My conversation with Kirti Bhadresa begins with reflections about our mutual friend Melanie Masterson, who died in December 2021 after years of living with metastatic breast cancer. Kirti tells me how Melanie’s example inspired her to make the most of her own time and prioritize completing her first book, AN ASTONISHMENT OF STARS. And then she reveals her BOOKSPO pick, Naben Ruthum’s CURRY, a book that, Kirti explains, gave her permission to write stories about racialized women the way she wanted to rather than in a way that’s circumscribed.
Kirti and I mention the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon, which is this weekend, with proceeds to RETHINK, improving outcomes for young women with breast cancer. If you’d like to contribute, you can sign up yourself at https://turning-the-page-on-cancer-2024.raisely.com/ or donate to my campaign at https://turning-the-page-on-cancer-2024.raisely.com/kerry-clare
In our conversation, Kirti explains how CURRY made her understand that diasporic Indians (both in fiction and in the world!) can exist in a variety of different ways, and those ways need not always be powered by nostalgia. She tells me the fascinating story of how her story collection began with a list poem, each item on the item becoming a paragraph, and then those paragraphs growing into stories. Her stories, in her mind, aren’t necessarily laid out in the order they are in the book, but instead are all taking place concurrently (which is also how she wrote them, in bits and pieces, when life in general seemed so fractured during the COVID Pandemic), and then she shares how the title story in the collection came to her in a dream.
The wife who uses the name of her white husband in public. The mother who cleans the small-town hospital while her daughter moves to the city to forget their shared past. The well-behaved teen girl who anxiously watches her older sister slip further and further away from their hovering parents. Each of these characters is both familiar and singular, reminding us of women we have been, of our mothers and daughters, neighbors and adversaries.
Kirti Bhadresa is a keen observer of humanity, especially of the BIPOC women whose domestic and professional work is the backbone of late-stage capitalism but whose lives receive so little attention in mainstream culture. An Astonishment of Stars is a collection that sees those who are unseen and cuts to the heart of contemporary womanhood, community collisions, and relationships both chosen and forced upon us.
Kirti Bhadresa’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Quarantine Review, The Sprawl, and Room, and she has been a finalist for the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Award in the category of Feature Writing. Bhadresa lives with her family in Calgary, AB, on Treaty 7 territory.
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