Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that’s so great it’s got me accosting strangers in the street, and she came to our conversation with a very cool twist on the Bookspo format. Her Bookspo pick is Alice Munro’s short story “Corrie” (which was included in her 2012 DEAR LIFE), which she used as inspiration for her own same-but-different story “Rahel,” published in her collection.
In our conversation, we talk about the possibilities offered to writers by constraints, about excellent titles, and less immediately-excellent titles named for characters (like Corrie and Rahel) who have to do the work to earn them, about writing bold and unapologetic women, how to create a story collection that functions as a whole, the delight of giving readers little Easter eggs, how reading Alice Munro carefully can be as useful as an MFA degree, and so much more!
Engrossing, witty yet devastating stories about diasporic Indians that deftly question what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home.
An underappreciated coffee shop server haunted by her past attracts thousands of followers on social media with her peacock jewellery. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequity quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. And a foster child, orphaned in an accident directly attributable to climate change, brings down her foster father, an oil lobbyist, in spectacular fashion.
With an intense awareness of privilege and the lack of it, the fourteen stunning stories in Peacocks of Instagram explore what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home.
DEEPA RAJAGOPALAN won the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room, the Malahat Review, Event, and Arc. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived in many cities across India, the US, and Canada. Deepa works in the tech industry in Toronto.
Episode 11: Deepa Rajagopalan