A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Nishanth Injam

“We spend too much time thinking about how we are different and not enough time thinking about how we are similar.”

Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize is the fifth edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote. Submissions for the 2022 awards are open now.

Nishanth Injam is a fiction writer from Telangana, India. He received an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he is currently a Zell fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review and The Georgia Review.

“The Math of Living” was originally published in Virginia Quarterly Review. Find a brief excerpt below:

I’ve been working for the Chicago Tribune for about four years when it strikes me that I will go home again in three months. The ticket has been booked, and I’m ready. My boss has reviewed the JavaScript code and made his updates for the day. The code is in production.
Everything about my going home is formulaic. Sometimes I think this is my legacy—not everyone can write themselves a home. I tell myself it’s the next best thing to being on a plane.

Where did you find the idea for this story?

It came from a writing prompt! I was in Fernanda Eberstadt’s class at the University of Michigan’s MFA program and I was supposed to write about a stranger who’s either new in town or leaving town but I found myself writing about the shape of my life. The long flights back home, the calculations you make as an immigrant, the fear of losing one’s parents, all that heavy stuff.

What was your writing process like for this story?

It usually takes me several months to write a first draft. I wrote this one in three days and Fernanda Eberstadt helped me edit it, but I wasn’t happy with the ending. The narrator is stuck in this endless loop and I didn’t know how to not make the story a monologue. A friend, Thea Chacamaty—also a wonderful writer—told me I had to break the loop. I set aside the story for a while hoping that my subconscious brain would figure out how to end the story.

And the solution came to me, months later, by way of life. My mother died unexpectedly and I got a phone call informing me of her death. I just put that in.

After the story was accepted, I did a round of clarification edits with VQR editors Heidi Siegrist and Paul Reyes. Thanks to them, the story read a lot sharper.

In the story, you write “Home is the recognition of the lives we led together once, the things that only we knew of.” How has writing this story impacted your relationship to the concept of home?

This is such a dangerous question—I’ll answer it anyway. I had a home when I wrote the first draft. I was afraid of losing it, but I still had it. Later, when I was done with the story, frankly, the concept of home felt irrelevant. A thing of privilege, even a distraction. I’m less interested in the idea of a geographical home now. Maybe home is just the air you breathe, the people you love.

You combine evocative prose with coding language to illuminate the complexity of the immigrant experience. What inspired this particular stylistic choice?

When I began writing this story, I didn’t think of it as a story in the conventional sense. I wanted the piece to hold all the emotions I’d been carrying for a while. I wanted to skip past conventional craft elements and get to the real emotion. Every detail that needed to be filled in became a variable in the coding sense—it didn’t truly matter.

Sometimes I think literary fiction places too much importance on detail. Let’s say Person A likes to have oatmeal for breakfast and Person B prefers frosted corn flakes. I get that those two breakfasts are different and those two people are different, but the capitalist framework we are all living with emphasizes this difference; fragmentation over solidarity. We spend too much time thinking about how we are different and not enough time thinking about how we are similar. Granularity is good, specificity makes fiction alive, but I didn’t want to lose sight of what I was writing against.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

It’s a great honor. The prize came at a time when I needed some encouragement and I feel really lucky and grateful for being chosen. I also loved meeting the other prize winners and reading their stories.

What is the best or worse writing advice you’ve received, and why?

The best writing advice is the one that tells you to read widely. Books from different time periods, languages, literary traditions, etc. It opens your horizons on what is really possible with your work.

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

Through literary magazines and newsletters like Lit Hub Daily. I’m not on social media and I tend to rely on friend recommendations. My MFA cohort has impeccable taste. They are all fantastic writers and readers and I trust them.