“Since childhood, reading for me has been about becoming someone else. Which means that writing developed along the same continuum. It also means that I have found fragments of myself inside characters who appear to have no relation to how I present.”
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a striking a new voice emerging from Central California. Her debut story collection, What We Fed to the Manticore, has garnered critical acclaim since its recent publication by Tin House.
In this interview, Talia and I talk about the first-person animal perspective of her stories, the joys of research, her non-MFA path to publication, and what we bring of ourselves to both our writings and our readings.
Samina Najmi: Thank you for writing these beautiful stories, Talia. Such gorgeous prose: tender, wistful, and elegiac. How was this book conceived — in particular, the stunning first-person perspective of animals in your collection?
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri: Thank you so much! Writing through animal voices really grew out of curiosity more than anything else. I like to read about nature-related news all the time, and there are so many stories about things happening to animals and the environment. But I never really understood from those pieces how the animals might feel about their experiences. So, this collection is really my own answer to that question.
Najmi: This book announces you as a fiction writer, but I’d say not in the traditional sense of prioritizing plot, character development, etc. There’s a great deal of reflectiveness here that I associate more with creative nonfiction (possibly my own bias). Was this a conscious risk you took, to blur the lines between genres? How did it come about?
Kolluri: I don’t know that I would describe it as consciously blurring genre lines, but I did use these stories as a filter for my own emotions, and as a mechanism to interrogate how I feel about things and hopefully understand something new about myself. That’s the ultimate question that every thoughtful practice is trying to answer, isn’t it? To understand the self? At least that’s what I believe the case to be, that fields like mathematics, science, history, art, music, literature, all rest on the foundation of a single set of questions: Who am I, and why am I here? What is my place in the world?
Najmi: One of the things I love about these stories is that while they demonstrate an extraordinary imagination at work, they feel rooted in solid research. Could you talk about your research process and the interplay of the scholarly and the creative in your stories?
Kolluri: Research was one of my favorite parts of writing this collection. I love learning new things so much, and it was a tremendously fulfilling and joyful experience to learn as much as I could about all of these different animals and environments. I am a person who learns by reading, so I read articles and books about each landscape and animal I was writing about. I watched documentaries. I went to zoos. I went birdwatching. I absorbed as much information as I could until I felt I had internalized something of the landscape and animal behavior.
And then I just let my imagination take over. I spent a lot of time as a child playing make-believe and at the end of the day, writing is just an extension of that same sort of play for me. I could only watch so many videos about the mechanics of flying; sometimes I just needed to close my eyes and pretend to be a bird.
Najmi: The stories are geographically expansive. What were you aiming for with this sort of versatility, and what were some of the challenges you encountered?
Kolluri: I wanted to cover a wide spectrum of geography and also a variety of animal lives and environments because it was very important to me to convey the scope of humanity’s impact on the planet. The one challenge was one that I enjoyed, which was to render all of these geographies with enough detail that they felt real. I haven’t been to most of the places that I wrote about, so this gave me the opportunity to pour myself into research, which was tremendously fun!
Najmi: Writers bring the totality of themselves to their works. Which aspects of your identity and experiences would you say had the most to bear on the themes that emerge in this collection?
Kolluri: Probably the most influential aspect of my identity that is not overtly expressed in the text is my experience as a mixed-race person, and specifically a mixed person with one immigrant parent. My father’s family is Telugu; he was born in Secunderabad and raised in the Matunga neighborhood of Mumbai, India. I really can’t speak to what any other person’s experience is, but for me it resulted in feeling like I am an observer in almost every space I am in.
I also feel as though I exist in a transition zone between ethnicities, cultures, and communities. If I consider my collection from a distance, I see that several of my characters exist in transition zones of their own. And of course, there are the obviously universal themes of mourning, and loss, and connection, and family that most readers can probably relate to.
Najmi: Readers, too, bring the totality of their life experiences to a text. So in reading these stories as a South Asian immigrant woman, I find a subtle but consistent critique of colonialism — of the destruction, displacement, appropriation, exploitation, and even extermination that happens in its wake. How do you synthesize the political and the existential so deftly in your craft?
Kolluri: That’s very kind of you to say. I think for this issue in particular, I must point to the profound influence of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, which to me was a life-changing book. That book and later The Nutmeg’s Curse, lay bare how colonialism and empire are the engine behind the climate crisis. Exploitation of people and exploitation of the environment have led us to where we are today, with catastrophic effects happening around the world. It is both impossible, and in my opinion irresponsible, to separate the climate crisis from the long reach of colonialism, and so I think it was inevitable that this would be apparent to at least some readers.
The subtlety comes from my choice to use animal narrators. Animals don’t know anything about humanity’s geopolitical movements, but they live with the impacts. The Great Derangement was so vital to me because it argues that this non-human perspective is important. This environment, replete with life, is something that we as a species are transforming through our politics, but every non-human living thing is experiencing it through a purely existential lens.
Najmi: As a woman reader, and as a mother who would ask her kids to choose the gender of the protagonists in the animal stories I read to them, I noticed that all but two of the stories here are male-centered. This includes some of my personal favorites, like “The Good Donkey.” Could you offer us some context for this striking gender dynamic in the collection?
Kolluri: This question and its framing is so interesting to me because I feel like it speaks to what you said about readers coming to a text with their own life experiences. In a way, both reading and writing are creative acts. There are actually three explicitly female narrators (the tiger in “What We Fed to the Manticore,” the wolf in “A Level of Tolerance,” and the Pigeon in “Let Your Body Meet the Ground”), four explicitly male narrators/point of view characters (the donkey in “The Good Donkey,” the white bear in “The Dog Star is the Brightest Star in the Sky,” Bendiks in “The Hunted the Haunted the Hungry the Tame,” and the whale in “The Open Ocean is an Endless Desert”), and finally two narrators where their gender is not directly stated at all and it is left to the reader to decide (the vulture in “Someone Must Watch Over the Dead,” and the hound in “May God Forever Bless the Rhino Keepers”).
I wouldn’t say that this gender composition was deliberate as a whole, but there were some stories that required the narrating character to be a specific gender. The wolf narrator in “A Level of Tolerance” was based on a real wolf, identified as 832F or “The 06 Female.” I wanted to imagine her life from her own perspective and that made it essential that this character be female. In “The Open Ocean is an Endless Desert,” the narrator is a blue whale, where whale song is a primary component of the story. Generally speaking, while both male and female whales vocalize, our current understanding of whales is that only males produce the long whale songs that have themes and melodies. I really wanted to explore this soundscape environment from a whale’s perspective, and I specifically wanted to write from the point of view of the singer, and this required a male voice. The remaining voices emerged naturally, and I let them take over the stories. I’m not sure what it says about me that several of the naturally emerging voices are overtly male, or are interpreted as male, but I don’t know that it matters what it says about me.
If I return to my earlier point of reading as a creative act, I think readers will take what I made and view it through the lens of their own experiences and world view, and thus make something new as they are reading. In the case of my genderless characters, the vulture and the hound, I think a reader’s interpretation will depend on what it means for a voice to sound female or male to that particular reader, which is likely a product of several things like social and community norms, self-identification, other literature they have read, and so on. I think it will also depend upon whether the reader sees the characters as completely distinct from me or as an extension of me. It’s possible that some readers may assume that I have put a lot of myself into these characters and because I am female, will interpret the characters the same way.
Personally, I have always come to both reading and writing from a somewhat genderless space. What I mean is that both writing and reading have been mechanisms for me to try on different lives and experiences. I can’t recall reading a book where I saw my exact experience reflected back to me. I don’t know if other readers have felt this way, but for me there are always pieces in every book and in every character that do not belong to me. I’m sure that there is a larger conversation to be had about how seeing or not seeing oneself represented in literature shapes both reading and imagination. But the outcome for me is that reading has always been an act of discovery and of learning and also, while not exactly an experience of self-erasure, reading has often been an act of subsuming myself into the characters that I am reading about.
Since childhood, reading for me has been about becoming someone else. Which means that writing developed along the same continuum. It also means that I have found fragments of myself inside characters who appear to have no relation to how I present. Characters of different ethnicities, genders, life experiences, nationalities, generations, have all allowed me to climb into other lives.
All of this is to say that for most of these characters, the choice to write as a specific gender, or from an ambiguous place, was mostly unconscious and came from the same chameleon-like perspective that I read from.
Najmi: You shared in our earlier conversation that you didn’t take the MFA route to writing. Yet you have written, and now published, this astonishing collection of stories with Tin House. As someone who is trained as a scholar but also enjoys writing creative nonfiction, I have to ask: How did you do it?
Kolluri: I’m so glad you asked this because when I was first starting to take my writing seriously as an adult, I had absolutely no idea how a person could make their way from solitary writing with no connection to the community to the eventual publication of a book. And I think what I hear you asking are actually two questions: 1) How did I develop a writing practice that produced a book without the institutional structure and support of an MFA; and 2) How did I find a publisher without that same support in place?
As to the first question: I don’t really know exactly what it’s like to go through an MFA program, and I can only guess at the many nuances that are present. But I do suspect that two of the most important benefits of a program are protected time to write and an available community of writers. I think it’s possible to develop those things outside of a program. I have a local writing group that I participate in regularly and I also went to the Tin House Summer Workshop several times. I keep in touch with many writers that I met during those workshops and I sent them my stories as I worked on them. And over these years I slowly built a writing community for myself and learned to refine my voice and style by trading work with friends. I was also just very fortunate that the writers I met seemed to go out of their way to treat my work with respect and kindness and to encourage me when it felt like nobody really wanted to read work with animal narrators. As I collected rejection after rejection, I always had these other emerging writers steadily urging me to keep going, and that was tremendously valuable to me.
As to the second question I will give enormous credit to the editors who decided to give me a chance. Before selling my collection to Tin House, four stories from this collection were published in literary journals. And each time, it was a story that was sent via the submissions queue and was selected by a first-round reader to pass to the editors. I am tremendously grateful to those readers and editors who decided to make space for my work. Without them, I would not have been able to build a publication resume and I may not have caught the attention of my editor at Tin House, who found “The Good Donkey” in The Common and reached out to me.
I also want to note that part of the real joy of this experience is feeling tremendously supported in my creative vision by both my editor and my agent, which has made me feel very uninhibited creatively. And to me that’s an important component to publishing a book: to feel that the people helping you get there are advocates for the art you want to make. I have been writing this way for just over a decade, but it took me a while to find my way to publishing a book and part of that may be timing. I was just starting to send my collection to open submission calls when I heard from Tin House. And shortly afterwards I connected with my wonderful agent and the whole process has felt very smooth. I wish I had a guideline for other writers, but so much of it has felt like luck to me.
Najmi: What is brewing now? And since we both happen to live in Fresno, California: Is there any chance that the Central Valley might inspire a story?
Kolluri: I’m currently working on the first draft of a novel, but I did write something set near the Central Valley. I had the opportunity to write an original story for Orion Magazine, which has been a long-time dream of mine. I decided to set it in the Sierras and it’s loosely based on the KNP Complex Fire. I have wanted to write about wildfire in the American West for a long time but I was struggling to find my way inside the story. I was just beginning to imagine a story from the point of view of a red-tailed hawk when I was given the opportunity to write something for Orion. I worked with Sumanth Prabhaker, their editor-in-chief, on this story and it was such a wonderful experience. I felt like I had a lot of creative freedom to experiment the way I wanted and work through how to tell the story.
In this piece, I explored the experiences of a hawk, a giant sequoia, and the mycelium fungal network during and after a wildfire. During the editing process, we also talked about how the devastation of a wildfire exists in tandem with the renewal fire brings to a landscape like the Sierras and we incorporated it into the piece. I feel that was such a valuable thing to explore because in writing about ecosystems, these two states of being: death and rebirth, devastation and growth, ebb and flow in a very dynamic way. This piece offered a chance to show that.
Najmi: Talia, thank you so much for these generous and thoughtful responses. I have learned from them, as I’m sure Normal School readers will, too. Great good luck with your new projects, and enjoy the well-deserved critical attention that What We Fed to the Manticore is receiving.
Kolluri: Thank you!
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House, 2022), is available now wherever books are sold. Her short fiction has been published in the Minnesota Review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, and Five Dials. A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband, a teacher and printmaker, and a very skittish cat named Fig.
Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic U.S. literatures at California State University, Fresno. A Hedgebrook alumna, Samina’s creative nonfiction has appeared in various publications, including World Literature Today. Her essay “Trinita” (2021), published in Under the Sun, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Author photo by Sarah Deragon.