Contributor Spotlight: Anjoli Roy

Anjoli Roy’s essay, “Feast or Feathers: On Alopecia Areata,” is part of Issue 79 of Bellingham Review. Subscribe or purchase a single issue through our Submittable page here. 

What would you like to share with our readers about the work you contributed to the Bellingham Review?

This story “Feast or Feathers” was born out of a transformation by multidimensional artist Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng (who cohosts with me the podcast It’s Lit, which features writers to love and the music their work plays best around; we’ve featured more than 100 writers to date, thanks in large part to our producer, Leimomi Bong).

I’d asked Joce to transform me into a peacock because of their prevalence in Bengal, where my father and his side of our family are from, and also because of how, as I state in this story, my dad used to call me peacock since my hair stood straight up when I was born. The story is also about my bouts with alopecia areata, an autoimmune condition that involves losing hair in patches. The regrowth I’ve had has been wiry and a bit feather like. The story is about making peace with this cycle of loss and regrowth and loss again.

The author photo featured here is from this transformation with Joce. (Isn’t she amazing??)

Tell us about your writing life.

Since gutsy writing and voracious reading go hand in hand, I try to surround myself with beautiful books. Sitting with, listening to, and talking story with/befriending inspiring writer folk whose work I admire has also been an important part of feeding my writing life.

I cohost It’s Lit for both of these reasons. The podcast is something that Joce and I do for fun, but we also take it seriously as a way both to hold space for underrepresented voices and to nourish ourselves. As our call for material states, we’re excited to feature Indigenous writers, people-of-color writers, LGBTQI writers, intersectional writers, the-personal-is-political writers, ally-is-a-verb writers, drawing-on-our-ancestors writers, heart-wrenching writers, the-revolution-won’t-be-televised writers, sexy writers, boundary-exploding writers, healing writers, community-building writers, damn-the-man-and-the-empire writers, all-of-the-above writers.

I’m so grateful to have such tremendous writer friends in our fold! (You’re very welcome to be in touch about our podcast; if you’d like to check out past features, or if you have a show idea for us, find us at @itslitwithphdj on IG and FB, and at www.itslitwithphdj.wordpress.com.)

What is your favorite book (or essay, poem, short story)? 

Favorites ARE hard. Some writers I love include Noʻu Revilla, Rajiv Mohabir, Momi Cummings, Aiko Yamashiro, Julia Katz, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Nicky Loomis, Craig Santos Perez, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Devi Laskar, Joseph Han, Lyz Soto, Joy Harjo, Sandra Cisneros, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison–ahhhhh! I have too many to list them all :).

What are you reading right now?

Some books I finished this fall and am still thinking about include Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Prince’s The Beautiful Ones, and Suzanne Farrell Smith’s haunting The Memory Sessions. Julia Koets’s debut The Rib Joint was fantastic and worthy of the prize it won, and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House was gutting and so necessary.

Next up on my bedside table are E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, and Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath. I’m always taking suggestions for the next book to read too (hit me up!).

What project(s) are you working on now, or next?

I am currently shopping around my creative nonfiction book-length manuscript, titled Where the Water Is, which asks the question: How does the grandson of a freedom fighter become a Trump supporter? I grew up in the 80s and 90s as a half-white, half-Bengali girl in a southern California community that didn’t know what to do with our biracial family. I had never heard of my great grandfather and revolutionary writer Kali Nath Roy until I started trying to make sense of how conservative my dad is. I knew he’d emigrated from India in 1950, grown up in the segregated American south, and gone to white schools. I didn’t know much else. As I worked through my complicated relationship with my dad, I launched a hunt for buried family histories that revealed the enduring presence of ancestors in our lives, the connection between hereditary illnesses and intergenerational traumas, and the mystery of why some stories and values get passed down while others are suppressed. This research also helped to stave off Kali Nath’s second death: the book honors him by restoring him in our family history and suggests that rebuilding familial connections through learning the truth of our family’s stories may be the key to our healing.

In terms of new projects, I’ve been experimenting with a few lyric essays, including one about my maternal grandfather, who was a skin diver and loved abalone the most. The essay is a mixture of memoir and biography presented alongside odd/interesting abalone facts. Abalone are fascinating animals. I’m curious to see where this story leads. Maybe there’s a collection of animal stories a-brewing!

Anything else our readers might want to know about you?

Thank you, Bellingham Review, for publishing my work! It’s an honor to be in your fold.

Where can our readers connect with you online?

@anjoliroy on Twitter

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Featured Image by NASA