’s role in Trevor’s life is incidental, he is a brief subject, a passing source of comfort, one whose name is forgotten once Trevor leaves town and continues with his grieving.
(6) OK! ON TO WRITING IN GENERAL. HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WRITING? DO YOU HAVE A DAILY ROUTINE?
I did my undergraduate in computer science, like a lot of my fellow South Asians, and worked for Google in their offices in India, Ireland and the US. I never wrote or read fiction until I was twenty-seven. Travel is what evoked in me a desire to write — especially when, vexed with pressures for an arranged marriage from my family, I spent a lot of time trekking by myself in the Himalayas. It was on one of those treks that I received an image that went on to become the starting point of my debut novel, The Sea Elephants. I saw a young man, alone in his house, shifting a picture from one wall that has the pictures of the living to another wall that has the pictures of the dead. The image had me in a vice-like grip, so I started to journal from his perspective. I followed my instinct to write fiction, not questioning why I wasn't writing, say, a memoir or a travelogue. A writer I met at the Jaipur Literary Festival (Annie Zaidi) and two good friends brought the habit of reading literary fiction into my life and I haven't stopped since.
I write for at least two hours every day and if I become hard-pressed for time, I still write for 30 minutes, or 20 minutes, especially when I am working on a novel, because it allows for emotional continuity.
(7) WRITING AND REWRITING: WHAT’S YOUR RATIO?
For me it is 30-70: a first draft allows me to learn my character and the world they're wrestling with and until my most recent novel-in-progress, it has been the hardest draft to complete because what appears on the page, in that early stage, always seems dull compared to the story's richness in my imagination. I see drafting a process of bridging of this gulf as the story and its characters gain depth, dimension, and complexity and I can clarify the voice of the story: hearing how characters sound to each other and articulating how they see the shifting sands of their world.
(8) AND WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON AT THE MOMENT?
I'm editing the final two stories in a collection that I envision as being twelve stories long (what Trevor saw is one of those twelve.) I’m working to place my debut novel, The Sea Elephants (Flatiron Books USA, Penguin India) in the UK/IE.
I’m also writing the second draft of a fantasy novel about Irish vampires migrating to the US in the near future.
(9) OTHER WRITERS. TELL US ABOUT SOME YOU ESPECIALLY ADMIRE – AND ALSO WHAT YOU’RE CURRENTLY READING.
I recently finished reading the hypnotic Playthings by Alex Pheby (Galley Beggar Press) and deeply admired the story's commitment to its perspective and the brilliance of the prose. The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (Fitzcarraldo, translated by Daniel Levin Becker) and Son of Man by Jean-Baptise del Am0 (Fitzcarraldo, translated by Frank Wyne) are beautifully-written slow burns that culminate in incandescent acts of violence. Julia Armfield’s Private Rites (Flatiron Books) and Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson (Fourth Estate) made for excellent companion novels this winter. Reasons She Goes to the Woodsby Deborah Kay Davies (Oneworld) stays beautifully true to the voice and perspective of a child. If you're looking for ghost stories, you cannot miss Muckross Abbey by Sabina Murray (Grove). I'm a fan of the body of work produced by Aanchal Malhotra, Anne Enright, Colin Barrett, Kazu Ishiguro, John Banville, Namita Gokhale, Oisín Fagan, and Ursula K. le Guin (I’m sure I’m missing many of my favorites here). And for the last fourteen years, I’ve reread God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Penguin India) once every year, right before my birthday.
(10) “THE HORROR OF THE BLANK PAGE.” DO YOU FEEL THAT HORROR? AND HOW WOULD YOU ADVISE OTHER WRITERS TO GET BEYOND IT?
Last semester, I taught an advanced genre fiction workshop in which my student-writers shared the storyboards of their novels-in-progress: one had crafted an elaborate map for her fantastic geography, including details that didn't make it into the novel (like a candy store that becomes visible to you only after five locals place their trust in you); another had a list of after effects endured by their shape-shifting protagonist after his returns to his human form (like the level of salt they can tolerate). They saw it as play, and they were reveling in it.
As writers we sometimes take our work so seriously that it becomes a kind of chokehold. We forget the childlike enthusiasm we're infused with when we get a new idea. Living in that play state for a little longer, by dreaming about and through your world can, I genuinely believe, bring us to a flow state when we show up on the page.
SHASTRI AKELLA’s debut novel is The Sea Elephants (Flatiron Books USA, Penguin India 2023). Their fiction was anthologized in Best American Short Fiction in 2024. Recently, they were recipients of fiction prizes from Black Warrior Review, CRAFT, and Bellevue Literary Review, as well fiction fellowships from the Fine Arts Works Center. Their stories are available online in Guernica, Fairy Tale Review, and The Masters Review.