Interview with Anubha Mehta - author

Anubha Mehta

Peacockin the Snow is a debut novel by Anubha Mehta and is being launched by Inanna Publications and International Festival of Author’s Toronto Lit Up on 28 September 2018. It has been selected as the most anticipated books to read for Fall 2018 by the 49th Shelf.

Tell us about your journey that led you to write Peacock in the Snow

This is a journey of the girl who was healed by her story. This journey started some 18 years ago when my husband and I immigrated to Canada on a whim! We were as taken-aback at our foolishness of leaving a reasonably cushy life in Delhi for no dire necessity to move, as were our friends and family.

Taken-aback but not really surprised. While others suspected, we both knew about that deep restlessness and insatiable curiosity to explore and know more about the world. We also knew that these weren’t generally the typical or sensible reasons for leaving a country of birth. But here we were, snow beneath our slippery soles and icy draughts clawing our face while forcing every facial muscle to pose a brave smile.

Canada of 18 years ago was very different from today. Our immigrant struggles were not so much of getting our degrees converted or breaking into our own professions but more around the pain of isolation from a community that we left behind till we found another one, coping with a new reality as a young family, dealing with a more equalizing society and then learning to forgive and love this new land day by day with all its faults and disappointments as well as its contributions and gifts to us, not necessarily all material in nature.

Peacock in the Snow: Section III Forever, Life:

“It is in moments of hesitation, not clarity, that I find my answers, my resolve
It is in darkness, not light that I can see clearly, I understand the truth
And it is in truth that I grasp ingenuity and find strength to embrace life”.

~ Copyright © Anubha Mehta 2018

But at a more immediate level, my journey of writing Peacock in the Snow started some five years ago when I got a stomach ache that refused to go away. After a few agonizing weeks of contemplating, I finally found my answer.

I found that there were all these stories in me, stories that were not mine, but stories that I had internalized. They belonged to countless individuals that I had met, socialized with, confided-in, competed and confronted, learnt from, sought, empathized and helped; and from the countless places across the globe that I had visited.

These stories needed extracting, not through a painful medical procedure, but by the simple act of putting pen to paper. So, for the next few months that’s just what I did. I went into a frenzy and wrote them all down. When I emerged, I realized that in my madness to write, I had forgotten to take my medication. I didn’t need to anymore. I healed a little every time another story spread itself in front of me. Was there a story line here? Yes, there was!

Why did you write this book? Why is this book timely?

Peacock in the Snow lifts the veil on present life and times of Canada and characters within this transitional time.

The complexion of mainstream Canada is changing. This new class of newcomers who have immigrated in mass numbers (since 1990’s) and whose profile and tastes, motivations and needs, are very different from what this continent has seen before- originating from non-western countries, educated, socially connected, internationally mobile, professionally astute and affluent. They are less tolerant of structured racism, the chronic underemployment and lack of opportunity for newcomers. They strive for equal access on the basis of experience, qualification and merit. Peacock in the Snow is a story of one such family.

What are the main themes that you like the readers to remember after reading your book?

Peacock in the Snow is a contemporary story of a modern woman that amalgamates voice, adventure and magic. This book mixes conversations, habits, and conventions of parallel lives from a non-western to a western context.

Intrinsically, the reworking the concept of privilege has been very powerful for me throughout this novel. Privilege can only be decolonized when abstracted from wealth, gender and class and its associated expectations or subjugations. For our protagonist Maya, her courage and peace came, not from her advantageous social placement, but by the exact opposite, her renunciation of it. So, until Maya reworked her privilege it did not lead her to either freedom or happiness.

This book also talks about the ‘other side’ of issues and isms, that fall within the shadows or silences of the noise. For example, when women become gatekeepers of patriarchy from all shades of benevolent to hostile or when sexism also affects sons who are trapped within its expectations to live, act or behave in pre-ordained ways, at the cost of their own love or dreams. Issues and isms are not contained within geographical boundaries. They mutate and change colour, shape, form within the cultures and tolerance of different countries and their people.

This novel and its protagonist mirrors the mood of today’s woman readers in her various avatars. She is tired of handed-down definitions of perfection and is compelled to be assertive in unprecedented ways, ways that have not been taught. Her inadequacies are no longer seen as weaknesses but an opportunity to grow, and her fear is accompanied with courage to risk everything for her conviction. Our protagonist releases that hope for a better tomorrow while validating similar struggles that we face in today’s world conflicted with diverse beliefs, ethnicities, cultures, and expectations.

Describe your writing process - did you seek guidance, inputs; did you have a mentor?

Alas, I have not been lucky enough to have worked with a mentor till now. That would be one dream I would like to work towards. My writing process has been more instinctive and unplanned. At a high level all the multi-faceted experiences that I have been blessed with – in performing arts, as a classical dancer, an instrumentalist, a theatre artist, in literary arts- academic writing, journalism and fiction, poetry- went into the birth of Peacock in the Snow.

Here is what made me tick while transitioning from a writer to an author: https://www.anubhamehta.com/part-1-how-it-all-started/ 

Peacock in the Snow is being launched on 28 September at Ben McNally Books (366 Bay Street, Toronto) at 6 pm. 

Book Launch Invitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxK7Jgx7dTI  (Please keep the volume on)

Book Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTlqy4UyNyI   

The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories

Guest Post by Aparna Kaji Shah

There is no single story about a place or a people. The well-known novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called it “The danger of the single story” because it is dangerous when we show the same thing about someone again and again; they become that, and all other possibilities are excluded. This is especially relevant in today’s climate, both political as well as social.

Aparna Kaji Shah

 In my collection, “The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories” the female protagonists have different stories to tell. They range from a fifteen-year-old girl from Jaisalmer, in eighteenth-century India, who runs away with the nomadic tribes, to a middle-aged woman in modern-day Mumbai. 

There is also the character of a grandmother in Toronto dealing with old age and disease; of a village bride who moves to Mumbai, expecting the City of Dreams to fulfill her every wish, and of a young mother in pre-independence India on her death-bed reliving the molestation by her father-in-law and fearing for her daughters after her death.

The title story, “The Scent of Mogra”, is narrated by a dead woman who is reminiscing about her life on Earth and about her daughter who she somehow knows is suffering. These are stories not just about women’s oppression and exploitation in a male-dominated society, but of resilience, passion, and triumph. The varied female protagonists, in their different time periods, go through the turmoil that is life-changing and that creates within each one an inner strength and a determination to move on. These women come into their own as life unfolds around them.

I am delighted to announce that “The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories” will be published this September by Inanna Publications. When I started writing these stories, some written in Toronto, and others in Mumbai while we were living there, I never gave a thought to having them published; I was so enjoying the creative process and the writing. But friends and family urged me to submit, and I did. I was very fortunate to be accepted by Inanna.

One of the themes that link the stories in this collection, women’s lives within a patriarchal structure, is close to my heart. But the writing of the stories took me outside of myself in a way that let me see the larger picture of women’s existence over the centuries; it gave me a deep appreciation of the unique texture of individual lives and relationships.

The stories will resonate with all readers, men and women, young and old, as they are drawn into the lives of the characters. The women who inhabit the stories inhabit the real world, and we all know someone like them. “The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories” will not only remind readers about the many issues that women face across generations and cultures but help cast a fresh eye upon them.

I hope that like all art that moves readers, viewers or listeners in its many mysterious ways, my stories will find a way to engage my reader’s heart, her imagination and intellect and provide the keen enjoyment that we all go to books for. Finally, my wish is that this collection will help someone feel less alone in the world.

I am excited about the launch of my book on September 28th, sponsored by The International Festival of Authors (Toronto Lit Up) and Inanna Publications, at Ben McNally Books in Toronto. I will read from my stories and sign books from 6 to 8 pm. I look forward to seeing many of you there. 

In case you would like to pre-order “The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories”, it is available on Amazon Canada, the US and the UK. It can also be pre-ordered from Indigo. You can follow me on Twitter @akajishah  and on Facebook at Aparna Kaji Shah.

‘Canada offers stories of different diasporas’: Mariam Pirbhai

Mariam Pirbhai’s collection Outside People and other stories, published by Inanna Publications, will be launched this week. She is Associate Professor, English and Film Studies at the Wilfrid Laurier University. Mariam explains, the stories in her collection explore “what it means to have to experience forms of migrancy (even as someone impacted by another’s immigration) at different levels of precarity or isolation”

Q. Your soon to be launched collection of short stories 'Outside People and other stories' is your first foray into fiction. How different is the experience of writing fiction compared to academic writing?

There is great cross-over, for me, in my academic and creative life so I don’t find this difference—between fiction and academic writing—as delineated as others might. There are many similarities between the two experiences, in fact. I can find myself wrestling with one sentence for days on end in both forms. I have to research many of the subjects that drive both my fiction and academic writing.

Both are outward expressions of the things that matter or come to matter and thus need to be said, in varying degrees of urgency. Having said this, when I write creatively, I find myself thinking more about the writing process: of such things as style, technique, form, etc. But here, too, it would not be such a far stretch to say that my academic training as a literary scholar is working on me and through me as well, putting me in the rather schizophrenic position of both writer and critic.

I can only hope that when one kind of writing--the creative or academic—starts to cross over into the other, however subconsciously, the end result delivers a coherent self or at least a collaborative fusion.  

Q. Outside People includes Pakistani Canadian perspective and also touches on issues of Islamophobia and recent legislation targeting Muslim Canadians, among other minority perspectives. Please tell us more about the collection.

As a Pakistani-Canadian who has lived in Canada for thirty years—since my late teens--it is impossible for me not to be concerned with the issues and struggles impacting Muslim Canadians. Having said this, I do not necessarily identify with any one community, ethnic or other, and I have grown up in various parts of the world, including England, the Philippines and Dubai, all of which have influenced this collection in various ways.

What really brings the stories in this collection together, then, is not so much a Muslim-Canadian point of view or a Pakistani-Canadian point of view, but rather what it means to have to experience forms of migrancy (even as someone impacted by another’s immigration) at different levels of precarity or isolation.

If minority-hood is already one kind of outsidership, how is this experience further compounded by gender, socioeconomic disadvantages, precarious forms of citizenship, religious beliefs, etc. In each of these stories, various states of migrancy (the temporary worker, the second-generation, the family members left behind, etc.), are filtered through the perspective of those (predominantly women) who find themselves facing dilemmas that are created at the nexus between the personal (e.g., fears, hopes, challenges, regrets) and the public (e.g., those larger forces like Islamphobia that govern our world).

For instance, one story takes a look at the anxieties of a domestic worker becoming increasingly estranged from her children living at the other end of the world; another story delves into the insecurities of a factory worker in Brampton undergoing cancer treatments who distances herself from the Muslim community for reasons of shame, as her son (a second-generation Canadian), her sole caregiver, starts turning to the very same community for support; another story that is loosely inspired from one of the worst road accidents in Southern Ontario’s history, traces the unlikely bond that arises between two agricultural labourers from the Caribbean and Latin America as they wait out a snowstorm on a chicken farm; and another story is told from the perspective of a young Pakistani-Canadian woman who is trying to forge her own cultural and sexual identity independently from that of family and state, as she witnesses a protest march against Québec’s proposed Charter of Values bill targeting Muslim Canadians’ religious freedoms).       

Q. You are a scholar on the subject of immigration fiction genre and have specialised in fiction by the diaspora from South Asia, Africa, the Asia-Pacific, and the Caribbean. What do you find dissimilar in terms of the narrative styles and the sharing of experiences between authors from different diaspora?

One of the gifts of living in a country like Canada is the opportunity to hear or read the stories of people from so many different diasporas. One of the first patterns that start to emerge is how very mixed up we all are, in the best possible way. Very few of us arrive here along some linear trajectory consisting of Point A to Point B, a fact that is sadly not always reflected in stereotypes about migration or the émigré. More often than not there is also a great deal of overlap from one diasporic community to another.

For instance, South Asians might be coming from anywhere in the world, not just the Indian subcontinent, and thus could belong to several diasporas, including Africa (someone like M.G. Vassanji or Tasneem Jamal) or the Caribbean (someone like Shani Mootoo or Cyril Dabydeen). To further complicate such geographic permutations, writers are further influenced by the particular traditions reflected in the hybrid constellation of their own diasporic communities.

Thus, one might find a Caribbean writer of any origin (African, South Asian, etc.) deeply influenced by the Creole languages of the region. Or one might find the sacred epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana providing the mythological and cultural landscape of a writer from Malaysia as much as that of a writer from Trinidad or India.

I try to reflect this cross-pollination of peoples and styles in my own writing. In this collection, for instance, a Mexican man meets an Anglophone woman of South Asian origin from Guyana, and this confuses his mother to no end because, as she says, “she never thought of Latin America as anything other than Spanish.” I guess it comes down to this: narrative styles can be as highly variegated as the circuitous ancestral routes or cultural genealogies of our diasporas and, invariably, of ourselves.

Q. What future does multiculturalism hold in Canada, considering it’s been summarily rejected in Europe and the US?

This question arrives on what appears to me to be a very hopeful day: the day after Jagmeet Singh, a lawyer from Brampton who bears all the outward symbols of his Sikh religion, just became the first “visible minority” to head one of this country’s major political parties, and thus holds the potential to serve as the future Prime Minister of Canada. Did the principles of multiculturalism have something to do with this landmark event?

Is this recent win a sign that we have entered a “post-multiculturalist” Canada? Or did the force of this individual and his convictions have something to do with this incredible achievement? I am inclined to think that however many racial or other barriers positive events such as this suggest we have broken through, we should never become complacent.

We need to keep reminding ourselves of the principles of equity, diversity and social justice that must be advocated for and protected, not only in spirit but also in law. Without a legal system to defend and ensure those rights, multiculturalism, like any rhetorical policy or set of ideals, falls short of the mark. 

To buy the book online, click here: Other People...

Min Fami

Laila Ait-Bouchiba, 'Self Portrait, Prohibited,'
installation, 2008, from Min Fami 

The Western media shapes the world’s perceptions about different regions and cultures. By focusing on conflict, and being ideologically partisan in its coverage of events, it creates stereotypes that it nurtures by ad nauseam repetition.

In case of the Middle East (a wholly inaccurate and inappropriate geographical description coined by the West), the region has always been depicted as “dangerous” place.

The depiction of Arabs has changed over the years, but continues to remain largely negative.

Arabs were oil rich in the past, then turned fanatic some time ago, and these days are rebellious, especially in the spring (and that, the Western media has decided, is a good thing).

Arab women were and are backward, and perennially voiceless.

Recently, I attended the launch of Min Fami – a book that comprehensively shatters these myths, about the region, the language, the people and especially the women.

Published by Inanna Publications and Education Inc. Min Fami– Arab Femnist Reflections on Identity, Space and Resistance is edited by Ghadeer Malek and Ghaida Moussa.

Min Fami means from my mouth in Arabic. It is a book is about finding a voice and giving voice; it is an anthology of poetry, creative non-fiction, searing fiction, academic and political essays, and visual art by Arab women.

Arab Woman, a poem in the collection by Montreal-based Ghada Chehade eloquently frames the issue identity:

Orientalized through colonial eyes

I AM AN ARAB WOMAN

Understood out of context, like a tale from an ignorant mind

I AM AN ARAB WOMAN

I have selected some of the passages that I enjoyed from the book and posted them here: Select Passages from Min Fami

These passages give a glimpse of the exquisite creativity that has been collected and compiled in this volume.

If there can ever be one book that can serve as an introduction to contemporary Arab world (and not just contemporary Arab feminism), it is clearly this book because even if the essays, the poems and the art represent an individual’s worldview, collectively, they are draw an accurate portrait of the Arab world today.

And even though the creations in the collection are pronouncedly feminist (or perhaps because of it), the anthology succeeds in transcending ideological parameters and has an innately universal appeal.

Image: From Min Fami.

The Witchdoctor's Bones - I

Guest Post by Lisa de Nikolits

This, The Witchdoctor’s Bones, is my fourth novel, and, without doubt, it is my most ambitious book to date – and by that I mean that I wanted to do so much with it, and achieve so much.

A recipe for disaster you might think and for the longest time, you’d be absolutely right. Let me backtrack a little.

That I am, and always will be an African, is an indisputable fact. How deeply do I love the country of my birth, how I revere her forthright bold colours, her vibrant, charismatic people and the power and force of her warrior spirit.

Lisa de Nikolits

But while it was the land of my birth, it was never my land and I knew it instinctively, long before I needed anyone to tell me. I grew up in White apartheid South Africa and even as a very young child, I knew that our beloved country was borrowed, stolen, from those who should have had rightful dominion over it, and I knew that one day, they would own it again.

But knowing that a terrible injustice had a hold on our land was not enough, and I always felt, as a teenager and young adult, that I should do so much more to help the cause – but, do what? March more? Protest more? I know I did what I could but I always wanted to do more.

And that is what this book is, for me. It is my voice in helping spotlight the injustice that White rule brought to Africa, primarily with regard to the Bushmen.

It was while walking through the veld grass in the valley of the Underberg mountains, with the steep Sani Pass behind me, and Lesotho to the north east, that it came to me that I needed to write about the people who had walked this land before me.

No, not the Zulus, or the Xhosas but a quieter hero – the Bushman.

I had just returned from a trip to Namibia and I had learned much about the Bushmen there, but I had no idea that the San had in fact also lived in the very place that my father had a forty-hectare farm; in the wild foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, and you can imagine my astonishment when research revealed this to me. It was one of those gifts from the writing gods and I knew that I simply had to write this book, and that it would be my tribute to the Bushmen, my homage to them.

Now, one cannot say that modern-day Africa is perfect – it is flawed for a whole bunch of reasons and I also wanted to bring those atrocities to the readers’ attention; the horrors of child abduction, the unspeakable crime of muti murders and the barbaric practices of modern day witchcraft that are still very much in evidence today.

To say that I wanted to ‘document’ all this would be erroneous because this is not a history book; it is a psychological thriller and it is also a story of bold adventure, camaraderie, friendship, romance and travel.

I also wanted this book to be a gripping read in the tradition of an Agatha Christie, with murder and suspense and characters vile and headstrong, coming head to head with ones that were heroic and brave.

So you understand what I mean when I say that I wanted to achieve a great deal with this book and you can also understand why it took six years of rewrites and edits for it to finally see the light of day in print!

I admit, yes, I put too much into it; I put my heart and soul and too many characters and endless descriptions and then I took out the wrong things and had to put them back in again. I had to walk away for a bit, and I admit I even nearly gave up; such was the immensity of getting this book right. What started out at 220 000 words had to be halved and I thought, more than once that it might be impossible to achieve my dream.

But in the end, I simply couldn’t give up. I had too much faith in it, and too much hope for it, and with the excellent and patient guidance of my publisher, the book has now been published.

On a final note, I have often wondered what the common denominator is, if indeed there is one, in my writing and I have realized that for the most part I have a fascination with morality. I am fascinated by the question of our innate versus our learned or controlled, if you will, morality, do we have an innate morality at all?

And what happens to our morals when they are challenged? And for me, this is largely what this book is about, morality. In this book, a holiday becomes a true test of moral fortitude but equally, the book is a psychological thriller and I very much hope that readers will enjoy taking this journey alongside some of my most unusual characters to date.

I’d like to conclude this rather long blog post (and I thank you for your patience!) with a piece that wasn’t included in the final edits but which I found fascinating, and I hope you will too.

Thank you!

Continued in the post below

The Witchdoctor's Bones - II

Continued from the post above

Marika sat with her hands tucked under her legs. “I read that the Bushmen’s tracking skills were so great that they were recruited by the army and also, that they have now been asked to go back to the Drakensberg to help track down poachers,” she said. “This, after they were systematically and officially killed, by both blacks and whites alike. If I am correct, the last official Bushmen hunt was organized by the Natal authorities as recently at 1863 and then in 1881, a tribe of Batloakoa people were allowed to settle in the Kubelu valley by Chief Letsie on the condition that they killed the remaining Bushmen, and from what I read, this was carried out with a lot of enthusiasm and great cruelty. And now, that very area is trying to get them back. And good luck with that, since there are so few still around.”

“You know a lot,” Jono commented. He had been eager to bring the evening to a close but when Marika spoke up, he changed his mind and happily seized upon the commonality of their knowledge to engage with her. “And you were right about the army, it played a big role in the lives of the Bushmen. In 1974 the South African Defence Force decided to incorporate two Bushmen tribes into the army; the Barakwena and the Vasekele.”

He laughed, a bitter sound. “This Africanization was good marketing material for the army because it could conveniently claim that race discrimination no longer existed and that blacks were now legally allowed to bear arms. Oh yes, the SADF was very proud of itself, and it announced that it had abolished race discrimination, that both white and non-white soldiers received the same wages and the same opportunities for promotion but this was clearly not true since the highest rank a Bushman could achieve was staff sergeant; so much for equality.

“And yes, their tracking powers were very good but a lot of the stories were urban legends, with some white soldiers claiming that a Bushman could ‘follow a faint spoor at a run for 30km or more, he can predict his prey’s behaviour as if he is clairvoyant—but he can also read and write.’

“Another story said that if a patrol has a Bushman in it, then it is unnecessary to post guards at night because even if the Bushman goes to sleep, he will wake even if the enemy is still far away and will raise the alarm. The SADF hoped that stories like this would create a psychological advantage for them, to their enemies who feared the Bushman powers.

“Now Marika,” Jono continued, “some of your love for the Bushmen probably came from what you may have read in the newspapers or maybe what your parents read and told you. Because, during this time, the white Afrikaner press was in love with ‘these beautiful people’ and the problems they had in adapting to white society were misrepresented in many newspapers. All the things that were in reality very shocking and terrible were recounted as if they were quaint and charming. The Bushman’s aptitude for mathematics, their athletic skills, their love of singing; all of that was presented as fairy-stories. It was considered charming how many of the students in primary school were married with babies of their own by the time they were fourteen. Yes, very charming.” Jono was sarcastic.

“So,” he continued, “the army claimed they were doing a good thing and the press supported them and it looked good but in reality, the Bushman was moved ever further away from his natural life. He drank more, alcoholism increased and soon the whites learned to track as well as they did, so their unique skills were not unique anymore. Also, they weren’t in their natural environment enough to keep their skills fresh. Their children were sent into the bush for few weeks every year, to help them train in their natural ways, as if it could be learnt like that, so quickly.”

Links:

Website: lisadenikolitswriter.com

Readings on YouTube:

• Helen’s Revenge: http://bit.ly/1phxCsg
• Dumi, An Exerpt from The Witchdoctor’s Bones: http://bit.ly/1lirtpA

Pinterest Moodboard: http://bit.ly/1f56CCG

Twitter: @lisadenikolits

Book trailer: http://bit.ly/1gNPYeB

* books can be ordered (or pre-ordered) at Amazon.ca or from inanna.ca and can also be found in select bookstores. If you have any trouble ordering a book, please contact the author, Lisa de Nikolits, at lisa@lisadenikolits.com

West of Wawa

A couple of weeks back I went to the launch party of West of Wawa published by Inanna Publication and Education Inc. It was a great event for a great book. The novel is written by Lisa De Nikolits.

 

She is the most ‘un-writerly’ writer I know. She is vivacious and friendly. That’s rare in a writer. She has an infectious smile. That’s rare, too.

And, of course, she is a brilliant storyteller.

Lisa is from South Africa and is a prolific writer. This is her third novel. The first – Single Girls Go Mad Sooner – was published in 1995. 

The second, The Hungry Mirror, published in 2010 by Innana, was awarded the IPPY Gold Medal for literature on women’s issues in 2011 and shortlisted for the 2011 ReLit Awards.

West of Wawa has been extremely well received and was chosen as one of the editor's pick in the September issue of Chatelaine. 

Lisa De Nikolits reading at the launch

The Chatelaine book club also interviewed Lisa, and many other book blogs also featuring her. 

The novel is about Benny, a young immigrant woman on the road across Canada, running away from herself and her past.

During her trip across the vastness of Canada spread over nearly three months and covering thousands of miles, Benny discovers herself. Despite everything that continue to go wrong – thanks to her guileless naivety – she eventually emerges a winner.

The launch event was a big draw, and Dawn Promislow and Danila Botha were among the many writers present. 

Here’s an extract from Lisa’s interview with Lori Ann Bloomfield, a novelist and blogger of First Line Fiction.  

FL: What is your favourite word?

LDN: An interesting question! If you were to look at West of Wawa prior to editing, you’d be inclined to say that my favourite words, (albeit unconsciously) were, ‘looked’, ‘little’, ‘happily’ and ‘cosy’. They’re actually not my favourite words at all and once I spotted this weak-word trend, I weeded them out vigorously!

My favourite word is ‘serene’. I have loved it ever since I first read it in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – I was so moved by this opening paragraph and I’ve always thought it’s one of the best openers:

“Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. 

Everyone was talking about
Lisa's book and her shoes

Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn’t fit those words into Brookly. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.”

After reading that, how could serene be anything but one’s favourite word? There isn’t too much call for the word these days but I found the perfect place for it in West of Wawa:

The ruined and the destroyed had always held a fascination for her, even before the devastation of her own world. She liked to stand among the decay and pick through the aftermath of vanished lives, searching for clues to uncover what had made it all go wrong. And finding the perfect images to capture her imaginings, well, those were moments when she felt close to serene.”

Images: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2259151370278.118791.1593233926&type=3