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Essay by Ruth Minah Buchwald •

What keeps you up at night? For me, it’s genocide, climate change, another epidemic, hopeless politics, something embarrassing that I said in middle school, the finite nature of time, and so on, but in her debut short story collection, Mouth, Puloma Ghosh reacquaints readers with scary specters of a different sort. Her stories are full of those classic tropes of beasts, ghosts, and the dead, all of which she enhances and subverts with modern, carnal, and visual language. What keeps you up at night is briefly subdued by these classic tropes rather than the calamities out there.

In Mouth, a lonely figure skater suspects that her rival is not a girl but a vampire, a former veterinarian takes in and raises a werewolf during a mysterious pandemic, and an unearthly persimmon tree in a mother and daughter’s garden unexpectedly blooms on their colonized planet. Along with other characters stuck in their “normal” worlds, these people are also haunted by real-life problems: familial and romantic heartbreak and loss that make them feel isolated. While most university students worry about classes and their social lives, first-year Kara investigates the origins of a girl named K, who once occupied her dorm room and was one of many to disappear from their small mountain college town. Kara states:

It doesn’t take long for people to realize that the stories I tell about myself are outlandish and contradictory. I have many people I talk to but none I consider a friend. They’re always willing to be entertained, but otherwise keep their distance. I’m accustomed to this by now and understand that everyone feels uneasy around a person they can never truly know. Still, I can’t resist the way my stories light them up, like they’re children cross-legged on a library rug.

Ghosh’s stories do light us up, but they are dark and equally intriguing. And while realism may be the dominant market in literary fiction, Ghosh helps to expand its possibilities, insisting that the horror tropes we love serve as extensions of our everyday fears. They may be “outlandish,” but they are definitely not contradictory—in fact, everything converges. This collection conjures up the horror tropes we love in recent cinema—doppelgängers in Jordan Peele’s Us, sacrificial rituals in Midsommar, and exile in The Witch—and shows us that these fears are indeed extensions of our everyday fears. Life may not be as theatrical, but problems arise and stir up terror in us in the same way—terror that reminds us of the fears we held as children coinciding with the fears of adulthood.

Ghosh is well-versed in horror; this much is obvious. In her essay, “Finding the Fear” in The Rumpus, Ghosh writes, “I actually love to be scared. My fascination for the macabre only grew with me, as did my bank of terrifying imagery that could return to me in new configurations at any quiet moment. It’s only natural that eventually I’d have to exorcise my mind’s concoctions onto the page.” Fear becomes obsession in these stories and draws readers into worlds, into narratives that will scare them in new ways. Fear and obsession are what horror movies, haunted houses, and ghost tours build their industries on.

Each story in Mouth takes place in a new world guided by different rules and restrictions. We are often ushered into them by mother figures who help us to understand, like teenage Meghna’s mother says in “Desiccation,” that “we had to accept the logic of the world we were given and learn to live in it.” Whether it be the government-enacted disappearance of men when they turn eighteen or a world in which people could possibly get sucked into holes, Ghosh grounds us in each story’s reality, and we are children sitting cross-legged on rugs, leaning in and listening carefully.

Each character’s history takes the form of a ghost. Ankita, the main character in “The Fig Tree,” who thinks she sees her dead mother around Kolkata, repeats to herself, “Ghosts are just memories.” Ankita believes that this ghostly version of her mother could be a shakchunni, a Bengali spirit of a married woman, who wears traditional bangles that the newlywed wants to get with her aunt, who tells her that it’s too late. Ankita searches for this ghost, who feels as unfamiliar to her as her actual mother did. She constantly questions her relationship with her mother and says, “It feels lonely to wonder,” even when she’s accompanied by her father and aunt in her motherland. In this story, Ghosh breaks conventions in the immigrant-returning-home narrative, as Ankita finds peace and reconciliation when memories start to converge at the home of her mother.

This speculative collection is bloody and juicy. With each bite readers and characters take, a new world opens up before them. Ghosh thinks of the collection as a mouth, which is why its luminous cover features the image of a mouth hued in orange atop the image of a slice of a peeled and bitten clementine. What we consume and what we say become intertwined, and we watch what leaves and enters our lives in awe and fear. In “Natalya,” a story in the form of an autopsy report, the main character recalls, “‘You can’t choose the things you remember,’ my mother told me that afternoon while she cleaned and gutted a fish in the white mouth of my grandmother’s kitchen sink. ‘The important things will find you.’” Each story is guided by this mantra.

Mouth is sad-girl lit, a genre designation that I stand by, populated by South Asian women characters who take agency and empower themselves and each other. Mouth is also uncanny, cutting, and queer. Reading this collection conjured up my own unique ghosts, or memories that contribute to my feelings of loneliness. In her story “In the Winter,” which first appeared as a winner of CRAFT’s 2020 Flash Fiction Contest, Ghosh writes, “There are no stories without loneliness.” I am inspired and affirmed by this statement to put my own ghosts onto the page, without feeling like my fears and hang-ups are written off because of expectations of genre.

I asked Ghosh about these expectations, among other things, after her publicity run this past summer. We spoke over Google Meet about loving to get spooked, leaving and returning to places and ourselves, and writing (and revising) as meal prep.

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Ruth Minah Buchwald: How have you been enjoying Mouth’s release, now that it’s been out for a few months?

Puloma Ghosh: I’ve been working toward this book for a really long time. It’s great to see it come to fruition and to be able to celebrate that success with the people who have seen me through the project and my ups and downs.

It’s been really rewarding, and also almost anticlimactic because I finished it so long ago, and my head is definitely in what I’m writing next. So I’m kind of seeing it like new again.

 

RMB: I love the dedication: “For my mother and grandmothers and the scary stories they told me at night.” What kinds of stories were these? Were these stories your primary influences to become a writer?

PG: Storytelling and reading have always been really important in my family. My mom studied literature in college, and I grew up having all kinds of stories told to me. They were a mixture of folktales and religious parables that made an impression on me.

There’s one piece in my collection, “The Fig Tree,” which is based on a folklore story that everyone in my family has told me over and over again. It had some really striking images—it was a ghost story. There’s a lot of scary stuff in the folklore and mythology of the place where my family’s from, which has definitely seeded in me a love and fascination for hometown ghost stories. And then, as I got older, I started to seek out fantastical and horror elements in other media. So I think that all of my interests are just a build-up of everything that I’ve been exposed to.

 

RMB: You’ve been doing interviews and podcasts about horror. What is your relationship to horror and the uncanny, beyond these maternal connections?

PG: I’ve read some horror books, but I mostly enjoy horror on screen because it’s so visceral. The audio-visual really adds to it. I keep up with horror movies as they come out. I love to scare the wits out of myself.

Horror can take so many different shapes and people are scared of so many different things, and it’s fun to play with that genre. Long-term practice of consistently watching, reading, and consuming horror makes your imagination a little bit horrific, so I’m a person who has a lot of nightmares. I get scared pretty easily, and then these horrors that my imagination brews up make a reappearance in my stories. I try to make my fears a little less scary in my stories by approaching them with a little more empathy, so that I can not be afraid anymore.

 

RMB: This collection also encapsulates the horrors of everyday life too.

PG: I think that horror as a genre is not random. It tends to reflect people’s actual, practical real-life fears and be given a metaphorical, fantastical skin in supernatural horror, which is my preference. I’ll watch a slasher, but I think supernatural horror is scarier to me because of the element of circumstances being not understandable and not in our control. The unknown is always a reflection of the things that people fear in their daily lives as well. Even if it’s not directly allegorical horror or horror derived from folklore or religion, these things stem from a fear of things that weren’t understood a long time ago, and they aren’t understood now, but the stories that people came up with to explain those things still linger.

 

RMB: This collection is so grounded in setting. You have ties to Kolkata, Boston, and Chicago. How do you tend to start a story? Is it with setting?

PG: I think setting is pretty integral to most stories, but when you have speculative elements, you have to understand what the character is being subjected to and what they can control within the bounds of their life. And if you have a science fiction, fantasy, or horror setting, that distinction becomes really important. I enjoy thinking about place and environment in writing. None of my characters are real people I know, even though I might take like a little tidbit from something I’ve seen or heard someone do, but the settings in a lot of my stories are definitely based on places I’ve been to and events I’ve experienced. And then maybe I add a twist to give me the freedom to explore without being limited by the actual setting.

 

RMB: How did you come to the title of Mouth? There’s no titular story in this collection. Did it come after finishing the collection or was it a theme you knew that you were working toward?

PG: Once I had a good number of stories under my belt that I felt satisfied with, I started to put together a collection to query. I came to the point of needing to title it and typically, the convention is to title the book after one of the stories; however, I’m a very minimalist story titler and I didn’t feel like any of the story titles could encompass everything that was in the book, so I started to just go through the stories to see what the connecting threads were.

A lot of themes reappeared, and I found that consumption was a pretty strong one. And in many of the stories, I realized that I was playing with the image of a mouth. Then, I started thinking of the collection as a mouth.

 

RMB: I notice that the theme of returning is prevalent in this collection, whether it’s a character returning to themselves, their families, or their homelands.

PG: My life has been characterized both by movement and stasis. As a first-generation immigrant, you return to your country of origin, and you have a lot of feelings about who and what has changed. There’s a lot to process. There’s also the element of returning to your hometown. My parents moved out of my hometown when I was in college, so I never really go back there. On the occasion that I am back there—I lived very close to my hometown for most of my twenties, but rarely set foot in the actual town—much has changed. I lived in five different houses in my childhood, so I can’t go back to a childhood bedroom.

A sense of change threads through the stories of returning; you might go back somewhere, but it is inevitably changed, and you are changed. You might think, “Can I return to the way I was or the way things were in the past?” But there is no way to do that, and I think some of those stories are a reflection of that loss. In the process of writing, I generally don’t write about whatever’s currently happening to me, I tend to stew on things a little bit before I write about them, so often, the process of writing is like returning to feelings that I had in the past that I’ve sort of processed already, or returning to a setting that I experienced and want to reimagine on the page.

 

RMB: I love the use of doppelgängers in this collection, especially when all of these characters are lonely. Could you speak more about that idea?

PG: I put doppelgängers in my stories because I’m really scared of them. The concept of encountering a familiar person, whether it’s yourself or someone else, but they’re not the person you know, is pretty scary to me. Maybe that fear is also tied to some of the scary stories I was told when I was younger, about evil entities masquerading as familiar people. That’s a core fear of mine, and there is probably a doppelgänger novel in my future.

But I think of the doppelgänger idea sort of separately from the loneliness question. Of course, there’s a lot of loneliness in the collection, and I think that particular emotion is one of the connecting threads between all these stories—it’s something that I’ve felt, that we’ve all felt. Transitional times in our lives, like when we’re young and we’re figuring things out, can feel really lonely because we don’t understand ourselves and it feels like no one understands us. I feel compelled to explore aspects of belonging and not belonging. In an uncanny story, loneliness is a bit of a tool because when a character is by themselves, and there’s no one observing them, they might do something a little more outlandish.

I think of the story, “K,” in which this character is rather isolated, and she makes some highly questionable decisions because she doesn’t have anyone to say, like, maybe you shouldn’t do that. She just makes dangerous choices.

 

RMB: You mention a few autopsies in the collection: “Desiccation” features a girl who masturbates to images of autopsies performed by her father. “Natalya” is a story in the form of an autopsy report. How did you approach writing these stories?

PG: “Natalya” is one of the oldest in the collection. It went through so many edits, and it wasn’t even in the form of an autopsy for quite a few iterations. Eventually, I put it in the autopsy container, and I was like, okay, this helps give it shape. Going back and forth between the present autopsy and the past memories, I did so much reorganizing and trying to find the right flow. Eventually, I did wind up making the past timeline chronological for the most part, but in previous edits, it was not.

Structure is so important; I learned a lot about structure from that story. A lot of the language was fairly visceral and immediate, and I didn’t change much of it, but more so, it was the structure of the story that went through a lot of revision.

 

RMB: What is your revision process like?

PG: I enjoy revising. I feel like I learn a lot when revising. Generative writing can feel punishing in a way, because, I don’t know, it feels more emotional. I think punishing is the wrong word, however, because I do enjoy generative work.

Revising is like when you’re cooking, but generative writing is like getting all the ingredients together, frying, and chopping. Revising feels like the food is in the oven or simmering, and now I can clean my workspace, taste the food, plate it. That all feels like a much calmer process for me. The best advice I ever got is to just open up a new page and write from the top. I do side-by-side documents, or if I’m really struggling with something, I will just start rewriting it without looking at the old copy because the important parts will come back to me. Later, after I’ve written the next draft, I can go back and reconcile. Are there sentences I want to take from the old draft and put them into the new one? Most of the time, I do side-by-side revisions. I start on a new page and write. Every page or so, I’ll look back, consolidate, and then keep going.

Reading out loud is also really helpful with sentence-level issues. Writing is so much about sound and style.

 

RMB: You have one piece of flash fiction in the collection, “In the Winter,” which first appeared in CRAFT as a winner of the 2020 Flash Fiction Contest. This story is the only piece of flash included—do you think that you’ll return to flash? What are you working on now?

PG: It’s actually the only piece of flash I’ve ever written. I like world-building, which doesn’t really lend itself super well to flash. In the middle of the pandemic, I was feeling really creatively dry because I didn’t have enough stimuli. We’ve all experienced it: in the lockdown phase when all you see is your own apartment all the time. You’re not going out into the world and seeing enough variety to give you ideas.

I was on my grad school campus in Vermont for a bit, and it got me thinking about my undergrad days because I would walk around the college campus all the time. I had those feelings fresh in my mind, and then I just sat down and wrote “In the Winter” after reading Luster by Raven Leilani, which is an amazing book. The language in that novel is so rich, but not overwhelming. I felt the flow of language from that book, so I wrote something that feels like a prose poem more so than a story. To me, it’s like, there’s no plot. You don’t know that much about the world or the characters. It’s just the little snatch of a moment in someone’s life.

I’m stewing on a couple of novels these days. I haven’t finished either of them, but we’ll see. They’re both speculative, fantastical stories. I’m not going into realism anytime soon, so I’ll see what I finish first. Of course, I’m still writing short stories. I’m actually working on a short story right now!

 

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PULOMA GHOSH is the author of the short story collection, Mouth (Astra House, 2024). Her work has appeared in One Story, CRAFT, Cutleaf, Book of the Month’s VOLUME Ø, and Cake Zine. She has received fellowships from Tin House and Bennington College. She lives in Chicago. Find her on Instagram and Twitter @pulomeow.

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RUTH MINAH BUCHWALD is a Seoul-born writer, comedian, and performer from New Jersey. Her writing has been featured in ELLE, Autostraddle, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Margins, and CRAFT, and supported by Ma-Yi Theater Company. She curates and hosts lactose intolerant, an anti-clout monthly reading series featuring writers of color in New York City. She has a BA in critical and visual studies from Pratt Institute and lives in Brooklyn. Find her on Instagram and Twitter @ruthbuchwald.