Shownotes
In Conversation with Anju Gattani
Fiction author, freelance journalist, fiction writing instructor, blogger and former newspaper reporter, Anju was born in India but grew up in Hong Kong. She has also lived and been published in Singapore, India, Australia, and USA in cover stories, fiction, feature, news, interviews, travel, perspective pieces and more. She finally dug her roots in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, with her husband, 2 dashing boys and a rebel lion-head rabbit.
Her Winds of Fire series, was optioned for film / TV to Double Strings, Inc, ranked on the Amazon Bestsellers List and is honored to be a book of the month pick by International Pulpwood Queen and Timber Guy Book Cub Reading Nation. Reviewed as Crazy Rich Asians in India “Downton Abbey-style saga, but set in India!” by BooksByWomen.org. The series advocates for awareness of abuse, domestic violence, mental health and more...
Anju also interviews writers and publishing industry professionals on her Youtube channel, Story Mantra. Anju hopes her books will Bridge Cultures and Break Barriers.
Social Media:
website:https://www.anjugattani.com
Youtube: Anju Gattani, Story Mantra
“Hard to believe this lush, passionate novel is the author’s first. In Duty and Desire, Anju Gattani has created an utterly immersive reading experience—fascinating characters, evocative details, compelling dramatic turns, all set against the teeming irrepressible vibrancy of modern-day India. A bravura performance.” —David Corbett, award-winning author of The Art of Character
“Like all good stories the story of Sheetal conveys deeper meanings about human experiences and relationships. Duty and Desire is definitely a bridger of cultures; educating readers about and celebrating Indian culture whilst keeping the reader well hooked.” ~~Qaisra Shahraz, peace activist, author of ‘The Holy Woman’ & Founder/Executive Director of Muslim Arts and Culture Festival, UKw
Transcripts
In Conversation with Autho Anju Gattani
[:[00:00:03] Anju Gattani: Hi Lovelace. And I appreciate you having me on your show. It's such an honor to be here such a privilege. We chatted so many times and every conversation is full of bubbles
[:[00:00:22] Anju Gattani: I would say so considering the world is a very tough place right now. Yeah.
[:[00:00:46] You lived in Singapore, India, Australia, and now the U S. You are truly a cosmopolitan, international writer. How has that influenced you? How has that transition growing up in all these different cultures? How has that influenced your writing? I'm going to jump right into it if you don't mind,
[:[00:01:28] So even growing up in Hong Kong, think of Bend It Like Beckham, but without the soccer. That was my life. We'd step out the door, our school, which was in colonial Hong Kong before the handover to China British school under the university of Cambridge, but over 36 nationalities under one roof. Wow. And we come home in a very Indian home environment, but our parents talked any with each other and Hindi.
[:[00:02:23] Lovelace Cook: It sounds wonderful. It sounds like a great environment, a very creative environment. I love that. And what inspired you to write in the first place? How did that evolve in your life?
[:[00:03:27] And just seeing that I thought to myself, well, imagine how many households are getting this newspaper and how many people would see my name. And that time we didn't have social media. We didn't have telephones where you could talk through in terms of visually, it was just the old-fashioned phone.
[:[00:04:02] Lovelace Cook: And what an affirmation to see your name in print,
[:[00:04:19] I would peek out from behind whenever we had guests who would come in for dinner. And I was just really shy. So that was my way of I think telling the whole world, Hey, here I am.
[:[00:04:56] Lovelace Cook: I really have been fascinated with your winds of fire series and want to talk with you about that. Because I'll leap right into your series, you are an advocate of just trying to promote awareness of domestic abuse and the advocacy for mental health. But in your winds of fire series, it's all draped in glamour.
[:[00:05:59] But [00:06:00] can we talk about world building and how you built the world for the characters. Please tell me how, through your writing process, developed the worlds in which your characters live.
[:[00:06:43] And I pulled out tons and tons of craft books on fiction creation, writing from Donald Maas to David Corbett, to Steven James and, and all these, there were a lot of facets of world building and nuggets in there, which I learned, but The Winds of Fire series was a process of 20 years of development.
[:[00:07:26] And I would tell you point blank that every time, I work out every day almost. And every time I'd get on the treadmill or a cross trainer, I start planning out in my head. This is what I'm going to, in terms of the story format; this is what's going to happen then this, after the missing, so on and so forth.
[:[00:08:06] But I had to learn how to create that world efficiently and effectively, so that what is in my mind and the environment that I am creating, or the environment that these characters living in will translate to you the reader seamlessly, which is the enormous number of revisions and rewrites.
[:[00:08:35] oh my goodness. What a setting, what a phenomenal setting and in contrasts and the level of detail with which you write is just, it paints that picture of a certain lifestyle and in the culture as well.
[:[00:09:11] And these are, , behavior patterns and thought patterns that you would never see or be exposed to, but exist. , that's where the culture comes in and it's, it's not just specific to one, , I grew up on Hong Kong, so I've seen in Asia as well in Hong Kong with the Chinese, they have their own way of thinking and living and their system of conduct, modes of conduct codes of conduct behavior.
[:[00:10:02] Lovelace Cook: Coming from and having, being influenced by a patriarchal society in which arranged marriage is just, I suppose for generations and generations was just an accepted part of the culture.
[:[00:10:55] Anju Gattani: It's putting myself to... where I could easily get lost in translation with words on the page because I'm taking you the reader to a concept which you've heard about, but you wouldn't know the details of unless someone who's been in that situation. And the way arranged marriages operate now in today's day is very different from how it operated 25, 30 years ago. Even 30 years ago in my grandmother's time when my grandmother herself got married at the age of 13. My mother, the generation after got married at the age of 16, but she went to finish on her bachelor's degree and then moved in with her in-laws. And now it's the same arranged marriage system. And now we have my generation a lot of arranged marriages, a lot of friends I know have also had arranged marriages.
[:[00:12:08] And they, that middle person would be the sort of wheel that facilitated the meeting of the two families. And, but when I say families, I mean families, families first after the families meet, then it's the next stage would be for the suitable boy and girl to meet and chaperone meeting where you get maybe a few minutes at that time to talk that's in our generation, in my mom's generation, you didn't even get to see her.
[:[00:13:05] And a lot of them. Conflicts do come in when it's somebody who's out of a different caste or a different sect of India. But people are more open to that now than they were before. Women are getting a lot more opportunities for education and higher education. So they're also wearing the pants in the house, which is nice.
[:[00:13:41] Lovelace Cook: I know that when I was traveling in India and I just distinctly remember a day in Kochi in Kerala, where I saw there was obviously the grandmother whonwas wearing a sari, the mother was wearing a tunic [00:14:00] and the daughter had on jeans and Western clothes.
[:[00:14:24] Anju Gattani: I really appreciate that you observe that, but Lovelace, this is what I observed from my end of the spectrum. So now when you paint that picture, what I observe when I paint, when I see your painted picture is the generations have had to fight to go from one extreme to the other. Each generation has had its own battle in terms of advocacy, in terms of standing up for women and mothers who don't want their daughters to go through the same, pick up that fight and take that up and battle that for as long as they can until it's the time for the next generation to step in and take that battle up.
[:[00:15:16] Lovelace Cook: That's really exciting. I mean, in my own growing up, I've had to do the same to walk away from a far more traditional upbringing and very restrictive culture, in a sense. My lifestyle is very, very different from that with which I grew up.
[:[00:16:04] Anju Gattani: Sure. I think going back to, for example, how the series began, I didn't get to choose the characters. I didn't get to choose a story. They came to me. I didn't even know I was addressing these issues of domestic violence, domestic abuse, and mental health until I had two or three books written out.
[:[00:16:45] And the story starts coming to life in terms of it starts shining a little more cause now we're removing the dirt. As I began to unearth more of it, I began to see the themes which I hadn't even known I was writing about. So clearly there was a lot at the back of my head, in terms of, in my subconscious-- issues that have been just sitting there waiting to be addressed from what I had seen my mom go through in her life.
[:[00:17:27] I don't know why. They would just start opening up to me about issues they were having in their lives. And I was surprised at the level of trust they had in me. Here, I am a complete outsider interviewing them, maybe an aspect of education, or on something to do specifically with their kids. And the next thing I know is we're discussing their life.
[:[00:17:56] Does that make any sense?
[:[00:18:27] Anju Gattani: And I, I felt very privileged. I'll be honest. I really did to have that level of trust, but. What started happening was I would just, I found myself burdened with all these stories of, again, violence abuse, and especially with women in Asia. It's a huge, huge problem because these stories are swept under the rug. The people, the women keep living their lives and they keep sweeping these stories under the rug.
[:[00:19:23] Lovelace Cook: And so you brought some of the experiences that you heard and molded those through your characters?
[:[00:19:43] Lovelace Cook: When you are writing, sitting down writing, everybody wants to know about a writer's process. And when you're writing and you say that your characters are taking over, are you in a flow state?
[:[00:20:12] Wow.
[:[00:20:30] I'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way. And the pen has to be right. The flow of being cast to be exactly what I needed to be. And the paper has to be white, like a white canvas so that there's no lines, nothing. And that's when the characters take over and I'm only, and I'll be very honest with you. I'm just a vehicle who puts the stories and pens them down on paper. And my characters bleed through me.
[:[00:20:59] Anju Gattani: I wish it was, but it's a lot of revisions after, and what that is Lovelace.
[:[00:21:34] Anju Gattani: Thank you. I've always been one to advocate for other people's books.
[:[00:21:58] And Alka Joshi's books. I [00:22:00] just love her work to death. Like same as Khaled Hosseini. And the recent book I read is Ana Johns’ book, The Woman in the White Kimono. And I will tell everyone, you have to read that book. It's like Memoirs of a Geisha, but fast forward to 1957 a little bit, cause now we're, post-war Japan, and it's just a fantastic story.
[:[00:22:36] Lovelace Cook: And I want to make sure I get some of those titles in our show notes too. Because reading is as much of. I think reading is as much of a writer's part of a writer's life as the actual writing.
[:[00:23:14] And the internet wasn't as developed at that time, we didn't have YouTube. We didn't have a lot of the social media links and development that we have now. And I would always go to the library, check out books and read the back to learn about the author. Where were they born. Where did they grow up?
[:[00:23:48] So every time I do a video recording of Story Mantra, it's my way of giving back to myself and that passion and love for the writer's work, as well as [00:24:00] helping other writers who may have the same questions but may not have access or the ability to touch base or network with the authors that they love or look up to.
[:[00:24:32] Anju Gattani: Absolutely. If you want to listen to it.
[:[00:25:12] Anju Gattani: So my journey began when all the doors shut down on me, we moved from Singapore to the US back in 2001. And my international journalism career came to an end because I was writing for magazines in Singapore, India, and Hong Kong, who didn't quite have the internet presence at the time that they have now, because it was still a process of development. A lot of magazines would just have a landing page, but that's about it, nothing more.
[:[00:26:07] We had just moved from Singapore to New Jersey. And so the locale was new. The people were new. We were driving on the wrong side of the road. We were walking on the wrong side of the road. We had never seen anything on the scale of Kmart or Walmart in our life. And so seeing something that phenomenally big was like a shocker. Going into, going into the grocery stores, and seeing one whole aisle just with cereals.
[:[00:26:32] And then seeing that the cereal came in four different packaging styles from many carries, many carriers you can put in your handbag or, school bag to family size. I mean, it was just like, whoa, there was a lot to soak in at the time. And as beautiful as the transition and coming here was, my career had ended.
[:[00:27:15] And the end of book two hit me in a daydream, and I woke up and I was like, what was that? Cause I was sweaty. I was shivering and my heart was racing. And I was like, what was that? And I didn't know whether it was a movie I had seen or whether it was something I had dreamt or whether it was something I had seen long, long, long ago or heard about. It was so real to me.
[:[00:28:02] And my writing saved me because at that time, a woman in my position could have fallen into depression easily with nowhere to go, nothing to do. There was no escape. There was no going back. My writing saved me. My fiction, my own fiction saved me and took me to a whole new world and has connected me now, here we are 20 years later to somebody like you.
[:[00:28:36] Anju Gattani: My husband calls it stubbornness; you call it persistence.
[:[00:29:10] Anju Gattani: And what an honor, what an honor. Talking with Kathy is like a whole other thing. I mean, she's incredible. She simply is. And, to know that the book was picked up by someone like her and she understood the, the behind the story, the advocacy, the issues that I'm looking to address, which I didn't even, I didn't know until much later. What a gift to get to have my work in her hands.
[:[00:29:57] Anju Gattani: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. [00:30:00]
[:[00:30:08] Anju Gattani: Anthology.
[:[00:30:11] Anju Gattani: Me? Yes. And I'm excited about your story too, so I can't wait until that comes out. It's a deleted scene from book two and it is the fabric, the very fabric of affection. True deep- seated love between an Indian man and an Indian woman who are forbidden to each other. That's the scene. They're not allowed to talk about what they feel. They're not allowed to hold hands. It's a very, very modern Indian society, but modes of conduct and codes of conduct, which tell you exactly what you should or should not be doing, what you can or cannot be doing.
[:[00:31:22] And I hope that comes through in writing as well.
[:[00:31:41] Anju Gattani: Having lived in so many different countries and friends from all over the world, I would say that I realized, and again, this was not intentional, this is something I discovered sort of on the subconscious level of what I was doing, which took four books to figure out by the way, cause I was like, why am I writing these [00:32:00] books?
[:[00:32:24] So I know that we have the internet. I know we have social media. I know that we're all technically on the same level playing field and on the same page, but a lot of things get lost in translation because of how we're shaped and our value system, how our beliefs are influenced by all of that. And so I began to see my work on trying to bridge those differences, which are technically invisible because you can't put a thumb on it and say, well, this is what it is.
[:[00:33:35] Lovelace Cook: I agree completely, and I think that's absolutely vital in our world today to be able to be open, to embracing other cultures, to understanding things that you pointed out. When I made an observation about clothing, I had no idea. This was gosh, [00:34:00] eight years ago, maybe. I had no idea about the background behind that. This is part of my education. I will say that travel in India, the times I've spent in India completely opened my mind, changed my worldview, and helped me understand just how we all are one.
[:[00:34:49] So we all learn to navigate, we all have our own inner GPS system, so to speak, which tells us, take a left. No, take a right. Okay. Reroute, you can't do this, but somewhere, somebody else on the other side of the world could take that route, but you can't. So you learn to navigate based on the world around you.
[:[00:35:25] Lovelace Cook: You've just brought up so much that's so important. And I think that's one of the gifts that a writer like you brings to the party, brings to people to be able to understand just that connection. I love the analogy of the GPS.
[:[00:35:49] I mean, it doesn't matter what I'm doing, whether it's my writing or whether it's my, my personal life or whether it's my professional life. It's always rerouting because the one thing I've learned is what's happening [00:36:00] today will change by tomorrow. Nothing stays the same. Everything is in a state of flux, everything.
[:[00:36:17] Anju Gattani: And if you fight against it, which becomes resistance, you make your own life difficult, which is what that fabulous book by Eckhart Tolle talks about The Power of Now, he talks about acceptance versus resistance versus things like the pain body, which is when you unknowingly choose to live in discomfort. And you continue down that path of self-hatred and not knowing your self-worth because you've become so familiar and conditioned to living with pain that that's the path you choose. Like I said, there's just a whole gamut of books and authors who I admire, who have really shaped my value of thinking, my perceptions and my misunderstandings also of other cultures.
[:[00:37:24] And then we had A Thousand Splendid Suns with a story of Laila and Mariam, what these two women were going through under the Taliban regime. And nobody would have known about that firsthand, unless you read it by the author, who's written it firsthand because secondhand information can always be diluted, or, changed just a little and that just changes the entire fabric of your belief.
[:[00:37:55] Anju Gattani: Like I said, I love talking to other people which is why I do Story Mantra. I find my fulfillment and [00:38:00] happiness in other people's stories and other people's books. And I it's been so funny cause sometimes I've been on other networks and other podcasts and interviews. And I'm carrying other authors books and I forget to take my own and I'm like, oops, where's my book. I just forget because I'm so excited about other people's work.
[:[00:38:42] Especially when someone like Alka Joshi, who's written a Jaipur trilogy broke out with such success and I'm from Jaipur myself. That's where my family lives. And for many, many years growing up in Hong Kong, a lot of my time was spent also living in hiding because I was afraid to tell people where I'm from.
[:[00:39:27] And I have an author friend. Her name is Nandita Godbole and she's a cookbook author. She self publishes, but she comes up with these amazing, amazing cookbooks which shows you Indian cooking from scratch. But step-by-step with visuals, which is something that no Indian cookbook has really been able to do before because of the level of patience required and remember Indian cooking, is not straightforward. There are many layers to it. It's a question of timing and it's a question of balance. And Nandita, in her books, [00:40:00] visually shows you and walks you step-by-step through those layers of cooking and how to bring those recipes to life.
[:[00:40:37] I was just in Jaipur for the month of September, and I got to spend a good three weeks with my mom who's there. And a lot of my cousins who I haven't caught up with in a long time, Again, Jaipur is not what it used to be. It's changed so much in terms of the people, the culture, a lot of westernization has come in.
[:[00:41:18] And there are women in our generation who wear the jeans on one occasion, but who can drape on a sari in five minutes with the jewelry and be there ready for Diwali, for example. It's just a question of knowing your priorities, what's right for what occasion, and being able to switch in and switch out.
[:[00:41:51] Anju Gattani: Oh, gosh, that's so powerful. I don't know what to say. I'm speechless now. Lovelace. That's what every writer craves to hear that for me at the end of the day. [00:42:00] There's a lot of work that goes in, it's words on paper. That's what I know. And I, that's what I tell myself. I'm just a messenger, whereas on paper it's very draining. That it's emotionally draining to write fiction.
[:[00:42:29] It's has been a project in development since 2006, and it's almost completed. And I questioned myself as do many writers; we question what we're writing. I'm like, Hmm. So is anyone gonna read this?
[:[00:42:56] Lovelace Cook: I applaud you and look forward to reading the next book, the story that's going to be in the anthology. I'll put a link to that also.
[:[00:43:24] Lovelace Cook: That's why we need to talk about those things. Anju, thank you so much for all your time today. Where can people find you?
[:[00:43:57] And I would really, really appreciate it. If [00:44:00] you subscribe to the channel, show me your love and support because I'm doing this for all of you. It feeds my creative soul and, that the happy person within me to talk about other people's books and to help other people where I wish I could have also been helped in that same way.
[:[00:44:32] Lovelace Cook: I'm going to put links to everything we've discussed to your website, Twitter, feed your Instagram, Facebook and Story Mantra in particular, because I really want people to hear you speaking with other authors and see what an incredibly wonderful interviewer you are.
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