My mother never ripened. When she was young, they bit into her and stopped the natural ripening process. After they’d spit her out, she stayed green until she began to rot. At the end of her life she was…
I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
The first time was an accident. She was slicing carrots, trying to keep them thin and angled, assaulted on her left by the blaring television in the living room, and on the right by her children squabbling in the…
By Duncan Whitmire • Nothing is more disruptive to a reader than the emergence of the cynical voice inside their head—and nowhere is this more true than with books that traffic in magic and speculation. Some readers call it…
By Devon Halliday • When I worked as a literary agent assistant, one of my tasks was to read (or skim) the manuscripts that my boss had requested from promising, unagented authors to determine whether my boss should offer…
Penny Guisinger and I met when we each served on the board of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance in the early 2010s, and I became a fan of her nonfiction soon after. Her work captured complex realities of…
Dark birds fly from my eyes. Disappear. Where do the kittens come from? We don’t have a cat. Just kittens lumped together like a single entity. A litter. In a box a blanket a bag on the passenger seat?…
“You’re a highly intelligent individual, and I’m sorry, but you probably know already that intellect and depression often run together.” The school counsellor raises her hand up and down to simulate a wave. “Your thoughts and your moods move…
More and more, I think about how, at its base, creating art is not a solitary experience but one meant to be shared with friends and like-minded people. In her recent craft book, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories…
“Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.” ―Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Chapter One: Orchid Tattoo 1. …granulation tissue Granulation tissue is cell growth, after…
“Orchid” is a memoir excerpt about the experience of living in a Brown femme body as a queer South-Asian woman psychiatrist, a body resembling those targeted by the carceral state that punishes any who resist it, whether patient or doctor.
But “Orchid” is a new story. Not a story of trauma and survivorship, but dreamy flowering. Enduring, strange, evasive modes of growth.
Not simply an American story, or an immigrant story, but the story of a plant with roots that touch British colonial soil, violent topography and luxurious materials—a story of Raj.
In my memoir, I interweave personal narratives of medicine and madness with familial and societal violence, against the backdrop of colonial history, including the Victorian British Raj conception of the orchid as an exotic trophy from colonized nations, but for me, a metaphor for stubborn survival, with orchids the oldest plant family on earth, dating back 110 million years. I use carefully curated scenes and storylines to center my relationships with my parents and my brother, but the understory is larger—fanning out to the history of my colonized family, including my two grandfathers who were already fathers by the time of Indian Independence and Partition, and to their legacies so informed by the rigid social and caste divisions and racial self-hatred specific to Indians during the British Raj and its aftermath.
CHAYA BHUVANESWAR is a practicing physician, writer, and finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection for White Dancing Elephants: Stories, which was also selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction and Best Short Fiction and appeared on “best of” lists for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue India, and Entertainment Weekly. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Narrative, Tin House, The Sun, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, The Masters Review, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, and has been anthologized elsewhere. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Community of Writers, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Find her on Twitter at @chayab77.
