A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Mohit Manohar

PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2020 is the fourth edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Tracy O’Neill, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Deb Olin Unferth. Submissions for the 2021 awards are open now.

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Mohit Manohar was born and raised in India and is currently a graduate student in the History of Art Department at Yale University. His fiction has received a Ward Prize and a Francis LeMoyne Page Creative Writing Award from Princeton University. He is working on his dissertation on medieval India and a novel set in contemporary India.

“Summertime” was originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

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In his junior year at Yale, Sandeep slept with a boy for the first time, and this filled him with such guilt that he knew he had to tell his mother. His parents had recently moved to an even taller apartment building in Mumbai: its topmost floors had a view of both the Arabian Sea and the Bombay Harbour. Only ten years ago, they had lived like regular people in the northern part of the city. But then his father’s New Age Ayurveda business took off, and when it became too big for him to manage alone, he sold it to a larger wellness company, whose stockholders elected him to its board of directors. Suddenly they had a lot of money. Sandeep was plucked from his regular school and put in an institution where the children of the rich went. There he acquired excellent English and French and lost his ability to speak good Hindi. He and his parents learned to use vacation as a verb; they vacationed abroad. They stayed in expensive hotels in London and Paris, where they suffered embarrassments big and small because they were still, essentially, middle class.

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Where did you find the idea for this story?

I wanted to write something that amped up the best and worst bits of certain dates I had been on and see what narrative I could come up with.

How long did it take you to write this story?

I wrote the first draft in a week. And then there were several intermittent revisions over a year. I tweaked the story before every submission.

The story captures the (often unpleasant) experience of dating apps with such precision, from the "casual racism," to quote the narrator, that exists on these apps (like the bio that reads “no asians no blacks—not racist just a preference”) to the agony of the first message (Sandeep ultimately goes with the classic “Hey, how’re you?”). Was your depiction of dating apps drawn at all from personal experience, or did you have to do some research, or a bit of both?

I used phrases I’ve seen in life. I hope the folks whose bios I’ve used won’t sue me for copyright infringement. On many of these apps, there’s a toxic mix of racism, colorism, and exoticism. Certainly some of these apps could be made more bearable if race did not determine whose profile you could see or shun. At the moment, on Grindr—the most popular gay hookup/dating app—you can pay extra to see profiles only from the race you prefer. Presumably those who don’t want to pay extra have to write things like “no asians no blacks.” That is messed-up and leads to predictable unpleasantness. Kathleen Collins’s question “Whatever happened to interracial love?” has an insidious new answer: “interracial love” has been codified and digitized, and we’ve found that it sells less ads, is less addictive, than its alternative.

The 2016 Brexit vote serves as a kind of backdrop to your story. Can you speak a bit about your decision to place this story within that historical moment, and what you were wanting to convey with that choice?

I was in London when Brexit happened, and every Londoner I met that summer was confident Brexit would not come to pass. Future historians will likely highlight those factors that led to Brexit, which will give the impression that it was inevitable; that in 2016, many of us were dreading Britain would leave the European Union. My story serves as a small reminder—one among many—that this was not the case. I wanted to capture the complacency and the contingency of the London I saw on the eve of Brexit.

The ending of the story is a bit ambiguous—we see Sandeep prefacing an uncomfortable admission to his mother, but we don’t know how he delivers the bad news, or how she will react. We have a sense of it from her previous reaction to his coming out, but we’re still left to linger in relative uncertainty. What was the intention behind the ambiguous ending?

The truthful and uninspiring answer is that I’m a sucker for ambiguous endings. I still wonder what happened to the lady with the lapdog or if the bear really did come over the mountain. Can we come up with a different phrase to describe these endings though? “Ambiguous ending” sounds like some other ending, which resolves the dilemmas raised by the narrative, is lurking around the corner, and the writer chose to not use it for no better reason than to confuse the reader.

How has the Robert J. Dau prize affected you?

Oh, it was wonderful! I immediately found the energy to revise a few old stories and draft some new ones. I am also hoping to complete the first draft of a novel soon. The prize breathed new life in me.

The money was a great help, of course. Three years ago, when I got more serious about sending out my stories, I created an Excel spreadsheet and noted an arbitrary amount, past which I was not willing to spend in submission fees. While the submission fees for most journals is around three dollars, there are some journals that have disproportionately large submission fees ($15–$23). And submitting a piece to writing competitions, often advertised in a seductive manner, typically costs upwards of twenty dollars. Thus, even with a handful of rejections—and I have more than a handful—the balance sheet can be deep in the red. Writers who’re starting out—especially those without the aegis of a patron or the good luck of a Sally Rooney character—actually lose money when they try to publish short stories. Even when a writer manages to get a story in, many journals cannot afford to pay. Thankfully, the Dau Prize has put the balance sheet in the green. For this I’m grateful.

Michigan Quarterly Review, where my story was published, does pay its contributors. I remain grateful to them and thank them for finding grants/having an economic structure that allows them to pay their contributors.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m aware that literary journals themselves do not recover the cost of their operation and would love to pay their contributors if they can, as this article points out. But journals that charge submission fees and offer no reimbursements to contributors—I think that’s wrong. Such a system does not bode well for beginning writers.

We need more data on how this (somewhat recent) practice of charging submission fees but not remunerating in kind is affecting publishing, as this article points out. We need more data on how Submittable, in its quest to become another tech-monopoly, is compelling or tempting journals to adopt a submission model that might not best serve their interests. On the face of it, it seems obvious that writers who have to budget their lives somewhat carefully cannot afford to send out short stories for long.

What are you working on now?

My novel, which is set in my home city of Patna, and my art history dissertation, which is about this extraordinary city called Daulatabad, located in Deccan India.

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

I subscribe to a dozen excellent magazines and journals in the US, UK, and India, and these keep me plenty busy. I’ve also been savoring the stories by past and current contributors to the Dau anthology and look forward to next year’s collection!

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