Significant Otters: Tejashree Murugan
The *truth* about her chapbook, Science Fiction - and much more!
Significant Otters is a monthly interview series exclusive to Things You Otter Know, featuring casual conversations with writers about their new books—writers who (most importantly) happen to be Otters. Significant Otters, if you will.
June 2023’s Significant Otter was Saturne Browne. You can browse my full archive of interviews here.
BECOME A SIGNIFICANT OTTER: If you have a book forthcoming or know someone who does, reach out either through my website or my Twitter (I refuse to call it X). I have slots available from October onwards.
July 2023’s Significant Otter is Tejashree Murugan, whose chapbook Science Fiction was released late last year from Yavanika Press.
Tejashree is a wonderful writer who self-identifies as an Otter (thank god) and initially reached out to me via my website—get this—LAST NOVEMBER. I asked her to send me her book, fell in love with it, and was like dude, we gotta do this.
Now, normally I conduct these interviews over Zoom, yet that couldn’t happen this time because our time zones and schedules had a seemingly impossible lack of correlation (she’s in India completing an MBA!) Instead, I sent her some questions over email, and I’ve included the vast majority of her responses below. As always, all the important links are available at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!
🦦 —O— 🦦
OTTAVIA PALUCH: Where are you writing to me from?
TEJASHREE MURUGAN: Right now, I’m in Ahmedabad, a city in Gujarat, which is India’s westernmost state. To be honest, I don’t know as much about Ahmedabad as I would have liked to, because I spent the last thirteen years of my life in Chennai, a city in the southern part of the country, and the one year I have spent here in uni has been extremely hectic. What I really like about Ahmedabad is how nice and sweet the people are, and the street food culture, which is insanely creative. To give you an idea, some delicacies you would find here include Fanta omelettes, rose petal kulfis (a type of ice cream), and cheese & chocolate pizzas. So, you know, basically a culinary paradise.
How’d you find out that I exist?
I think I found one of your poems on Twitter and really loved it. I couldn’t believe how mature your writing was when I found out how young you were! When I was your age, my writing was absolute crap. So yeah, I ended up following you for a while, and would read the other interviews you posted in your newsletter, which always introduced me to new and exciting writing. I have also conducted a couple of interviews myself, so I know how tough it can be to be on the other side of this conversation, but I felt your questions were very insightful, and you had a knack for getting the other person to open up, which I admired. So when my chapbook came out, you were one of the first people I contacted.
Give me the lowdown on how and why you started writing.
My teacher Mrs. Ridgeway was a huge influence on me. I was in her fourth-grade class, and she taught me English, along with some other subject I can’t remember. We used to do a lot of creative writing assignments in her classes and she always loved whatever I turned in, despite me being right in the middle of my adjective-heavy, convoluted, twisted sentences phase (which I haven’t entirely come out of yet). I’m pretty sure it was her who first planted the idea in my head that I could be an actual writer someday, and I’m indebted to her for giving me the confidence to stick to this dream for years.
Another reason I would write is because there was a lot of bullying in my school when I was a teenager, and I wasn’t able to find many friends I could just talk to about interesting facts and ideas and the world, and so I would just write whatever I had kept pent up inside. It became a crucial habit - writing helped me make sense of the world and gave my life direction and meaning. And then when I started publishing things and finding a larger audience than just my family and friends, it helped me find kinship and connection with the outside world as well.
How has being a writer from India shaped your writing? (We’ve definitely learned that time zones are an issue!) Like, how do you engage with a craft that, like so many other things, centres white, male, American voices above all else?
This definitely isn’t the first time that time zones have screwed up things for me, nor do I think it’s going to be the last, but I’m glad we found a way to do this anyway! To be honest, I don’t think I see myself as a writer from India primarily, because I spent a little less than half my life in the US growing up, and now I am in India, and after I graduate from university I am not sure where I will be ending up, geography-wise. So I do definitely see myself more as just a global citizen, or whatever. My writing is not really rooted in place, but more so in ideas and possibilities. I also think, from the outside, many people perceive India to be a cultural monolith, but the reality is quite different. My experience as a South Indian and the culture I grew up with is completely different to my friends in the North.
The way I engage with a craft that centres the straight white male experience is by simply refusing to remain stuck there. Obviously, the “canon” is the most common way of entering the literary world, but once you are here, there is so much more to see, do, and understand. Right now, I am trying to read more Asian literature, both from the East and the South. It is so interesting to peek at the similarities and differences in our cultures, and understand different philosophies of life and ways of being, rather than the very standard, and in my opinion, slightly more selfish, Western route.
I also consciously try to stay away from diaspora poetry, or cultural markers that have been overused to the point of exhaustion. This type of writing often feels like a very romanticised view of this country, but I think even Indians who grew up in India feel like diaspora sometimes because society has changed so rapidly here, and there is a huge and stark generation gap between young Indians and their parents. It sometimes feels like we speak two different languages entirely, and so it feels like a personal affront when someone goes on and on about mangoes and dupattas, when inheriting Indian heritage means so much more than that. Of course, everyone has a right to engage with their culture; I just wish writers would find a way to do so more meaningfully.
What inspired you to write this book?
Predominantly, the pandemic. Spending my senior year of university at home was incredibly mind-numbing because I didn’t have many classes to attend, I already had a job offer, and all I actually had to do was work on my thesis. I ended up spending an enormous amount of time online, where I stumbled upon a couple of cool independent literary magazines and started reading a lot of poetry. I really fell in love with the medium because I could use it to write about much that was very private without having to resort to personal essays that exposed too much or poorly-disguised fiction that would always raise the question - did this actually happen?
Poetry was this beautiful way to both vent and create; writing it soothed and aggrieved me. However, I found it difficult to share what I wrote online. I knew I wanted my words to be read, but at the same time, the thought of other people reading what I wrote made me want to claw my eyes out. A year in, I had a stack of poems piled up and felt compelled to do something with them. To my mom’s dismay, I covered an entire wall in my bedroom with them because I thought I could always just look at what I created and feel satisfied, maybe even pleased. However, my eyes would invariably land on some phrase I didn’t like or something I wanted to change, and I’d go back and re-edit the poem. Somewhere along the line, given the amount of labour I had put into them, I thought that publishing these poems together in a collection would be a good compromise. People would still read my work, but the consumption would be more private and compartmentalised, something I wouldn’t have to think about too much.
How indebted were you to, like, actual science fiction books and sci-fi authors? I know there’s a Ray Bradbury epigraph in here. What did it spark in you when you first came across it?
Very much. I have always been a huge fan of the sci-fi genre in all its various forms. Everything from trashy genetic mutation-driven movies and Robin Cook paperbacks, to stalwarts like the Three Body trilogy, Dune, and Jules Verne novels. In fact, growing up, the only time me and my brother wouldn’t be fighting was when he’d ask me questions based on sci-fi movies we’d see together, and I’d read up on the most esoteric subjects just so I could answer his questions. For example, after watching Angels and Demons, I read everything I could about antimatter, and tried to condense it in a way he’d understand. I definitely drew on this while working on my poems. I think this sense of me wanting to share all these cool things I’ve learnt about - whether it be related to literature, or history, or music, or mythology, or yes, even science - comes through in my work. It’s a collage of everything I care about.
I came across the Bradbury quote while I was reading a collection of Paris Review interviews, and it just stuck with me for a long time. I love how it prescribes weight to ideas, and to the imagination. It highlights sci-fi writers as the luminaries they are. Science fiction pushes people to think and dream, and I wanted to invoke that sense of mystique and open-mindedness in my readers before they began to interact with my work.
What’s your favourite poem in this book? Why?
Honestly, I think this question is a bit cruel. It’s like asking me to choose a favourite child. But alright, if I had to choose one, it would probably be The Anti-Midas, because I remember I sat and wrote this at a stretch and immediately knew that I had created something very cool and interesting. I wrote it during lockdown, and I was just so fed up with looking at boring concrete walls all the time. The best part of my day would be when it cooled down in the evenings and I would go to the terrace, do yoga or play sports, and look at all the plants and fish we had there. It was a momentary respite from the drudgery of the academic tasks I had to do each day, and I think this poem arose from all of this. I was also listening to Troye Sivan’s Take Yourself Home a lot, and related a bit too much to the lines “I'm tired of the city / Scream if you're with me / If I'm gonna die, let's die somewhere pretty”. Ultimately, the emphasis we place on productivity and efficiency and just numbers is so soul-sucking and inhuman, and sometimes it feels like all we are doing is optimising till we die. Occasionally, I just want to climb to the top of a mountain and scream into nothing, but writing this poem was the next best alternative.
Talk me through the first and last poems in this collection. (Go into as much detail as you want!)
The first poem Poetry / Reality exists in numerous forms and was constantly worked on until I finally became happy with it. It’s a strange but powerful little poem, exploring the strength of language. So much is happening in the poem - there’s a reality show ongoing, someone’s tongue is frozen to metal, and a pharaoh’s tomb is being broken into. This is the kind of writing I like best. All over the place, but somehow, it works. I thought it would be interesting to place it at the beginning of my collection, as a sort of “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here”. Starting off with horror, and eventually evolving into something more hopeful.
This brings me to the last poem, In Search of New Constellations. In this poem, my speaker has finally escaped the confines of her own mind. Words don’t have power over her anymore, nor do people. This earlier goal of being more sadistically power-hungry is referenced, by likening herself to “a matchmaker god looping red thread / onto the little fingers of people destined / for each other”, but she has now grown out of that phase, and is blissful in her own little temporary alternate universe, where “even the constellations are / different / here”.
“off the record” is really interesting to me. Normally when people use that phrase it means they’re telling you confidential info. Would you apply that literal translation of the term to this poem, especially because the situation it details is so raw and image-heavy? Is your speaker trusting the reader with its secrets?
I think “off the record” is a very interesting phrase because it immediately invokes secrecy and the exchange of confidences, but it also gives you some context as to who you are spilling these secrets to. It’s usually someone you aren’t close with, who has some power over you, and who may be frustrated that they can’t use the information you’ve given them - all of which makes for a tantalising mixture of emotions.
In a way, this poem is a confession of my self-destructive tendencies. There is so much romanticization nowadays of pain and sadness, and how they are essential to creating art that means something. And for a while, yes, I too thought I needed to artificially inhabit these states of being in order to be a better artist or writer, but I soon realised how unsustainable and draining this process was. As the second poem in this collection, I think “Off the Record” sets the tone for the rest of the collection, warning the reader that I’m trusting them with my secrets, but also calling them out for being guilty by association.
I love how rooted in setting many of these poems are. Which makes it especially impressive when you dart from location to location and from image to image in rapid succession, like in “The Jurassic Park Mosquito Wants Company”.
Thank you! I tend to write poems whenever I have a burst of inspiration, and all these visions flicker one after the other in my mind. This ends up creating a really interesting juxtaposition of locations and images that pop up in the poem at an alarming speed, propelling the reader through. It also makes the poem more fresh, and encourages the reader to connect things they may not have thought to put together before. As a poet, it does remain a challenge to ensure that the reader isn’t overwhelmed and that these disparate elements all end up making sense, which is where the stability of the setting becomes very crucial. All I can hope for is that my work comes across as grounded and familiar while also being eclectic and curious.
Also a ton of pop culture references in this book. Do you find pop culture serving as the inspiration for some of your poems, or does it act as more of a supplement?
Pop culture is very close to my heart. Growing up, like most shy, awkward teenagers shut up in their rooms, all I wrote was fanfiction. I think it made me feel powerful to have the ability to twist and fold narratives, make my favourite characters do whatever I wanted, and force myself into the worlds I admired, which, I admit, does sound a bit violent.
Now, pop culture is a source of comfort. Absolutely terrible things can be going on in our lives, and in the world, but people can still feel fiery outrage at the thought of Kylie Jenner dating Timothee Chalamet - it’s both extremely funny and extremely sad to me.
Another thing I like about pop culture is that it doesn’t inherently feel real. For me, these stories are as much a fantasy as a Lord of the Rings or a Grishaverse. It’s an escape for sure, in the spirit of science fiction, but it’s also a medium through which I can effortlessly convey certain states of mind and quickly connect with my readers. I want my poems to feel like I’m huddled under a blanket in a sleepover with them, talking about the latest Twitter gossip in between talking about our fears and dreams.
Give me the details on how the cover for your book came together. I’m especially curious about this because you made it yourself, which, honestly, so sick.
Thanks! I have been working on a series of paintings based on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a book that took me forever to finish and that I’m sure I haven’t even scratched the surface of yet. Many of these paintings are composed of tiny, meticulously-drawn lines, segregated into different patterns that flow together when you look at them from afar. And although you can’t really tell from the photographs, I used glitter pens all over, which made the actual paintings very sparkly.
I’ve never really seen glitter used much in fine art (not that I’m calling my work “fine art”). I think the use of glitter usually brings to mind preschool projects and those cheap, tacky pencil cases and pillows from the 2010s. However, I’ve always been very interested in the juxtaposition of culture that is traditionally considered to be “highbrow” with things that are thought of as “lowbrow”, and this curiosity also ended up surfacing in my poetry collection, what with all the pop culture references I sprinkled in. This connection between the different ways I use to express myself made me certain I wanted one of the paintings from this series to be my cover, so I sent over a couple of them to my publisher who then picked out the one we ultimately ended up using.
I remembered really liking the ransom note effect Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour album cover had, so I did the same to spell out the title of my collection, which was mostly a matter of aesthetics, and that was basically it. I love my cover. It is very reminiscent of DIY culture, like those scrappy punk pamphlets that were all the rage in the 90s. I don’t know how I’d feel in 20 years, but for now, I wouldn’t want to change a single thing.
Describe your experience working with your publisher, Yavanika Press.
I got to know about the press fairly randomly, during a creative writing class I took in undergrad. Shloka Shankar, the founder of Yavanika Press and an incredible haiku poet, took a session for us, and so I followed her on Instagram after that. A couple of months later, I came across a post she shared inviting chapbook submissions for Yavanika, and decided to give it a shot. She was very honest with me from the beginning and took a chance on me despite my relative youth and inexperience, and despite how different my manuscript was from their aesthetic. Her advice was really useful for me to shape the narrative of this collection, cull the poems that were simply not up to the mark, and finetune the ones that remained. I would definitely recommend picking up some of the other collections they have published as well. Some personal favourites are Rahana K Ismail’s Newtness and Aswin Vijayan’s Under the Handstand Statue Man.
Do you have any advice for people who are putting chapbooks together, or those who want to in the future?
It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen. Don’t force it. Or maybe you should, because I have no idea what I am doing myself, and I am sure that’s the case for almost everyone else out there. Just make sure that you are actually happy and excited about what you’re about to put out, and not just doing it because you feel pressured by what other people are achieving. I think the amount by which you yourself are satisfied with what you have created is the only metric you should use to judge how ready your collection is to be read by others because otherwise, I think you will end up regretting it later on.
Favourite poets and/or poems?
I am a huge admirer of Diane Suess’s work and have read all of her books multiple times. I also really enjoy Richard Siken’s work, and even named one of the poems in my collection Scheherazade in his honour. Franny Choi’s Soft Science also had a huge influence on me, particularly when I was writing Science Fiction. I think I first truly realised the possibilities poetry had to offer through Allen Ginsberg. Also, there was this episode in Gilmore Girls where Jess steals Rory’s copy of Howl and Other Poems, annotates it, and gives it back to her, and I am still waiting for a guy to do that for me. But yeah, definitely love the Beat Generation and just how absurd and fantastic all the work that came out of it was.
On a more contemporary note, there are a lot of writers I follow online whose work I am a huge fan of. Jasmine Ledesma, whose account I randomly stumbled across on Tumblr one day and who very kindly agreed to write a blurb for me, is just simply fantastic. I especially enjoy Jasmine’s poems that are written from the point of view of historically relevant, and yet neglected, characters, and how beautiful and explosive the imagery in them is. I also really like Ashley Hajimirsadeghi’s poem Divinity, which I think is a great example of how diaspora poetry can be done more tastefully. Some other favourites are Laura Ma’s To You, Two Thousand Light-Years Later, Eric Yip’s Fricatives, Kaveh Akbar’s My Kingdom for a Murmur of Fanfare, and, another super talented Science Fiction blurber, Ashish Singh’s 19 and Hindu.
What’s next for you, writing-wise, life-wise, whatever-wise?
Well, I am in the second year of my MBA program, and in a couple of months, I am going to Japan for an exchange semester, which I am extremely excited about. Apart from that, this year, I have a lot of things I want to do on campus, both academic and otherwise. I have taken a bunch of difficult finance and economics courses, all of which are completely new to me, but I feel like I’m learning so much about how the world operates, which I think is important to then figure out how to make it a better place. I have also been thinking of working with a professor and conducting some research, and I am also producing a podcast where we interview female alumni from IIM Ahmedabad who have gone on to do a lot of interesting things in both business and other vocations. I also want to take part in more competitions and projects with my friends, which is one of the best things you can do in a B-school because it leads to a lot of interesting conversations, and I end up learning a lot despite how stressful the process is. Winning sometimes is also very fun, for sure.
Writing-wise, I have a couple of story and essay ideas I am working on. I think I am going to retire from poetry for a bit and focus on these other ideas I have because I like having a lot of variety in the projects I take up. I also want to learn another language, either Japanese or Chinese, I haven’t decided which to focus on yet. And I want to make more art, before I graduate and my daily life becomes uncontrollably hectic. So, yes, there’s a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it in, but I would rather be in this situation than its alternative, so I have to make the most of it.
TEJASHREE MURUGAN is a 23-year-old writer and artist from India. She is pursuing her MBA at IIM Ahmedabad after graduating from IIT Madras with a B.Tech and an M.Tech in Biotechnology. She has authored opinion articles in publications such as ThePrint, Hindustan Times, CNN-News18, The Daily Star, and The Straits Times. Tejashree is interested in public policy, literature, and travelling.
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