Monday Cup Of Links #69 - Peer Mentors, Self Publishing, Revolutionary Confessions
And a deity for knowledge workers!
Happy Monday!
I am fresh off the exhilaration of attending the Rooted&Written conference/workshop at the San Francisco Writers Grotto. The most exciting thing to me has been getting feedback about India House from a group of very warm, kind, and knowledgeable, and most importantly, diverse authors.
I really love having 80k words of my own (+20k nonfiction summary words) that I can pick parts to polish, submit, and share publicly. It makes experiences like this much more fruitful, because I have something to narrow my perspective down and experience teaching through.
Turns out, people from other diaspora understand the anticolonial feelings quite well, and they also experience it in their own ways. They also write for a large nonwhite audience while also realizing their work will be consumed by a white-western audience, and they find ways to deal with that. Additionally, the peaceful, Gandhian strain of the Indian freedom struggle isn’t known to everyone, and there’s surprised faces when they are told the mainstream narrative of Indian freedom is that we protested peacefully to get our freedom.
And I came away feeling more confident in a decolonial global audience. Writing in English doesn’t mean my audience has to be American or British. I’m sure folks from other former colonies might enjoy India House quite well.
It’s also amazing what the movie RRR has done for the Indian narrative. It’s mindblowing how many people know the Vande Mataram flag of India now.
It’s been quite an experience to work so closely with other authors, getting insights into their process. While I went in mostly worried about how I can improve my work, I came out feeling more strongly about helping and celebrating others, understanding their vision, and enjoying watching them go through their process. I hope to carry that forward into my work, and online presence.
Onto our links!
Let’s start with a link I’m currently working off of - The statements of the accused in the Alipore Bomb Case of 1909. This was the case where a group in Calcutta planned on assassinating a particularly cruel British magistrate, but by accident, ended up killing his wife and another lady. To execute this, they had imported bomb technology from the Russians by way of France and Germany, and did their own experiments, aided secretly by several well-known luminaries like JC Bose and Sister Nivedita. When they were busted, a small group agreed to take the fall so the others could stay free and continue the effort.
In the link, note how young the accused are, and how much effort they put in to keep all their messaging consistent.The History Of Self Publishing. My teacher at the workshop suggested I read this piece when I told her I wanted to self-publish my novel. I didn’t know Charles Dickens self-published, and decided not to cut corners and made his book so beautiful and pulled out all stops that he barely broke even.
Why having a peer mentor can be the best move. I took a class with author Vanessa Hua about the writerly life. Among other things, she stressed on the importance of community, and this article on peer mentors which she wrote underlines an alternative to traditional mentoring, which is especially important in this rapidly changing landscape of publishing fiction. We’re all experimenting and trying to learn, and for the day-to-day of most careers, a peer mentor seems way more valuable.
ICYMI: My piece from two Thursdays ago about how the popular narrative doesn’t seem to value time spent parenting, and all the “juggle it all” tips seem to focus on finding ways to outsource parenting and get to work. I wrote it straight from the heart.
Artefact of the Week: A sandstone murti of Lord Ishana, originally from Khajuraho, currently on display at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I didn’t know of this deity! Ishana, it turns out, is the deity of the north-east direction. He is one of the eight forms of Lord Shiva. The north is the direction of wealth, and the east the direction of knowledge. So that makes the northeast a very important direction for knowledge workers, and essentially, as Lord Ishana depicts this marriage of wealth and wisdom, He ought to be the deity for those who want to earn from learning, teaching and disseminating knowledge. May He bless us with enlightenment, direction, and clarity of thought!